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

you don't get that [positive culture and integration] without being willing to let people talk about problems when they exist

oh how I agree with this

on a related note can I ask people to think carefully before responding to our visitor? Their aim, whether they understand it or not, is to hamstring this thread by making it shouty and polarised

Has anyone seen the thread in AIBU about is the UK racist?

A prime example of why so much goes on, such as FGM, grooming and such without being dealt with.

You literally can't say anything on there because the thread has been highjacked by the righteously offended who believe white British equals racist.

Any time anyone tries to put a point across they're shot down, even those who are married to people from a minority.

All the while there are people who shout down anyone who points out issues with any group, you are going to limit the ability to stamp out potential damage to others of a number of communities.

FGM is done by a specific group. It's kept quiet because of fear. But sadly if you highlight inter community issues you're immediately racist. I even had someone suggest to me on another issue that people who apparently voice a difference of opinion to their apparently superior one are apologists for male violence too.

Utterly ridiculous.

Yes, there is bad groups, as I mentioned Yewtree was well off men in celebrity circles who were seen as untouchable. But that doesn't excuse grooming in other communities and excuses made for that.

@ReformedWaywardTeen I am not so sure - I think this goes back to the issue about being able to talk about specific issues without being shouted down. E.g. if someone wants to talk about racism they or others have experienced, even if they want to limit the discussion specifically to racism experienced in the UK, at the hands of white police officers, specifically within the cheese industry (intentionally ridiculous example) that seems reasonable. The fact that (for example) other countries might be even more racist, or that sometimes groups that are victims of racism can also do bad things doesn't change that. In the same way that this thread was at risk of being derailed by "I have experienced mysogyny from white men therefore endless tea is lying/a racist" posters (I name no names) there's a risk of derailing discussions in the same way.

The biggest risk of course is that people get annoyed at their own discussions about (eg racism) being shut down that they then try to shut down other people's discussions/complaints and the whole internet eats itself in a mess of censorship, and revenge cancellations.

But I agree with you that talking about issues like FGM/grooming gangs etc isn't inherently racist even if its a difficult conversation. If I thought that I wouldn't be on this thread!

I want to change tack and talk about a former colleague of mine for a minute. This guy, he was friendly and did his job, but something about him was repellent, gave me the ick.

I learned soon enough that he was really tight with money for most of the year to save up a load of money, to go to Thailand and buy a girlfriend for a couple of months. I even get a little bit of sick in my mouth thinking about it now. He had these nauseating notions that he was actually helping them and their families out with the money they desperately needed. It made my head swim with disgust because I find this form of endurance 24/7 prostitution more horrific to envisage than when women can quickly get it over with and get the money.

He said it’s ‘not something he would do over here, he just does it over there’. So obviously completely othered the women because they are Thai and didn’t give them full humanity. I think there is also a stereotype of women in the Far East being more submissive, ‘feminine’, than all the nut-busting, strident feminists in the UK. It’s a trope lots of anti-feminist/incel men buy into. They want to experience having complete control and domination of women, which they lament that modern western living does not provide them with - us feminazis are to blame.

I challenged him in person on all of it, this idiot was utterly blind to the grimness of it.

I bring this up to illustrate that I am very much aware that British born white blokes can be vile, I am aware of how scary they can be when they become a mob, all these things. Wanting to focus on the topic of this thread does not make me suddenly lose knowledge of these things.

However, I was raised in British culture, so although I am familiar with these white British blokes with a nostalgia for the days of women’s oppression, I don’t really fully understand what is going on for the men who engage in the harassment, which is the topic of the OP.

I actually want to know and understand what the motivations and beliefs are behind it - when men who come from a culture where women are more oppressed than here, or are raised in a micro version of that culture in the UK, are confronted with women with more autonomy and freedom. I only quite recently discovered that, in part, there is actual racism against white women behind it. I want to know more. I am getting fed up with all the interference from people who believe, or pretend to believe, that my wanting to know it driven by racism.

I haven't seen that thread, @ReformedWaywardTeen but I've seen similar on MN and they always go the same way, with some very righteously offended people insisting that to be white and British is to be inherently racist. I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that while the UK does have some issues with racism, it is nowhere near as racist as most countries in the world. It ties in with the idea that I posited earlier, that there's this anti-british sentiment among (mostly leftish?) people in the UK. So we're not allowed to talk about the British values we appreciate (like education for girls, gay marriage, racial equality laws etc) because that would be to support Britain and that makes you a racist.

It makes it really hard to talk about women's rights and safety because, as we've seen on this thread, we're only allowed to talk about white British male violence.

And outsiders band together to find reasons why the female victims don't matter/aren't really experiencing abuse.

