#120db

[No1blueengine]

I stumbled upon a thing on twitter, a video for #120db which appears to be a anti rape women movement in Europe. Essentially standing up for women who feel they have been thrown under the bus by Western Europe's migrant policy. I am having difficulty evaluating it frankly and wondered if anyone had any experience of it.

I am cautious because of what seems to be a overt anti-migrant position. It is not helped by a google search which brought up as the top response a piece on the movement by Brietbart. Also the Daughters of Europa thing rings in my ears as a call to nationalism but maybe it plays differently in mainland Europe than here on the fringes.

Fundamentally I don't want to see persons fleeing war etc and seeking safety labelled as potential rapists, but it has always seemed to me that the integration of migrant populations into European communities has been badly handled and with little thought to the consequences from what i can see.

As a child my community had a large intake of Lebanese refugees fleeing the civil war and i went to school with these children. There were exceptions of course but I saw the girls slowly disappear from school almost totally by age 14 to go back to Lebanon or elsewhere and get married and i had to deal with the boys whose level of misogyny was off the scale - even for Australia! So it doesn't take much for me to imagine what #120db are describing.

Obviously it is a nuanced subject. All refugees & migrants are not evil rapists in waiting. However, would it be fair to say that some persons, newly come to Europe, have come with a disconcertingly worrying attitude to women which is incompatible with assimilation and puts women at risk and that governments, for fear of giving legitimacy to the more far right/isolationist elements are ignoring the problem?

I feel like i am risking the electronic wroth of the internet for raising these questions but it must be worth a conversation surely?

[R0wantrees]

There are also very serious dangers for women and girls who are refugees in Europe, especially in some camps.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/underwear-women-bras-not-bombs-refugees-knickers-donate-a7228201.html

www.leftlion.co.uk/read/2017/june/bras-not-bombs/

[TrumpTrump]

Personally, I think that the media should be forced to report on all proven sex crimes. All sexual assaults are under-reported, but for different reasons.

[WrongOnTheInternet]

There is an issue Quentin or have you forgotten Rotherham and Telford?

Yes all men can rape, and yes British society is quite misogynistic already. My experience incidentally, backed up by stats, is that Germany is less violent than the UK and so women there might not be quite as used to being given rape alarms as we are in the UK. None of that changes the point that we are importing more men from even more misogynistic cultures than our own. It has been suggested before now that one of the reasons these men want to come to Europe at all is because they believe they'll have more sexual freedom over here, because white women have that.

[CharlieParley]

Typical case of there's lies, damn lies and statistics.

So that 91%:

It represented the increase in Bavaria alone, not across Germany, for the first six months of 2017. The 91% figure had to be corrected - rather sheepishly officials admitted that it included all kinds of sexual harrassment, not just rape as initially reported. And what they didn't tell anyone at the time was that the German law on what constituted a crime of a sexual nature was changed to include far more offences and changed the definition of other offences*.

That's why all of the Bundesländer had agreed not to publish statistics on this for any ongoing year. North Rhine Westphalia was the only other state not to stick to that rule and they reported fewer rapes and assaults for the same six month period than in just one month ten years earlier.

Both Bundesländer had a political motivation for publishing their numbers. Bavaria wanted to stir up anti-immigrant rhetoric in the run up to the election, while NR WP wanted to prove that things were much improved after the attacks in Cologne (which were unsurprisingly misreported in the press btw).

For Germany as a whole, the numbers for 2016 showed that the percentage of alleged non-local assailants rose from 33% to 38% and that women as a whole were attacked in lower numbers than 20 years ago.

So if the increase in assaults and rapes committed by immigrants is relatively small and fewer women become victims, where does the alarm come from?

It comes from the public nature of some of the assaults committed by immigrants - that is they attack in groups and/or in public or relatively public places. They don't hide it as much as German men do, possibly because they come from cultures where women do not seek or get justice and/or from war torn countries where upholding law and order is a function the state can no longer perform.

They are definitely overrepresented among the perpetrators (I think they commit sexual crime at twice the rate of German men but as they make up only a small percentage of men in the country, the stories are definitely exaggerating the danger).

*Originally, it was rape only if the rapists had first been violent towards the victim, or threatened the victim with violence or where the victim was completely defenceless. The victim also had to fight back to stand a chance in court.

[CharlieParley]

Should add that the 33% to 38% is not actually non-locals but non-German perpetrators, that is longterm residents like the bloke from Newcastle, the dude from Chicago, the chap from Marseille are included in this number just as much as any recent arrivals like the refugees.

And it is entirely thinkable that the statistics are further skewed by the possibility that stranger assaults and rapes are more likely to be reported than the far more common sexual attacks by people known to the victim which tend to be underreported. (I've read this somewhere but cannot remember the source so I'm adding this here merely as a possibility, not a certainty.)