Thread to discuss the reality of parts of the UK absorbing large numbers of men from other cultures

[BernardBlacksMolluscs]

This thread is to replace the one that got deleted earlier today, and the TAATs that came after it.

As per MNHQ in site stuff, we're OK to have this conversatrion

www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/4687254-how-do-we-discuss-the-reality-of-parts-of-the-uk-absorbing-large-numbers-of-men-from-other-cultures?reply=121883255

The tradition of terrifying, heartwrenching videos about workplace safety is alive and well. Earlier this year, I had to watch a compulsory safety film on operating heavy machinery. A man dies at work and then you see his toddler being brought to see his gravestone. I was sobbing before the end.

I'm sure we can also design emotionally gruelling videos that address why you shouldn't harass women in the street.

Regarding Thailand etc - the UK could do a lot more to stop paedophiles/anyone with history of sex crimes from travelling to those countries. I would support that. Likewise Thailand would be fully in its rights to bar entry to any UK tourist with those sorts of criminal records. That would require information sharing between the two countries.
With crimes committed by the UN and charities - the only way to fix that is for the UN/charities themselves to act because by definition the countries they are operating are usually in a state of chaos/crisis. That requires a culture of accountability, educating everyone that that stuff isn't acceptable (it isn't just the people committing crimes that are the problem, its everyone else who turns a blind eye/thinks it's a joke), education to see the "outgroup" as human too, protection for whistleblowers and action at the top. And absolutely no tolerance for sacred castes/hushing things up because of politics/optics/the equivalent of xxyyzz in those orgs who run around saying "you can't say that" and straw-manning.

I actually knew someone whose job it was to speak to oil-workers for one of the big companies basically saying "don't buy prostitutes in the desperately poor country you're working - they have probably been forced into it specifically to service the foreign oil rig workers. And if you do please, please don't sleep with the ones that are obviously children". I don't know how successful she was. Probably not very. But unfortunately, wherever you get influxes of foreign men, be they charity workers, asylum seekers, miners etc, you tend to see brothels spring up usually containing trafficked/very poor women, and often active child traficking (see Dyncorp for real horror) UNLESS the country concerned or the companies employing them have an absolutely zero tolerance policy. And it goes without saying NAMALT. but the priority should be protecting girls/boys/women from the ones that ARE.

Someone made a suggestion upthread about the need for a buffer between women and police - a sort of halfway point where crimes could be reported and data collected without necessarily going to the police. I wonder what the logistics of that would be and how difficult it would be to set up something like that.

In a basic form, could it be something like a helpline number you could call to report a sexual assault and then be sort of triaged to hospital/women's aid/social services kind of thing? The calls could generate a huge amount of data which would be really powerful to have.

God knows if something like this would be possible.

I'm sure we can also design emotionally gruelling videos that address why you shouldn't harass women in the street.

Maybe so. But if you don't see women as human in the first place, would you be emotionally gruelled?

@beastlyslumber I suspect that some people never will-but it might help to stop all the people around them seeing it as a non-issue. I also think that training for the police/social services in all the places that let girls down might help for the same reason.

No doubt that Algerian migrants have faced racism in France no one disputes that, but in the 1990s it wasn't pleasant walking around parts of central Paris. Chatelet les Halles , which as you know is a very central area of Paris and is a transport hub, as a very white skinned red haired girl. The cat calling, whistling and other harassing behaviour was most definitely from the migrant population who were hanging out or trying to sell goods there. It can be quite hard to avoid the area given the location.

When I was studying in France I know I wasn't the only young woman who was made to feel uncomfortable by the behaviour of these males. I don't recall being made to feel uncomfortable by other French males in the same way. Sure some would try it on but they seemed to know when to take no for an answer and didn't follow you, harassing you verbally and sexually across a public space in broad daylight.

It is interesting how we all have different experiences isn't it!

Yes, definitely think we need as many interventions as we can come up with @namitynamechange .

