UK Muslim women encouraged to report hate to new charity-backed watchdog
The Muslim Women’s Network UK will launch the Muslim Safety Net Service on 1 October 2025
Muslim women and girls are being encouraged to report hate and discrimination to a new watchdog run by the Muslim Women’s Network UK (MWNUK) that launches next month.
The Muslim Safety Net Service, set to go live on 1 October, aims to capture incidents that often go unreported, according to the network’s founder, crossbench peer Shaista Gohir.
“We know that 80% of Muslims do not report hate crime incidents,” said Baroness Gohir, referring to the charity’s research from 2024. “Knowing the true scale really helps to show policymakers how bad the situation is. We need the numbers, data and stories to drive the point home — that way we can put pressure on those in charge to do something.”
News of the service comes just a few months after the government awarded funding to the newly formed British Muslim Trust (BMT) to record incidents of anti-Muslim hatred across the UK. The BMT itself replaced Tell Mama, which had been publicly funded to log Islamophobia since its launch in 2012.
Asked why the MWN was launching its own reporting service, Gohir told Hyphen the charity already had an established helpline and reputation that she hoped would encourage Muslim women, in particular, to use it.
“Our service is open to everybody,” said Gohir. “But our strength is particularly around Muslim women. They can trust us because we’ve been running a helpline for 10 years, where women have been contacting us with very difficult situations around abuse.”
The charity’s helpline provides faith and culturally sensitive support on a range of issues, including domestic abuse, mental health, homelessness and finance. “Over the last two years, we noticed that women were starting to call us about discrimination in the workplace, but also hate crimes on the street,” said Gohir. “Our database wasn’t properly capturing their experiences, so we began developing this separate service.”
Reports can be submitted by individuals either online or by telephone — though neither channel is yet live — or through trusted organisations. The platform is also intended as an educational tool that will address the gap in legal literacy among Muslims.
“A lot of Muslims don’t know what the law says,” said Gohir. “They don’t know what their rights and entitlements are. They don’t know what the processes are, so we want to empower people with legal knowledge.”
That includes encouraging Muslims to use existing processes, such as freedom of information requests and complaints. Gohir believes Muslims are underusing official routes designed to deal with discrimination: data from the Department of Business and Trade shows that fewer than 1% of calls received by the department-sponsored Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) were faith-related, a figure that Gohir described as “shocking”.
Alongside the new service, Gohir has been calling for stronger government action in addressing rising hostility toward minority communities across the UK. In a letter addressed to the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, Gohir expressed her anger at what she described as the government’s “silence” after a weekend of far-right protests organised by Tommy Robinson.
Keir Starmer condemned the violence aimed at police and marginalised communities, but — according to Gohir — “left it too late”.
Gohir is also calling for the government to consolidate existing legislation spread across different laws in England and Wales into a single hate crime act — something the Law Commission has already recommended. Scotland has unified its hate crime legislation.
