A petition calling for actress Emma Watson to spend one week in a migrant camp in Calais to prove how “safe” refugees are has reached almost 8,000 names.

The Change.org petition - now at 7,776 supporters - asks Ms Watson to spend time in the refugee camp “without bodyguards” to demonstrate to the public how “pro feminism” the refugees are.

The founder Oscar Izard said he rejects the idea that refugees from Africa and the Middle East are rapists.

“Emma Watson should spend a week's holiday in a Calais migrant camp, without guards of course, to show how safe, and how pro feminism these migrants are,” Mr Izard, from Melbourne, wrote.

The issue of refugees and the safety of women is a strongly divisive issue following the mass assault of German women - a country that has accepted around one million refugees in 2015 - by 1000 men on New Year’s Eve. The assault led to the Mayor of Cologne proposing women adopt a “code of conduct” in future to prevent assault.

Ms Watson, who is a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, has never publicly opposed refugees, and even tweeted that refugees are “welcome”.

Ms Watson is currently in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum annual conference to support the "HeForShe Impact Champions" campaign and to discuss a report on gender equality that the movement released in 2015.

On Friday ten of the world’s leading companies at Davos released new workforce gender diversity figures, for the UN Women’s inaugural HeForShe Parity Report.

Despite her good intentions, Ms Watson was strongly criticized by social media users last week for “exploiting” the death of fellow Harry Potter actor Alan Rickman to push her own feminist “agenda”.