I'm interested in how AHA approaches it. In the interviews and articles I've read, she says she's in favour of some kind of education program for asylum seekers. I've also heard her talk about how we need to champion Western values and make it clear what it means to be part of Western culture. I think there's a big reluctance for people in expressing pride in values such as equality, tolerance, freedom etc. But we ought to be talking those up, celebrating and protecting those values. We don't want to lose them and we want people to come here to adopt them as their own values.

I'm interested to read Prey to see what AHA suggests.

I've ordered Infidel on Audible off the back of this thread.

I can't find Prey in that format in English Language. I'll keep looking and may well get a paper version if it doesn't get realised that way.

Regarding the problem of a disproportionate number of single young men claiming asylum, this is always likely to be a problem for a few reasons:

The journey to the UK, and often even to Europe, is extremely perilous. Young, fit men and teenage boys are more likely to be able to survive the journey than are older people or women, especially women with children.

Travelling to a safe country is expensive and many countries from which asylum seekers are fleeing are incredibly culturally misogynistic. If you can only scrape enough money together to pay the traffickers to take one member of your family then you will send the most valuable, i.e. your oldest son or nephew.

If your culture dictates that women must not travel without a male guardian, or are fair game if travelling alone, then you will not send your daughter unless you can also afford for a male relative to travel with her. This doubles the cost.

Young men are overwhelmingly the most likely to be forced to fight in conflict situations. In such circumstances their lives are in immediate danger.

Once one person has gained refugee status they can apply for family members to join them. So it makes sense for a young man, who is fit and able to defend himself, and who is permitted by his culture to travel alone, to go on this perilous journey and for his wife and children to join him later, arriving safely and legally by plane.

The refugee crisis is only likely to get worse and there is no reason to think it will not continue to be a majority of young men, on their own, seeking asylum in the UK.

We do not take our 'fair share' of asylum seekers.

We do not have safe, legal routes to asylum in the UK, except for one-off specific schemes for specific countries and conflicts. From most countries, claiming asylum in the UK means arriving here illegally by dangerous routes.

So we could redress the imbalance somewhat by opening up safe, legal routes to asylum because if they were made to work well then more women and families would use those routes. It would also curb the people traffickers' business model. There is a LOT of profit in 'small boats' for people who don't give a shit whether desperate people arrive in the UK alive or wash up dead on the beach.

For the reasons above, there would still be a disproportionate number of young single men claiming asylum though, and large groups of young single men tend to lead to trouble regardless of race, religion or culture. See e.g. the rape culture of the military or the way men in prison rape each other.

Regarding asylum seekers, it is what it is and we have to face that head on and deal with it responsibly to mitigate risk. Things that would help include:

• Not housing asylum seekers all together in hotels
• Allowing asylum seekers to work and giving them the right to rent
• Giving them more than £40.85/week to live on

Just read that xxyzz found not a single possible explanation about why some act in antisocial ways, obviously missing all the different aspects raised and thrown their way, such as: uprooted, no social control, nothing to lose, socialization, contempt for women who do not conform to own cultural norms, contempt of women in general, group dynamics…

No one is as blind as the one who does not want to see, I guess.

It might not be an easy and straightforward brief, but some of these men will be reachable. Perhaps not all, but then not all of the men born on British soil are reachable, either. We've got plenty of our own homegrown misogynists and sex offenders, and that number is too many.

I can't guarantee any of these proposals will work, but it's got to be worth trying.

I'm in favour of trying any and all of the things pp have suggested. I suppose I just feel a bit helpless because really what needs to happen is that the police enforce laws and protect women and children; asylum seekers and immigrants have to commit to assimilate to UK culture wrt women's rights; we have to somehow end the practice of Sharia law, fgm, honour killings, and exploitation of women in immigrant communities that are already established in the UK; we need to stop housing young unaccompanied male asylum seekers in hotels and give them something useful to do... I feel like it's one of those problems where you pull on a thread and suddenly everything starts unravelling.

But I definitely think nothing can change until we are able to talk about it. I really appreciate this thread for enabling women to share our experiences. As a pp said, women need places where we can talk about this stuff. I'm grateful to @BernardBlacksMolluscs for making the thread possible in the first place. And I know I've posted a lot and I will shut up for a bit now!

