Alongside the increase in arrivals to Europe, sexual violence has proliferated on the continent, as detailed in ‘Chapter 3: Sexual Violence by Numbers’. Between 2017 and 2018, there was a 17 per cent increase in instances of rape, and a 20 per cent increase in other forms of sexual assault in France.3 In French public places, 3 million women have experienced unwanted sexual attention and advances. In Germany in 2017, the number of victims of ‘sexual coercion’ rose by 41 per cent. Compared to the previous year, Sweden witnessed a 12 per cent increase in reported sex offences in 2016—the staggering jump in these statistics is all the more shocking because rates of sexual violence were relatively stable in Sweden between 2005 and 2011.
Although Hirsi Ali recognizes that some of the increase in sexual crime statistics might be explained by new legal definitions of rape and greater public awareness about the issue (due to #metoo), she argues that it must also be acknowledged that the countries with the largest intake of immigrants have witnessed the largest increase in sexual violence. Therefore, she concludes, assessing the link between immigration and the rise of sexual violence is vitally important.
Denmark is unusual for making it relatively easy to distinguish immigrant offenders. Since 2015, the country’s share of immigrants from “non-Western countries,” excluding their Danish-born descendants, has risen from around 5% to 6%. Yet from 2015 to 2019 they have accounted for around 11% of convictions for sex offenses and 34% of convictions for rape.
In Germany a new category of “rape, sexual coercion and sexual assault in especially serious cases including resulting in death” was introduced in June 2016, making it hard to measure the effect of the migrant influx. Even so, in 2017 and 2018, more than a third of the suspects in the new category were non-Germans. For all sexual-abuse cases, the share of non-German suspects rose from 15% in 2014 to 23% in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and 21% in 2019.
“Non-German” is a broad category. In Germany’s crime statistics, the term zuwanderer, or “newcomers,” was used until 2016 to identify suspects who were asylum applicants, failed asylum seekers and illegal residents. This definition was expanded in 2017 to include successful asylum seekers. From 2017 to 2019, zuwanderer accounted for between 10% and 12% of sex-crime suspects, and around 16% of suspects for rape, sexual coercion and sexual assault in especially serious cases. It is unlikely that zuwanderer accounted for much more than 2% of the German population.
In Austria, “crimes or offenses against sexual integrity and self-determination” increased by 53% between 2015 and 2018. Between a quarter and a third of suspects were foreign, but in 2018 only 19.4% of the population was foreign-born. Between 4% and 11% of the suspects were asylum seekers; the share of the population born in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria—among the largest sources of asylum seekers—was only 1.2%.
In the absence of official statistics, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reviewed the gang-rape cases heard in Swedish courts between July 2012 and December 2017. Of the 112 men convicted, it found that three-quarters were foreign-born (almost all of those from outside Europe), and 30% were asylum seekers.
Talking about violence by Muslim men against European women is at odds with identity politics and its matrix of victimhood. Politicians, journalists and academics have been reluctant to acknowledge that the migrant sex-crime wave even exists. This is as much an issue of class as religion or race. Much of the crime and misconduct against women takes place in low-income neighborhoods. Somehow in the era of #MeToo, their predicament arouses less sympathy than that of Hollywood actresses.