In July 2025, The Guardian broke the news that 40% of those arrested for taking part in the racist riots of summer 2024 had previously been arrested for domestic abuse. These stats, while shocking, are not surprising. For all its talk of ‘protecting women and girls’, the current far right movement is intensely misogynistic. While the Guardian article headline did not mention gender, the individuals named in the article are all men who had been credibly accused or convicted of attacking women. Domestic violence can affect any gender, but statistics show that it is disproportionately a crime committed by men against women and girls. 

Far right violence against women and girls isn’t a new phenomenon – it is part of the foundation of far right ideology. Far right movements are structured around concepts of strict social hierarchies based on ideas of superior or inferior races or nationalities, and pushing concepts of “traditional”, “natural” gender roles that position men as leaders and organisers, and women as helpmeets. Women exist, according to the far right, to promote domesticity, support the men in their lives, and produce as many healthy white children as possible. 

These ideologies and hierarchies are alive and well in far right movements today, but they are not new. Historically, far right movements have attacked women’s rights, and harmed women directly, both covertly and overtly.

Kinder, Küche, Kirche

While the phrase ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ (children, kitchen, church) predates Nazi Germany, it was a major focus of the Nazi regime’s plan for Aryan women. While many women were heavily involved in the Nazi party, through organisations such as the National Socialist Women’s League, Nazi leaders repeatedly stressed that the most important role of a woman in the Third Reich was to run a home and give birth to multiple children. Women who lived up to this ideology were lauded and rewarded with the Cross of Honour of the German Mother, issued to women who had at least four children (the highest level was presented to mothers with more than eight children). Similar attitudes could be found in other fascist regimes – in Mussolini’s Italy, women who worked, or did not have children, were denigrated as ‘donna-crisi’, crisis women, who were a threat to the fascist state.

These far right regimes claimed to celebrate women; however, they did so in a highly bio-essentialist way, equating womanhood with domesticity, fertility, and the family. Women and girls were expected not to have careers, or indeed any positions of power outside of the far right women’s movement, where they would be expected to encourage future generations of girls into following the domestic path. Women’s rights to freedom, agency and autonomy were deliberately undermined and weakened by the far right’s emphasis on ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’. 

Violence and Murder

Women who did not conform to the covert violence of far right regimes, or who existed outside of these regimes’ concept of womanhood, were often on the receiving end of outright violence. In Nazi Germany, anti-fascist activist Sophie Scholl was guillotined after a show trial on 22nd February 1943. Cis women incarcerated at Ravensbrück, which housed Jewish women and political prisoners, were repeatedly and violently tortured and murdered. Trans women were also targeted by the Nazis – Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, which pioneered gender-affirming healthcare in the Weimar Republic, was targeted for book burnings, and trans people, particularly trans women, were sent to concentration camps and frequently murdered. Nazi Germany is far from the only historical far right regime that committed explicit violence against women and girls. The Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups and communities in the pre-Civil Rights US directed much of their violence against Black women and girls, as well as Black men. A particularly brutal example is the case of Mary Turner, a Black woman who was eight months pregnant, who was lynched on 19th May 1918 after speaking out against the lynching of her husband; she was hanged by her feet, burned, and had her baby cut out of her stomach and trampled. Before abolition, Black enslaved women and girls were frequently raped by white slave owners, sexual violence which did not end with the end of slavery – free Black women and girls who were sexually assaulted by white men and boys still had no legal recourse against their attackers.

Modern far right movements, from the ‘manosphere’ to Christofascist organisations, are constructed around both overt and covert violence against women. As these examples from history show, this is far from being a new feature of the far right; instead, it has been part of the far right’s DNA from the very beginning. To fight against far right misogyny, we need to acknowledge the different forms this violence takes, particularly against women with multiple intersecting marginalised identities. Women with higher levels of privilege, particularly white, cishet, abled women, must make space in the movement against the far right for marginalised women, centre their experiences and perspectives, and ensure that we do not replicate the racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or other structures of oppression that the far right are enacting. We must set up community defence against explicit far right violence, and lobby and organise against a regressive Reform government. While the far right are on the rise, historical examples show that they have been defeated before – and can be again.