Propaganda Overdrive

The migrant-sex-offender narrative has been carefully constructed by the state

Article by Vikki Harper

The recent case of Ethiopian national Hadush Kebatu—who arrived in the UK by small boat in late June 2025, lived in a hotel in Epping, Essex, committed sexual assaults after arriving, was sentenced to twelve months in prison in September and later mistakenly released from HMP Chelmsford—has been widely reported. Widely and frequently, despite statistics that reveal that in the year ending March 2025, there were 209,556 police-recorded sexual offences in England and Wales, of which 71,667 were classified as rape. We have to wonder why all of those cases didn’t get the same media and political attention.

What is striking about this case is not the crime itself, but the way government and mass media have exploited the incident as a propaganda device—linking ‘migrant’, asylum seeker and ‘sex offender’ in order to whip up fear and add mass support to the narrative that foreigners are the cause of working-class fears and woes. Reporters (one could never call them journalists) must have been laying bets as to who could get the most derogatory propagandist adjectives into one headline!

A slick, unified media-government strategy

From the earliest headlines, the same phrasing appeared across outlets. Almost like it was preordained! Phrases like “migrant sex offender”, “arrived by small boat”, “housed in hotel”, “child assault in Epping” dominated. Nineteen separate media outlets featured the same phraseology of ‘migrant sex offender’ in the approximately 48-hour ‘on the run’ window — including Sky, Reuters, AP, ITV, The Guardian, The Times, The Sun, The Telegraph, Independent, FT and several regional broadcasters.

When so many media outlets recycle nearly identical language, while emphasising the “migrant arrival” + “sex offence” combo, it hardly looks like spontaneous journalism -and I use the term journalism loosely – it looks like coordinated narrative management. The government politicians lean in too: the Home Secretary declared “our streets are safer because this vile child sex offender has been deported”. The Guardian The effect is clear: the message is not simply ‘a crime was committed’ but ‘migrant = predator, all migrants are potential predators, we must eject them all’.

A propaganda opportunity seized

We must ask ourselves if the timing and framing of this incident was crafted to serve an agenda. Call me cynical but when I read exactly the same headline repeated across pages and channels, my first thought was to wonder if the whole incident was contrived. Our ruling-class are devious and despicable and it is not beyond the realms of possibility for them to manufacture this choice opportunity (if not to take full advantage of it) to divide the working class, distract them from the systemic failure of capitalism and shift blame onto expendable minorities. Migrant workers are scapegoated via media and state provocateurs all the time and here was a perfect situation to exemplify and drive home the message. 

The danger of focusing on individual examples rather than structural root causes

The real crisis here is not isolated ‘migrant sex offenders’ for if that principle applied, we should extend it to rich, white sex offenders and their political and royal cohorts. Individual criminals exist in every population … so let’s not be sucked in by the misinformation machine, let’s not fall for the fabrication that migrants are the cause of our woes. We must drop the emotion that the headlines are intended to rouse and use our brains to assess the situation critically and logically. 

Life for workers has never been steady and secure because the capitalist system is inherently unjust and exploitative. It’s a system that prioritises profit over people and as such, it will continue to exploit working-class lives. As we feel the inevitable squeeze more cruelly through the deterioration of our material conditions, aka the quality of our lives, and we begin to question why, our ruling class has to divert attention away from themselves.  

The media discourse of treating the migrant as inherently suspect, as if the very fact of being a ‘foreign arrival’ dictates predatory behaviour, rather than seeing fault with the broader system, is intended to sow division. Their aim is to pit native working class against migrant working class, thus avoiding the entire working class uniting against the exploiters.

The repetition of nearly identical catchphrases across outlets points to complicity: business-owned press, broadcast media, and government all serve the same narrative. The effect: the incident is not reported as one of many criminal cases but elevated into a symbol of the danger posed by migrants in general, generating moral panic. Public discourse becomes: “If one [migrant] did this, perhaps many will — we must deport them all.” The risk is enormous: it reinforces xenophobia, divides workers, and allows the state to divert attention from corporate profiteering, housing crises, and public-service collapse.

What this teaches the working class

For those of us who see it for what it is and who can read the propaganda and critically asses it, the lesson is two-fold:

1. Never allow a single incident to define the struggle. The capitalist media will highlight examples that serve the aim of division, while hiding the system that causes crime, poverty and migration. 
2. Link working-class unity across nationalities. Migrant workers and native workers share interests: secure housing, decent wages, social services. The media narrative wants to pit us against each other. We must refuse it. 

The Kebatu incident is tragically real—sexual assault is abhorrent, whether committed by privileged white folk or poor migrants, and the victims deserve justice. But the way this case has been leveraged by state and media expresses a much larger strategy: to widen the divide between workers, scapegoat migrants, and legitimise harsher immigration and policing regimes. The unity of narrative across outlets suggests more than coincidence—it suggests coordinated propaganda.

The capitalist system is rotten; the real fight must not be over individual battles but against the entire capitalist structure. It is in this understanding workers, regardless of race or creed, see through the diversionary propaganda and join together to fight their common enemy – the British ruling class.