Can we have a sensible discussion about Cologne.

[HelenaDove]

I feel very uneasy about the way the discussions on the news board are going.

Can we have a discussion on the events of Cologne that isnt racist or sexist (meaning no sexism towards British OR refugee women) I find it very hard to believe that a feminist would refer to young women as girlies or talk about them as if their pregnancies were immaculate conceptions. Yet i have seen someone refer to young British women in this way as well as ask why some of the refugee women are pregnant.

Some of the comments ive seen are making me very uneasy and i hope i am articulating this in the right way that it is intended.

One of those attacks described seemed to have no sexual motive; the woman was punched in the face and knocked to the ground and her face pushed into the asphalt.

Not robbed, not raped, just punished.

For what? Being out? Being alone? Being a woman?

Or maybe just because he could.

From that article shabby

police said they 'have never seen anything like it in Östersund'

I believe those exact words were uttered by the German police after Cologne. So that's Swedish, German and Austrian women been advised not to go out alone . Western women's civil liberties are being stripped at an alarming rate and still people don't want to talk about the real cost of immigration. Maybe we'll have to wait until British women are advised not to go out alone, of course by then it will be too late.

Its disgusting. More should be done to show immigrants how to behave in their new countries. If they really want to settle and make better lives they should be willing to do their best to treat the inhabitants with decency and respect.

I find it worrying that people whose instinct might be to minimise what they might regard as simply 'laddish' or 'natural' behaviour by white men (not anybody I've seen posting here, please note), or blame the victims of it for where they are or how they are dressed, suddenly become champions of women's rights when immigrants are doing it.

I've read all of the Cologne threads and wrote the email to lots of people.

If the minimising, victim-blaming and deliberate misinterpretation of events in the replies from those few who bothered is anything to go by, I think women will be clutching at absolutely anyone who champions women's rights in the face of such frightening, hitherto unseen on this scale, attacks.

And the left and liberals will only have ourselves to blame because the debate was shut down and labelled racist for too long.

If I wish anything on IWD, it's that politics can be taken out of a debate that is essentially one about sexism and culture clashes.

But I am worried that attributing the attacks purely to cultural or religious factors glosses over the ways in which European men do pretty similar things (attack and sexually assault women, albeit not in a coordinated fashion like Cologne, I'm not trying to minimise what happened), for similar underlying reasons.

Gang rape or gang assaults on women in public are thankfully quite rare in the UK. In the majority of cases of rape in the UK the perpetrators are known to their victims. The more recently reported cases of gang rape have all been committed by immigrants. I'm in a rush but I'll come back later with some links.

Many of us on these threads have said the British justice system needs to step up and increase sentences for such crimes, regardless of who commits them.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3481882/Women-warned-not-night-Swedish-town-multiple-sex-attacks-foreigners.html

OK - health warning: it's the Daily Mail.

But this is what we earlier posters were warning against in the earlier threads about Cologne before the threads went tits up.

We were saying how easily this could lead to women's rights being curtailed (thus the petition).

Sure enough….

Much easier to stamp on women's freedom than actually deal with the objectionable shits who think any woman is fair game.

Yes I think you are making sense.

It is very difficult to articulate, because there are two things that need looking at both separately and together at the same time IYKWIM

The sexual assaults and dv against women is something that we have being trying to move forward for a long time. I think we have moved forward, but not as far as we need to. This is an ongoing fight.

But now we have to add into the mix an even greater risk coming from an influx of young men who have been brought up to believe it is their right to behave the way they do.

What I'm saying is the odds of been sexual assaulted in public have just risen an awful lot for those women in Europe.

So it all needs looking at and talking about, how can we keep the safety we already fought for, and how to ensure we improve it.

We need to make everything happen faster now, because of the mass shift in people coming into Europe. Other wise we could end up going backwards.

Sorry if it doesn't make sense, I'm on the school run.

I think the thing about Cologne was the uniqueness of the attacks, never before in Europe have we seen so many men attacking women in what appeared to be an organised plan in an open and busy place.

I just don't understand why no one is taking these attacks more seriously, by not doing so they are being given the message that's its not really that wrong but just high jinks. In the meantime women are supposed to change their behaviour, their dress and the hours they can go out.

Its just a step backwards for women.

I just wondered how many people know that its International Women's day today, not a good day to be telling women not to go out at night as there is a good chance of being raped or attacked.

Yes, the irony didn't go unnoticed shabby.

Some statistics re gang rape in the UK. Impossible to know the real picture of course because only the Metropolitan police record the crime of gang rape and it isn't recognised as a separate crime category in the UK. And of course only a tiny percentage of victims ever report.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/gang-rape-is-it-a-race-issue-1711381.html

I said on the other thread that we need to tackle underreporting, misogyny, recording of crimes and campaign for harsher sentences as current punishments are not deterring anyone.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3482214/Five-migrants-arrested-suspected-sex-attack-girl-12-using-waterslide-pools-Cologne.html

I guess for me, these men in Cologne were openly and proudly doing what countless men do secretly (though it's more of an open secret isn't it) all the time.

Psychologists reckon that around 4% of men are what's called "anti-social" in their behavior and personalities, of which a quarter are seriously hardcore (psychopaths). Those in this group who engage in sexual assault are likely to be serial offenders. Apart from locking them up, it's going to be very difficult to ever prevent their criminal behaviour, sadly.

But that's different from the 96% of normal men, whose involvement in sexual harassment and assault will be strongly culturally mediated. If their immediate culture/social group seriously frowns on it, they won't do it. If it accepts it, or says it's not that bad, then some of them will. I was looking at a really shocking study of Chinese rape statistics recently, where 22% of men said they had committed rape, for example.

That's why I think the difference between public behaviour and secret behaviour is HUGELY significant, and that we really shouldn't go down the route of thinking that really it's all the same.

The state is supposed to protect the public from mass public disorder where women and girls are being sexually assaulted, not have the police just stand there and let it happen.

That is the difference between public and secret acts. Not immediately intervening to prevent the former is a breakdown of the state's ability to protect the public.

So in order of severity from the most severe...

Assaulted by the state
Assaulted while the state's agents stand and watch.
Assaulted in private and the state does not investigate.
Assaulted in private and the state does investigate and prosecute.

Think of the difference between your child being punched at school and the teacher not knowing, and your child bring punched at school while a teacher stood and watched and then told you they could not intervene.

"The state is supposed to protect the public from mass public disorder where women and girls are being sexually assaulted, not have the police just stand there and let it happen.

That is the difference between public and secret acts. Not immediately intervening to prevent the former is a breakdown of the state's ability to protect the public. "

This is it. It was shocking enough that men gathered for the purpose of mass sexual assault and robbery of women but that nothing could be or was done to stop them is even worse.

AND then the state and the media colluded to hush the whole things up. Agree completely, and that's a very, very clear way of putting it, Almond.

Matilda, I don't know if you read the Cologne threads, but you may not have come across the explanation about Tarrahush Gamea, and its commonness in North Africa:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_sexual_assault_in_Egypt

Yes and let's not forget the Cologne police were offered back up from a neighbouring force when things started heating up and they REFUSED the offer of help then stood by and told the women they couldn't help them. That is why the petition focused on police understanding, recognition and response.

I don't think that is true about the child at all. There is a particular form of humiliation where authority figures are complicit in allowing abuse to happen. There is a feeling of utter helplessness and victimisation when those in authority will not protect you. It is not like just being punched.

Of course we have greater rights to protection and all other forms of state intervention by the state in public. The whole concept of 'private' in these contexts refers to the limits of state scrutiny and interference in our domestic lives.