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

Yes, I'm not sure what the squeamishness is about but I've felt it too. I think it's something about not wanting to be all colonialist and superior. There is also a real anti-British sentiment among some sections of the left, and people often talk about feeling ashamed to be British and so on. I think the idea is that almost any country or culture is better than ours. White guilt, I guess.

But as a woman I consider myself extremely lucky to have been born in the UK in a time when no one questioned that I should go to school or work or live alone or drive a car, and the vast majority of men and women I've met in my life have treated me with respect and kindness. I've felt safe in almost every place I've lived in the UK.

It was working and living in other countries that really made me start to understand how unusual it is to have such freedom and safety. Being assaulted and raped in Egypt, being stalked and followed and harassed in Morocco and Turkey. Being followed and surrounded by a group of males is terrifying. Not being able to go anywhere on my own without a man. Having to cover myself up completely. Never going out after dark. Not even being able to take a taxi somewhere by myself.

I don't want to live like that and as much as I think we should try to give asylum seekers a chance here, if this is what's in store for women and girls in the UK then I say no. We have a good thing going here and we already have a huge fight on our hands to hold on it.

There is also a real anti-British sentiment among some sections of the left, and people often talk about feeling ashamed to be British and so on. I think the idea is that almost any country or culture is better than ours. White guilt, I guess.

Definitely this. Young British people in my wider family who have lives of unbelievable ease, have travelled widely, have had a world class education, the first generation to have this given to them by their parents and who will never want for anything, hate the British because they now have to get a passport stamp on their dozen or so flights a year visiting friends. We are all structurally racist.

They will have to live with the consequences of hating their origins I suppose.

This thread needs to decide: do you just want to have a moan about immigrants or do you want to address male sexual misbehaviour? If the latter - then focusing on a fraction of the population will only produce a partial view.

No, this thread does not need to decide. This thread is about specific kinds of male violence and harassment ('misbehaviour'? ), perpetrated by specific groups of men.

There are plenty of other threads about other specific kinds of male sexual violence perpetrated by other specific groups of men, and by specific individual men, as well as threads about MVAWG more generally.

We have had threads about sexually abusive catholic priests, sports coaches, medics, celebrities, aid workers, police ... can't remember seeing arguments on those threads about our focus being too narrow.

It makes a change I suppose, usually in these parts we are accused of focusing too much on trans offenders.

What about geordie men? Can we talk about them? (tbf, some may be students from elsewhere but the fact they were booing rather than hissing suggests they are at least culturally british)

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4688404-newcastle-reclaim-the-night-march-booed-by-men

Actually, the second generation angle is quite a contested issue in Germany when it comes to statistical analyses. There is a substantial amount of 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants with basically no integration and very limited knowledge of German, who have a German passport, while having been socialized in communities that live by the rules of the cultures they emigrated from.

German police statistics, however, generally show correlations of crime and nationality, not ethnicity. With this method you will obviously distort and arguaby minimize potential trends. That led to major discussions in Germany a couple of years back.

This doesn't only affect white women though. In fact it's women from these same communities that bear the brunt.

I don't think it's racism per se that these men are exhibiting. They just don't think any women should be going around uncovered, without a male guardian, participating in public life. They hold the women they think they own to the same standards and they punish them even more harshly.

www.gov.uk/government/statistics/statistics-on-so-called-honour-based-abuse-offences-england-and-wales-2021-to-2022/statistics-on-so-called-honour-based-abuse-offences-england-and-wales-2021-to-2022

I'd like to know whether those accusing us of 'racism' think we should care about these women's rights and safety or not. If we should care, how do we talk about what is being done to them?

A few thoughts after reading this thread, mostly on statistics and research. I looked into these questions about five years ago, so what I say about the data sets may be slightly out-of-date, but not much.

First, even though all cultures have forms of cultural and/or religious misogyny or at least aspects which are contemptuous of women, what also matters is how common and how widely approved misogynistic practices are.

This does vary by culture, so that rape rates, for instance, are different for different countries which record them in fairly reliable statistics, and what kind of treatment of women and girls local laws allow also differs.

Not all cultures are alike, and it matters how frequent and severe, say, street harassment is and what form it commonly takes. This is something we need to study, record, and discuss so that the world overall can be made a safer and freer place for women and girls.

Second, to make sense of the statistics on sexual crimes committed we need to compare the rates of various ethnic/racial/national origin offender groups in the crime statistics to their population percentages:

For instance, if white men are 87% of all men in the UK (not sure if that's correct today), then if their share in those convicted of sexual crimes is more than 87% we could tentatively state that they would be over-represented in the sexual crime statistics. If their share in the sexual crime statistics is less than 87%, they would be under-represented. And so on, for all ethnic, racial and national origin groups.

