LAWS AND CUSTOMS HERE MAY BE DIFFERENT
THE HOME OFFICE NOW EXPLAINS THAT YOU CANNOT RAPE WOMEN OR HAVE SEX WITH CHILDREN.
The British government has decided that adults arriving in this country require dedicated instruction that women are equal, that sex requires consent, and that sex with a child is a crime.
That decision took physical form on 19 August 2026, when the Home Office published a nine page booklet titled Understanding Behaviours and Expectations in the UK: A Guide for Asylum Seekers, with a poster series carrying its crest and the campaign header Asylum Consequences of Behaviour.
Home Office
The booklet covers gender equality, domestic abuse, sex and consent, and respect in public. One poster lists what you must never do to a child, including sexual contact with a child under 16. Another explains that in the UK both people must say yes to sex, and that it is still rape if you are married to the person.
Reporting of the launch attributed the material to cases in which migrants convicted of sexual offences claimed not to understand UK law. That rationale is not printed in the booklet itself. The Home Office wrote down the instruction and left out the reason why they published it.
The reason is not hard to find. It is in the court records of the last twelve months, and in the Home Office's own filing cabinet. Let me help remind you.
THE CASES THE POSTERS NOW ADDRESS
The booklet's Respect in Public section instructs readers never to make sexual comments to someone even as a compliment, never to whistle or make kissing noises, never to follow someone or block their path.
In September 2025 Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, an Ethiopian asylum seeker housed at the Bell Hotel in Epping, was convicted at Chelmsford Magistrates' Court of five offences. Two counts of sexual assault, one of attempted sexual assault, one of inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity, one of harassment without violence.
Rajeev Syal
Days after arriving by small boat, he told two teenage girls he wanted a baby with each of them, tried to kiss them, and put his hand on one girl's thigh. He sexually assaulted a woman by putting his hand on her leg and telling her she was pretty. He received twelve months, the maximum a magistrates' court can give, was mistakenly released from HMP Chelmsford a month into it, and was deported to Ethiopia after a two day manhunt. His charge sheet reads back the poster's prohibition list almost line by line.
The booklet's Sex and Consent section states that anyone under 16 is a child and cannot legally agree to sex, and that there are no exceptions to this rule.
This month, at Nottingham Crown Court, Abdul Khan was sentenced to nine years and six months for two counts of rape of a 13-year-old girl, sexual activity with a child, sexual communication with a child, meeting a child following grooming, and perverting the course of justice.
Gavin Bevis
Khan arrived in the back of a lorry in 2015 and gave a date of birth of 26 December 2004 in his asylum application. He was already serving 23 months for sexual communication with another child.
On 27 March 2026, at Warwick Crown Court, Ahmad Mulakhil was sentenced to 15 years with a further year on licence for the abduction, rape and sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. A jury convicted him of child abduction, rape, two counts of sexual assault and taking an indecent video of his victim, and cleared him of a second count of rape. He had admitted a further rape charge before trial.
Clare Lissaman
He arrived by small boat four months before the attack. His victim said he laughed while attacking her. His co-defendant, Mohammad Kabir, was acquitted of all charges, and no finding stands against him.
At the same court, on 8 December 2025, two 17-year-old Afghan asylum seekers, Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, were detained for ten years and eight months and nine years and ten months, having admitted the rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa. They were named after the judge lifted a reporting restriction.
Those cases collide with the government's premise. The booklet exists, we are told, because convicted men claimed not to understand UK law. But Khan did not misunderstand the age of consent. He posed as a 14-year-old boy on Snapchat, because he understood exactly which age would open the door. When arrested, he did not plead confusion. He denied ever meeting the girl, until DNA evidence proved he had, and picked up a conviction for perverting the course of justice on the way.
Mulakhil is the man who actually ran the defence the booklet anticipates. He told the jury he believed the girl when she said she was 19. Passing sentence, Judge Kristina Montgomery KC told him the claim was an obvious lie and that the jury's verdict left no doubt he knew she was under 16.