Social workers categorised groomed girls in care as making a "lifestyle choice". That's not so different from the attitude towards the teenagers in my GCSE classes, who were married off at 16 using the "parental consent" loophole in English and Welsh law.

That legislation should have been amended decades ago, but girls, whatever their race, are an acceptable sacrifice to avoid conflict with men.

Beastly, how about all of the racist people who aren’t white?

The most jaw-droppingly racist things I’ve heard in recent years were not said by white people. A friend of Pakistani heritage said appalling things about black men, a colleague from Trinidad made regular comments about Indians, for example. These comments actually upset me and I was shocked at how blithely and matter-of-factory they said them.

@beastlyslumber that's exactly what has happened.

There are people of different races even saying that whilst there is some racism in the UK, they've experienced far worse in other countries.

And normal, intelligent debate is thus derailed by the same old attitude that to be British and white equals being a Tommy Robinson fangirl. It's just tiresome.

I have mates from many different walks of life, my DH is of traveller descent. I don't care who you are or where you or your ancestors are from as long as you are kind, polite and a nice person. There is good and bad in every group. There are rights and there are wrongs too.

I call out that wrong where I see it and I can't abide one sided arguments. But to be shouted down because of my being British and white? Well that in itself snacks of racism and adds nothing to any discussion.

You don’t get white working class people calling Kwasi Kwarteng a coconut, which I consider to be grossly racist

in general that kind of insidious racism is the territory of more liberal ‘enlightened’ types

Reformed, Douglas Murray is one of the people talking quite a bit about anti-white racism. Calvin Robinson is another. I don't think either of them have connected it to violence against white women, but I believe it's a factor.

EndlessTea, yes, same here. Some of the worst racism I've heard has been from young Black males towards young Pakistani males, and vice versa. (I work with young people, so that's why I'm hearing this stuff.)

@beastlyslumber oh it's definitely a factor. Definitely.

Thats interesting. The only time my son was ever called the N word (very different to the past) was by a Pakistani (ethnically, nationality Dutch for the nit-pickers) boy his age. BUT his mum did come over and give him absolute hell for it and apologised to me. So I don't know if that's a good or a bad sign... But the fact is, schools etc in very multi-cultural areas need to be aware of the potential for those small, negative interactions between children to crystalise as they get older and watch out for/come down hard on them when they occur. Because its much easier to fix when they are six than when they are 16 and throwing stones at each other. And for the record Of Course I would punish my son for using racial slurs towards others (and expect the school to if it happened there).

That said there still is racism in Dutch society. (I don't like zwartepiete, I don't have arguments about it because it isn't worth it. But they can't make me like it)

I challenged him in person on all of it, this idiot was utterly blind to the grimness of it
@EndlessTea
I think what's possibly going on here is that the experience of having a 'sex slave' and him being made to feel like a god has become the main focus of his life. It inflates his ego so much that he lets it consume him.
The younger the girl, the more compliant and obedient the greater the buzz and the more his ego inflates.
He tells himself that he is doing a good thing because he cannot tolerate letting go of the rush of power and omnipotence that he receives, his only priority is to continue with this practice, he cannot accept the reality of the situation because he cannot tolerate anything that might stand in the way of him getting what he wants.
Awful horrifying, sociopathic ☹️

What you are saying is probably right. And if you saw him, you would shudder to think it too.

He comes across as perfectly affable, but there is something that unsettles you, that you can’t put your finger on.

there is something that unsettles you, that you can’t put your finger on.
If nothing else it's good to know that your radar is working here!

It seems to me that men are very prone to developing pathological behaviour around sex, I want to describe it as a trap that they can easily fall into but that seems wrong because it's like saying it's not their fault they can't help it. Even so it does seem to become all consuming and compelling very quickly?
I think they tend to reflexively blame women for this because they cannot tolerate being in the wrong, they refuse to accept anything less than being at the top of the hierarchy. Casting all women beneath them is a way of trying to keep themselves towards the top of the hierarchy.

I think they tend to reflexively blame women for this because they cannot tolerate being in the wrong
I suspect also that they can't tolerate the feeling of being out of control. Which is reasonable in a sense - that feeling of not being fully in control of yourself (through addiction, eating disorders etc) is horrible. But the healthy response to that is to work on oneself. The unhealthy (but much easier) response is to identify an "object" as the cause of loss of control and externalise the rage/blame on that. Which is one thing if its an alcoholic blaming demon drink. Its a problem for women if its a man blaming his "pathologic behaviour around sex" on women.

