Dad, I get that but it cuts both ways, doesn't it? Our individual personal experiences are what they are but we can't extrapolate that to a general or national level and say 'this is the true picture', because the true picture is made up of myriad lived personal experiences, many of which are vastly different. So how do we decide what's 'right', or the most representative, without some objective basis on which to discuss it?
What I don't think is helpful, though, is to dismiss experiences like yours and many others shared on this thread (and elsewhere) because I agree that individual experience is valid and needs to be listened to and understood both to get why people feel how they feel and to move forward.
But... it's sort of a two way street, isn't it? We all have to be willing to challenge our preconceptions.
Grays, I think that's a massive issue and one (from a healthcare perspective) you'd have far more exposure to than me. I don't know what the answer is? I'm really proud of the work Britain has been doing on FGM, both here and abroad - to me that's the sort of thing the Foreign Office and DfID should be doing abroad, as well as other agencies tackling it locally.
I think I'm pretty well integrated, to the point where most people are surprised to hear I'm an immigrant. But I come from a point of privilege on that point, in that I'm a well-off white economic migrant who married a local. It's easy for me to fit in, so I can't really opine about cultural integration, but it feels to me that a real key in achieving better integration has to be language skills - because how can people understand each other's cultures, and the reasons for certain cultural practices, or even be challenged on the basis of some of those practices if they can't talk to each other?