A man who misunderstands the law explains himself. A man who understands it conceals himself. These are files of concealment, not misunderstanding, and the government has answered them with a leaflet about misunderstanding.
The domestic abuse and gender equality sections need no court reports at all, because the Home Office has been processing this behaviour inside its own estate for years. Since 16 July 2019 the department has maintained standing guidance for its staff titled Domestic Abuse: Responding to Reports of Domestic Abuse from Asylum Seekers.
Home Office
It was revised as recently as November 2024. Its revisions added a referral checklist for staff. Its provisions include rehousing a woman who is a dependant on her abuser's asylum support claim, and relocating the perpetrator within the asylum estate. Instructions of that specificity are written for practice rather than possibility. The paperwork is the caseload.
And alongside the behaviour booklet, on the same day, the Home Office published a companion leaflet titled Domestic Abuse, Know Your Rights: Support for Asylum Seekers.
One document instructs the husband, the other shows his wife the way out, and the department printed both sides of the same front door.
THE BOOKLET THEY ALREADY HAD
Since 2 October 2019 the Home Office has issued Rights and Expectations in the UK, a 42 page guide for asylum seekers covering British culture, values, law, health and safety, produced in eleven languages including Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Farsi, Kurdish and Arabic.
It is still live on gov.uk today. The Home Office's own accommodation guidance still tells asylum seekers they should receive a copy.
So this week's document is not the state discovering induction material. It is the state judging that 42 pages on British law and culture were not enough, and that the gap requiring a dedicated publication was consent, rape, domestic abuse and sex with children.
Something happened between 2019 and 2026 to persuade the Home Office that a general guide to British law, culture and expectations was no longer sufficient. It has not told us what.
The stories that expose them are the stories they tried and failed to imprison me for sharing.
Eight years in and even the mainstream media blacklist has failed to censor our campaign. Millions now know the truth of the grooming gangs, and who covered up what took place.
What comes next is the National Inquiry, and forcing it to go where it does not want to go. The only way to do that is pressure. We got it this far. Now help push it further, to a place where politicians are forced to testify. That includes the Prime Minister.
My name is Raja Miah. I led the campaign that helped force the National Inquiry. I need your help to make sure it is not a whitewash.
My ask of you is a simple one. Please follow my work on social media and take a minute to sign up to and subscribe to my newsletter Red Wall and the Rabble.
I cannot do this without you.
THE SENTENCE THE STATE ONCE PUNISHED
The booklet opens by telling its readers that "laws and customs here may be different from your home country."
Read that sentence against the last twenty years.
Connecting sexual offending to culture and country of origin was the accusation that isolated Ann Cryer inside her own party by 2003 and put a police panic alarm in her home. It was the fear that led the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire to ask Channel 4 to postpone Edge of the City ahead of the 2004 elections. It was the climate in which Sara Rowbotham's 103 referrals and 181 alerts to police and social services went nowhere, and in which Operation Augusta, with 97 potential persons of interest and at least 57 potential victims identified, was closed in 2005 because, in the assurance review's own finding, senior officers removed resources rather than knowing all lines of inquiry were exhausted.
The British state now begins its own publication from the proposition its institutions spent twenty years treating as the offence.
- It addresses a defined population
- It anticipates that their home customs may differ from British law
- And it then specifies the crimes it is worried about
Its own contents list runs gender equality, domestic abuse, sex and consent. What was racist in 2003 is Home Office copy in 2026.
The booklet also chooses its verbs carefully. For controlling a woman, for domestic abuse, for taking images without consent, the warning is that it could affect your asylum claim. For rape, and for sex with a child under 16, the wording changes to will.
The word will appears twice in the booklet's warnings. Both times the offence is sexual.