There's also the uncomfortable truth that many women seem to actively encourage that pattern of thinking and I don't know whether it's through naivety or active maliciousness or just do-it-to Julie mentality (Cough Nicola Sturgeon cough). Obviously, I am not blaming women for men's bad behaviour. But women who immediately start making excuses for the most terrible behaviour or get cross with other women having boundaries are... unhelpful. And I find them even more baffling than the men.

There are certainly some cultures we have chosen to import where women are treated worse than in the UK by men which in some areas has put back the rights of women about 100 years to issues women fought over around 1900 such as what they are allowed to wear and much else. Of course we can talk about that and the separate but related issue that large groups of young men without women coming over with them are not always very safe to have around.

I don't know how many generations it takes to assimilate people into liberal British values but probably 2 - 4 is most likely unless the community once they come chooses to be very closed. If it is completely closed and self sufficient I suppose it is then not a problem for the host country

I don’t know if anyone else on this thread is chewing over and thinking about it in the background too as you go about your business.

I think for me, it represents a bit of a change in my position.

I grew up in an area where I did witness a quite a lot of racism and some of it was so banal I didn’t notice it was racist. But I was staunchly anti-racist, long before I recognised sexism and became a feminist. My parents were over-compensators and sort of crossed over into exoticising other cultures and rubbishing our own.

Getting older I’ve been able to increasingly filter out people who have non-empathetic views - snobby, sexist, racist, etc. I also did a lot of self-examination, consciously trying to put myself in other’s shoes, really challenging myself, my own preconceptions and prejudice, etc, taking it on the chin and not being offended when white people, British people, Southerners, Londoners or Europeans are heavily criticised. Thinking - people need to vent their hurt and rage about injustices in the past, I won’t take it personally. Even accepting things I shouldn’t accept, pretending not to see things.

Meanwhile, in parallel, I haven’t been the only one going through this, for example, the police have been accepting the unacceptable and pretending not to see things as part of their own ham-fisted ‘self-examination’. This has had devastating consequences for the victims of so-called ‘grooming gangs’.

What is coming to light for me now, is a lot of people, who haven’t done any self-examination of their own racism, have been calling me or white people or British people or European people racist unfairly. Much of it is imported American politics and it is getting tiresome.

Although I have managed to manoeuvre myself into a life where it would be extremely rare to witness racism, I’m not an idiot and know racism persists, I believe that culturally, in the UK, we have really moved on from when I was a kid and a lot of stuff now ‘called out’ as racist, just isn’t racism. I believe some people just don’t want to examine themselves, or their own sub/culture so they point at others instead.

I am lucky that I live in a place where it would be very rare for me to feel uncomfortable or frightened now, but I am also aware of these ‘no-go’ zones too, which I avoid. I mentioned upthread that I think we sleepwalked into a situation where terrorists who hate our way of live have flourished in the UK and although this seems to have stabilised (I’m sure secret services are maxed out to maintain this stability) I think we should keep our eye on the ball.

There is nothing racist about recognising that some men despise women having autonomy and freedom.

There is nothing racist about exploring the phenomena and anecdotal evidence of women’s experience of men who despise women having autonomy and freedom.

There is nothing racist about wanting to tackle the potential threat of an influx of men who despise women having autonomy and freedom.

There is nothing racist about wanting to understand the mindset of men who despise women having autonomy and freedom.

There is nothing racist about mapping the likelihood of men who despise women having autonomy and freedom, to the levels of endemic sexism and the presence or lack of women’s rights, in the culture within which they were raised.

There is nothing racist about trying to create bespoke solutions.

Apologies about my last post being out of the blue - I had my iPad open for a while and kept going back to it.

If it is completely closed and self sufficient I suppose it is then not a problem for the host country

Well no, it's potentially more of a problem. Because then you have issues like the Batley Grammar school teacher who is still in hiding after Muslim parents threatened to kill him for talking about Mohammed. (Or in France, teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded.)

And you have areas of towns and cities where it's not safe for women to walk, or work. You have areas where people are making their own laws and having nothing to do with the host country. I used to work with Bangladeshi women who were not allowed to leave the few streets of the local area they lived in. Most of them had never even been five minutes on the bus into the city centre. Some of them were born here, some had moved here at ages 10 - 14 as wives. None of them could speak English or read and write.

You shouldn't be able to move to a country and not assimilate at all.

Yes I'd support policies more like in France where some aspects of assimilation are compulsory. I'm happy to pay tax to make sure that all new arrivals get English lessons for example.

Surely policies like that benefit everyone? I don't see that as racist or oppressive.

@Soothsayer1 and @namitynamechange I think a lot of misogyny stems from this ambivalence. On the one hand they feel superior to women and entitled to women’s deference, but on the other hand their desire for women and the fear of women’s rejection, in their minds, gives women the upper hand. It’s a spasmodic emotional state that gives them the rage.