In other words, stating that white men are some large percentage of the offenders sentenced for a particular sexual crime does not, alone, tell us anything about which groups are proportionately more or less likely to commit sexual assaults in general, given that white men here are the majority of men.

This is not directly relevant now if the data has not been collected in the UK at all, but it is relevant for interpreting data from other countries.

Third, some five years ago I searched for data on the question this thread discusses. I found some methodologically good data for three Nordic countries and will look for my references if there is interest in seeing them. I had some of it translated by a friend so the summaries are available in English when the originals are not.

But the gist of those is that certain immigrant groups (not all) were clearly over-represented among those who came into the attention of police in cases of rape (sources of origin in Northern Africa, Middle East and Somalia).

Fourth, at the time I read several studies about crime in immigrant communities in general. These were older ones so were not specifically about the most recent waves of immigration, but they all found that rates of crime tend to be higher among recent immigrants than the native population and listed several reasons for it (cultural isolation, mismatch between skills of the entrant and the local job market including language skills, past traumatic experiences). These studies were not on sexual crime as much as on economic crime but some of the same factors probably affect the former, too, including different cultural beliefs about how women and girls are expected to behave.

I am trying to find the source of a quote I read years ago which was something like “the biggest danger to the world is large groups of single disaffected young men”. It went on to mention the impact of wars restoring balance to society. If anyone has any ideas please help me!

I think if it was similar sized groups which consisted of families, mixed sex and multi generations the issues would be different.

Transplanting a large group which is entirely made up of disaffected single men into one place is unlikely to lead to integration. Families go through the school system which forces integration, language skills, exposure to local culture. If there are no external factors forcing integration presumably the opposite happens and the group becomes its own unit.

A large group of single men with embedded cultural views on Western women with fairly typical human tendency to punch down - the attacks on women seem almost inevitable. Horrifying.

Changes to the locating policies would help. Limit on numbers in a small area, specific activities to pave the way for integration into communities?

I don't think that solely talking about peoples (or groups) nationalities or refugee/migrant/citizenship status is entirely helpful.

There are a lot of Venn diagram overlaps between nationality, ethnicity and sociology-cultural allegiance.

Take the 7/7 bombers. It was reported they were 'British'. (3 born in UK, 1 in Jamaica). The 3 born here were 2nd gen with parents who had emigrated from Pakistan. The last had a Mum who converted to Islam when he was a boy. None were ethnically 'British' and none adhered to 'British values'.

But when we are talking about anti-terrorism policies we 'allow' what is effectively racist profiling.

If it's good enough for anti- terrorism why isn't it good enough for gender based sexual terrorism?

(Clue: women aren't worth as much as dead white men)

I think people feel squeamish about saying, actually, in these areas our values are better.

Squeamish is right.

When I took my GCSE and A-level exams, some girls in my year were married. At 16, because it was legal. This was in Blair's multicultural Britain, and looking back on it, the wider party line in the community was an emphasis on the difference between "forced marriage" and "arranged marriage". People felt sophisticated and tolerant of other cultures when they refused to judge that a 16 year old girl was married before she even knew if she'd passed GCSE Maths. You wouldn't want to dismiss all marriages of teens as forced, after all! That would be racist. It was squeamishness at work there.

There is a difference between forced marriage and arranged marriage, when the bride is a 27 year old, financially-independent pharmacist (a graduate-only profession), who left home for uni, and still lives independently, and asked her parents to set up some dates for her!

A 16 year old girl in her parents' home, with no qualifications, and no ability to support herself independently, does not have full freedom to refuse when her family tell her they want her to get married. What better examples can you have of coercion and decisions made under duress? But no-one wanted to address that.

And then they missed school/college because they had to do things for their husbands, damaging their educational attainment post-wedding. Which then would keep them financially dependent on the husbands.

Yes, the cultural sexism part.
I wonder why there isn’t anyone (women/feminists) coming forward from these communities to say ‘yes we can see exactly how Rotherham, etc, happens, it is an extension of the so-called ‘honour’-based violence within our communities, it is underpinned by the same sexism, the same misogyny, except it is outward facing’.

Instead, the conversation seems to be shepherded out of the spotlight by accusations of racism, either ‘why are white feminists not doing more to help brown women?’ or ‘oh I see, let’s all make an example of the brown men for doing what all men do’.

Its all a bit “Look! A squirrel over there!”