Gangs of young men with lots of rights and no responsibilities have been a problem in every single global human society in history. It's Lord of the Flies.

There are lots of legal and policy options to tackle the issues in this thread- rape, rape culture and harassment/ misogyny but the (male) legislature and policy makers just don't care enough about raped women to get their finger out.

If men were getting raped en masse by a distinguishable demographic change would happen in a flash.

such an interesting thread

certainly the way I work is I need to read a variety of opinions and approaches, and venture some myself and have them challenged and see what other people think before I can come to sensible conclusions.

if even raising this subject leads to groundless accusations of racism, then that refinement of thought can't happen.

We need to separate out grooming gangs and sexually aggressive asylum seekers because the circumstances are different.

The thing they have in common is extreme cultural misogyny and I have to say it's weird to me that the accusations on this thread have been 'racist' and not 'islamophobic'. Everyone knows what the problem is but nobody wants to say it, even those who are desperately insisting that there is no problem.

But these two particular issues are different.

The grooming gangs have been mostly british pakistani muslims - second or third generation, but from towns where there is little integration.

I've read so many posts over the past day or two saying 'I live in London in a very diverse area and there is no problem', and I also live in a very diverse area of London and experience no problem but I think that is largely because London is an extremely wealthy city in a constant state of change. London has a constant influx of all sorts of people and you either learn to cope with that or you move somewhere else, like Bradford or the home counties, depending on your particular brand of conservatism.

So in terms of the grooming gangs, what adds to the cultural misogyny is the kind of expat mentality, where over time, the diaspora becomes much more 'traditional' than the country of origin, that has been well described by previous posters.

In terms of the asylum seekers, what adds to the cultural misogyny is the economic and social deprivation and the concentration of young, single males living all in one place.

We need to be able to name and describe the extreme cultural misogyny which comes with both sets of men. We also need to be able to name the differences.

such an interesting thread

It is, thank you for starting the discussion.

over the years in this country and in France, I’ve been harassed for being small, blonde and female and sadly for being young looking. Please stop harassing girls for the colour of our skin.

Very familiar with Les Halles as I lived just across the river and at a similar period. I’m a Londoner thus fairly used to street harassment so perhaps it didn’t bother me as much. Either way I didn’t experience it more from any particular ethnic group and certainly the worst run ins were with white men.

I just wonder whether you were infected the the general demonising of N.Africans that was part of French culture at the time. I noticed how othered and separate ethnic communities were in Paris compared to London. I lived in a town in the south for a bit and we were told not to cross the Algerian quarter at night. But it ludicrously fine, quiet as a churchyard, no idea what the fuss was about other than racism.

are you suggesting that unconscious racism made this poster imagine that street vendors from the migrant population in Paris followed her harassing her verbally and sexually across a public space in broad daylight?

seems unlikely, no?

I just wonder whether you give a shit about women who are harassed or attacked in circumstances that make you feel politically uncomfortable.

The other thing I have to say is that I think it's extremely dangerous to shut down discussion of this, or immigration more generally, on the left or centre of politics.

If you do that you gift the debate to the far right, who will not hesitate to fill the void left by the people who you have silenced.

Sometimes it all seems utterly insurmountable, especially when you realise that our purported political allies are sabotaging efforts. I've mentioned this before, but Nimko Ali is an FGM survivor and campaigner. And people from the Labour party, including her own Labour MP, called her racist for speaking up against FGM.

The whole thing seems rather unlikely frankly. There weren’t huge numbers of Algerians in Les Halles anyway, it’s not the banlieues. I’m wondering if she was more afraid of them than white men thus the incidents impacted her consciousness more.

No, I know what inexperienced. It was a difference in the behaviour in the males. I find it insulting that you imply the difference is due to me being racist rather than to believe my experience. It is frankly astounding that your prejudice is against other women rather than recognising that the way in which men from northern African communities have been raised to view women might impact on their behaviour towards women. Do you imagine these men forget the cultures they come from and can’t do bad things once they are immigrants? How bizarre.