THE CHILDREN NEVER GOT A POSTER
The booklet's kindest pages are written for victims. It promises anyone who has suffered sexual abuse that support is available and that they will be treated with respect and dignity. Its help pages list thirteen helpline numbers, from Rape Crisis to the Samaritans, with a free interpreter service behind them. Three separate times it assures the reader that reporting a crime will not harm their asylum claim.
The girls in the case files received the opposite of every one of those sentences.
Where the booklet promises dignity, the files recorded blame. The girls Sara Rowbotham's team referred were written up as making lifestyle choices. Where the booklet promises that help is a phone call away, the calls in Rochdale travelled the other direction, 181 alerts and 103 referrals from the professionals to the state, and moved nothing. Where the booklet promises that reporting carries no cost, Victoria Agoglia, in the care of Manchester City Council and known to be at risk of sexual exploitation, reported being injected with heroin by an older man. She was fifteen when she died, and the investigation her death forced open was closed with its lines of inquiry 'unexhausted'.
The girls were recorded as the problem, while the arriving adults are addressed as people requiring explanation and help.
THE RECEIVING TOWNS GET NOTHING
The Home Office has now demonstrated what it can produce when it decides prevention matters. Nine pages, designed, translated and distributed, inside a government one month old. Alongside the booklet it published an entire gov.uk collection titled Resources for Asylum Seekers in the UK. Every document in that collection is addressed to the asylum seeker. Not one is addressed to the communities that receives him.
This is no longer an abstract gap. The Burnham government is dispersing asylum accommodation across the country, instructing wealthier areas to take their share.
Kebatu offended within days of reaching Epping. Mulakhil offended within four months of reaching Nuneaton. Neither town was told the risks these men potentially posed before they arrived.
- There was no briefing for the school a mile from the accommodation
- There was no material for parents to help keep their children safe
- There was no published safeguarding assessment for a receiving council to see
The state has proven it knows how to write prevention. It wrote it for one side of the encounter, yet dispersed the other side unprepared.
A LEAFLET IS WHAT REMAINS WHEN ENFORCEMENT IS RULED OUT
The booklet arrived in the same month Abdul Khan was sentenced, in the same month the National Grooming Gangs Inquiry marked fourteen months of administrative outputs, with the men the government is deporting placed beyond the reach of its powers to compel testimony and the CPS strand excluded from its Terms of Reference, and thirty days into the Burnham government, which now owns both the document and the question it raises.
Kebatu offended within days of arrival. Mulakhil within four months. The booklet proposes to reach such men in the window between the beach and the offence, with a nine page booklet helpfully translated in to their language.
THE VERSION THE STATE CAN NO LONGER TELL
For twenty years there was a version of events the state could live inside. In that version, there was no pattern, only crimes. The men who raped children in Rochdale and Rotherham and Oldham were individuals, their origins were incidental, and anyone who connected the offending to culture or country was not describing reality but manufacturing hatred. That version had teeth. It isolated an MP, postponed a film, buried 181 alerts, and closed a live investigation with the lines of inquiry still open. It held for two decades because the state enforced it.
On 19 August 2026 the state stopped enforcing it. A booklet that tells a defined population of arriving men that laws and customs here may be different from their home country, and then walks them through consent, the age of a child and the equality of women, is not written by a government that believes origin is incidental.
It is written by a government that has conceded the pattern and is now managing it. There is no reading of those nine pages that restores the old version. The Home Office cannot hand this document to arriving men while maintaining that the people who said some men needed telling were inventing the connection.
So the confession stands, and it cannot be unpublished. Every future denial now has to argue with a Home Office document. Every future smear of a whistleblower now has to explain why the government printed what the whistleblower said. The children got case files that blamed them. The towns got nothing. The men got a booklet, and the country got the truth by accident, set in a government typeface with a crest in the corner and a helpline on the back page.
They typeset the admission. And we forced them to do it.
I am Raja Miah MBE. It is now eight years since I first started to expose how politicians protected the rape gangs.
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