I know I am not alone in the horror I felt as news came in of the masked thugs dressed in black in Portsmouth trying to stop the arrival of asylum seekers by boat on 6–7 September. Hampshire is our neighbour. This could easily be happening in Sussex next.
The following morning the media was awash with the new dehumanising language that is increasingly feeding on people’s anxieties. The particular phrase that struck me in an interview with one of the protestors was “fighting-age men” being allowed into the country.
Where does this come from? What makes a lone man arriving on our shores to seek asylum “fighting-age”? Could he not also be parenting-age? Or caring-age? Could he not be teaching, nursing or hard-working-age?
The term “lone males” is often used to frame male migrants and asylum seekers as a security or social threat. They are presented as potential criminals rather than themselves being vulnerable individuals in need of and seeking protection.
This language focuses on their gender and lack of family ties rather than their needs, vulnerability and other characteristics. This is done deliberately to evoke anxiety about crime, social disruption and cultural change. The claim is that lone males put a greater strain on local housing and public services than women or families. The suggestion is that men – especially young men – will fail to integrate and will disrupt communities.
When other adjectives such as “fighting-age” or “single unattached” are added, they explicitly evoke military, security or physical threats. In pictures we are shown groups of lone male migrants waiting in queues, hiding in trucks or jumping borders, creating the impression that the arriving groups are entirely composed of single men acting illegally.
The recent rise of groups in the UK such as the Pink Ladies with their pink versions of the Union Jack at anti-immigration rallies has hyped this up further. I spotted some of these flags in Brighton on 13 June when, thankfully, so many turned out in force in the Carnival Against Fascism to stand up to them.
The Pink Ladies claim that migrants make British women feel unsafe. They wrote to the Home Secretary earlier this year asking how she planned “to keep us safe from unknown and unchecked foreign nationals arriving by illegal means.”
This kind of language and narrative focuses the public’s attention away from the humanitarian needs of these individuals to the security, economic and cultural anxieties of the population.
It ignores much of the evidence about these young men. They are, in fact, often chosen by their families or communities in their places of origin to be the ones to attempt the dangerous journeys. Sometimes this is for them to escape forced military service or conscription. Sometimes it is because they are thought best placed to be able to survive the journey and then send back remittances and support entire families at home.
Humanitarian organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF) have pointed out that single men continue to face systemic exclusion and homelessness due to political and social scapegoating.
There are also academic studies showing how adult men suffer systematic ‘misrecognition’ as criminals or loners, stripping them of legitimate status in the public eye. In contrast women are recognised, especially when portrayed as vulnerable mothers (‘Loners, Criminals, Mothers: The Gendered Misrecognition of Refugees in the British Tabloid News Media’, British Sociological Association’).
A UK Migration Observatory University of Oxford report of 2025 also points to studies showing that single men struggle to receive protection via UN refugee resettlement schemes because they are often viewed as less vulnerable.
So, safer routes are less available to them and this then become a vicious circle. There are already very few legal and safe routes available, but there are far fewer available to single young men. And so, is it a surprise that there are more of them proportionately arriving on boats?
What we need is a decent humanitarian and people-centred policy of providing safe routes for asylum seekers of all genders and backgrounds to reach the UK where they can legally claim asylum and have their cases considered.
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