I can’t help thinking it is shame and embarrassment about these backwards attitudes, and shame and embarrassment about having to navigate them and make compromises just to get by. A bit like my reluctance to discuss the sexism in my own life - I don’t trust people to be non-judgemental and genuinely helpful, I know how thoughtlessly people leap in with “LTB!” or “go NC” on the one hand, which would upset me when talking about my loved-ones, and if I would discuss it with people closer to home they’d minimising it with ‘ you should count yourself lucky, you have no grounds to complain’.

i was responding to langclegsinspace

I wonder why there isn’t anyone (women/feminists) coming forward from these communities to say ‘yes we can see exactly how Rotherham, etc, happens, it is an extension of the so-called ‘honour’-based violence within our communities, it is underpinned by the same sexism, the same misogyny, except it is outward facing’

I think the answer to that is crystal clear.

You'd have to be very brave to call it out in your own community, the response might that you become estranged from the community.

If the behaviour derives from religious, as well as cultural beliefs you might be deemed a heretic for speaking out.

I don't think women within those communities are to blame.

"But the gist of those is that certain immigrant groups (not all) were clearly over-represented among those who came into the attention of police in cases of rape (sources of origin in Northern Africa, Middle East and Somalia)."

obviously the police are entirely neutral and utterly trustworthy.

Any reference to the murder of Jean Claude de. Menezes is someone trying to bring down the magnificent achievement of Cressida Dick as first female Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,.

Likewise any reference to the murder of Sarah Everard and the role of Wayne Couzens, or repeated reports of racism in the Metropolitan Police,

All left wing hate

Indeed, but even on an anonymous forum like Mumsnet?

Adolf Hitler really respected women

Earlier in this thread there were women from immigrant communities saying that these threads and discussions are important.

It may be that this is already happening, on these forums.

We need to have more forums like this though, ones that aren't shut down. Because the more talking about things is normalised the easier it is for people to speak.

Also upthread someone talked about books by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she is an example of a person within such communities who has spoken out, loudly. I sought her books out today on Audible (I'm dyslexic). I think they're worth a read/ listen.

I think we can see evidence of how the "honour system" operates in our communities in how Boris Johnson who bullied a sexual partner into having an abortion and has faced a number of allegations of harrassment was able to operate openly at the heart of British society,

But he's not Muslim so won't face some of the ire of many posters on here...

why might that be I wonder🤔

I am thinking also about a friend of mine whose dad is Egyptian. I couldn’t tell him about my experiences in Egypt because he found it too toe-curlingly embarrassing - he recognised the backwards attitudes towards women in his dad.

Thank for that.

Yawn, you are only reading selective posts.

There are multiple threads over the whole of Mumsnet that deal with the sexist ways of the former prime minister.

We know and talk about white male misogyny.

But for some reason we're not allowed to talk about misogyny that derives from other cultures.

why might that be I wonder 🙄

I've seen women of various backgrounds speak out on social media about cultural misogyny. I've also seen white, middle-aged Labour party activists shout at them for making "racist generalisations". And there's Nimko Ali, who got blocked by her Labout MP for impugning the Somalian community when she spoke against FGM. She is an FGM survivor of Somalian heritage. Women have spoken on this thread, even.

It's amazing how people will tell women they don't know what they're talking about. And sadly, it has a silencing effect on everyone else. When you see a brown woman being punished for "racism", you know what will happen to a white woman who makes similar comments.

"Ali is a close friend of Carrie Johnson, the wife of Boris Johnson, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, and godmother to their son, Wilfred.[27] She endorsed Johnson, who she has referred to as a "real feminist", in the 2019 Conservative leadership election.[28] During the 2019 general election, Ali campaigned on behalf of the Conservatives.[29]'

I think Pergatory and lifeturnsonadime, that I must be giving too much credence to the posters who are trying to sabotage the discussion.

I would really like to see a round table discussion including some feminists from these communities, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to find a practical solution for the issue in the OP. They could just cut to the chase.

It is truly depressing that the voices of people who have experienced these things are drowned out by people who have not.

Why are people so intent on drowning out these voices?

Is it because it's too complicated and the easiest people to placate are the women?

Or is it because of the reluctance of people in the West to even acknowledge that there could be issues within migrant communities that cause challenges in host counties? And if it is that, what is the cause of the reluctance? Is it some form of colonial guilt?

What is concerning is that it is, once more, it tends to be women's voices that are being silenced. I haven't heard the story about Nimko Ali, but in general terms how dare the Labour Party block a Somalian survivor of FGM on the basis that those views must be racist? Just dreadful.

Lurkers, look at how a black woman and FGM survivor, who has founded a NGO to end FGM, is being attacked by some shade of self-identifying leftie. Is the behaviour of those who interfered with her activism questioned?

No, only Nimko is on trial here.

EndlessTea Ayaan established a foundation to address FGM and forced marriages. Be right back with a link.