##D+-'aisy - I mentioned+
Cologe in response to your post, because you ask. It (and responses to it) were part of, but not the whole story about rape culture.
Here's (roughly) what I put on one of the earlier threads on Cologne in the feminism section: it is possible to accept that taharrush gamea is a new phenomenon (and additional pile of shit dumped on women) that hasn't featured in western Europe in recent history (though one can point to mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers at the end of WW2, and to mass rapes of Bosnian women in the Balkan crisis); and also think that it shines a spotlight on a pre-existing, institutionalised rape culture in the indigenous culture (in this case article 177 of the German penal code, and the responses of the police, police chief and mayor of Cologne); and note that the same people in the right wing press jumping up and down about Cologne (quite rightly, but I would argue for dubious motivations) a week earlier were writing articles minimising attacks by white frat boys on American campuses, or writing articles saying date rape isn't proper rape. In addition to those points, I'd also say that it's been a gift to the far right (who aren't exactly known for their stellar record on women's rights). And I'd say that your pc points carry some weight (the Guardian, for instance, is still wilfully misreporting the number of attacks as only 100).
However, this thread is about a much wider phenomenon - sure, it encompasses women's rights being thrown under the bus when they conflict with the left's pet concerns of racism (Cologne, Rotherham) but it also encompasses the way the right is quite happy to reach for victim blaming as soon as the perpetrator is a "well to do white chap like one of us".
Common thread - women are bottom of the heap. I think it was Dworkin who said "the right sees women as the personal property of individual men, the left sees women as the collective property of all men."
Your continued insistence on limiting this thread to events in Cologne does look like derailing. It is not that we want to silence discussion of Cologne - but we want a much broader discussion. If I was a German woman, the questions I would be asking wouldn't so much be about the culture of the perpetrators but about "why is our law on sexual assault out of kilter with the rest of Europe to the extent that Germany cannot sign up to international conventions on preventing violence against women because it conflicts with the (overly weak) stance in German law?" and "why the hell didn't the police actually, you know, police the situation?"
Incidentally I didn't sign the petition because it was a wishy-washy "we are outraged and demand someone does something" statement, with no actual content. If I was in Germany, I'd sign a petition saying "rewrite article 177 to make no mean no and get rid of the concept of presumed consent." In this country, I'd sign a petition to revamp our laws round, say, the age of consent, such that for any child under 16, if the sexual partner was over 16 and the age gap between parters was greater than two years, the older partner was automatically prosecuted without regard to whether the victim had supposedly "consented" or not. If we can have laws round alcohol usage that put the onus on the retailer to check age, I don't see why we can't have similar for sexual assault of children.