I’ve joined Mumsnet (I normally just read) to write this post as I feel I have relevant experience on this important subject. I have both worked for the benefit of those with Leave to Remain in the UK for a number of years, as well as being sexually assaulted many times by immigrant men (not whilst working, I might add).
When I was working with my cohort of clients, they were about 80-90% male and the majority in the 18-30 year old bracket. At the time, I’d say 70% upwards were from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also from other Middle Eastern and African countries, a few from Pakistan, Vietnam, and the odd one from EU. Literacy and education levels would vary. Of the younger male clients, the literacy and education level was often low, sometimes they would be illiterate in their own language. Having had limited schooling and work experience, many from that age group and background would find it difficult to attend the scheme on time and pay attention for the day long duration. They would have a lot of needs with regards to bureaucracy, paying bills, rent, claiming benefits, the health system, and generally navigating the way of life in the UK. Some clearly had mental health problems, understandably, due to the trauma and upheaval they had faced. However, coming from a macho culture, they were not able to manage their mental health problems very well and would lash out, rarely physically, but verbally and by being difficult in their behaviour.
First time working with a group of new clients I would be asked if I was married or had children and other personal questions, there’d be suggestive comments etc. As a young woman, a lot of the men would be disrespectful and felt in some way affronted that a young woman was helping them, as though this was demeaning to them. I often felt like I had to tip-toe around a lot of egos, only to be treated with disdain. Older women usually fared better and were seen more as mother figures. Once they got to know me a bit, many would be more respectful. Some were respectful and grateful from the get-go, but sexist treatment was more common than not. Any conversation of men’s and women’s roles would revert to sexist stereotypes, women like housework and are more suited to it etc. Even from the respectful men, it would be fair to say that for most their views on women would be conservative and outdated by Western standards. I didn’t feel supported by my other colleagues that weren’t young women. In fact, I remember an older female colleague questioning my choice of wearing silky combat trousers (yes, full-length trousers) because the clientele were very ‘touchy feely’ in her words, and so she didn’t think what I was wearing was appropriate. It felt like the blame was put on me for any unwanted attention or disrespectful treatment I might get.
Some of the younger men were quite obsessed with Western women. One of the married men asked me for advice on how he could pick up women, and said that he’d been approaching women in the park. I told him that women aren’t just available to him and usually want to get to know you first, and in any case, wasn’t he married?! He later came back to me and told me he’d found a woman ‘but she was fat’. Another older female colleague overheard this conversation and told me it was inappropriate. Well, yes, I quite agree, but it wasn’t me initiating it, and it felt I was being blamed again for the behaviour of these males by older female colleagues.
Another man spoke to a male worker about how he could cure his VD after seeing a prostitute. When other young women were visiting the building there’d be a lot of running around and gawping. One much older man asked me for a kiss when he was alone with me. The younger women working there, including myself, were often pestered by these men to date them, but that said, nothing criminal of a sexual nature ever happened. A few were found driving without a licence, and anything criminal was usually due to this kind of thing, ignoring rules rather than anything violent.
I was working with this client group because they were struggling to find work. The degree of success they went on to have in finding work was varied, but what I would say was that the expectations set by the authority of what they could achieve in such a short time was completely unrealistic. Of the men who could find work, they would often go on to work in jobs where they don’t leave their own community – taxi driving and working in or starting ethnic shops were popular choices. This means the men are employed, but ghettoised and not fully integrated. I support the idea of genuine case immigrants (refugees etc) coming to the UK and see it as a moral responsibility of any country that can to accommodate this. However, due to the amount of support required in so many areas of life, numbers need to be limited, so that proper provision is in place for the integration of these men into society.
Outside of work, I have been sexually assaulted and harassed more times than I care to remember. I have been assaulted by both white British men and immigrant men, and the assaults have taken different forms. For the most part, white British men have been drunk, or in groups and with that mob mentality trying to show off to their mates. Things like being groped in a nightclub, being harassed on the street, flashed at. With immigrant men, I have been groped at the swimming baths; groped on the street; trapped in a taxi cab with the driver asking me sexual questions not letting me out and then when he did trying to get a ‘hug’; violently sexually attacked by a man on the street who was later caught for multiple sexual offences and sent to prison; a man masturbating on a public park bench; followed on a few occasions; also lots of low level pestering in public places, workmen in my own home feeling like they can hit on me because I live alone etc. The only things I reported to the police were the violent sex attack by the immigrant man, and the flasher who was white British, so for the poster suggesting that women are more likely to report an immigrant man (?!), a) I reported both an immigrant man and a white British man, and b) I think we all know that women are subjected to all sorts of low level harassment and groping, but frankly how time consuming would it be to report all of this, with low likelihood of a conviction in any case. A lot of the behaviour is not even criminal, just anti-social or an intimidating display of male superior status – for example, thinking they have the right to push in front of a woman in queues at the supermarket, or just gawping at you and undressing you with their eyes or calling things out at you on the street. Such things can’t be prosecuted, but are a drip drip drip of misogyny that grinds you down and makes you want to retreat from public space.
As another poster mentioned, I’ve learned to have resting bitch face with immigrant men who I don’t know. I don’t like this, as it means I am having to adapt my personality and way of life. I enjoy chatting to people in general, and would do this at the gym I used to go to, it was a nice social place for me. I feel I can’t do this at the gym I use now as every time I have done so much as say hello or smile at a familiar face, I have been followed around the gym, stood over in the women’s toilets, rubbed up against or followed home to my door by these immigrant men. They take it as a come on rather than an everyday friendly exchange, so it feels daily life is becoming more segregated by sex, and as someone who has always had a lot a male friends and more male-typical hobbies and interests, I find this limiting and difficult.
In the UK I lived in an area with a large amount of Iraqi immigrants. Whilst I was never attacked in this area, the streets were full of men rather than women and I would be gawped at and commented on as I walked by, making it unpleasant and intimidating to go about my daily business. I currently live in a European country where large areas of the city are inhabited by North African and Turkish men. On the streets in these areas there are very few women, particularly later in the day. It feels there is no integration whatsoever. I walk through these areas and I am stared at, as though a woman on her own shouldn’t be there, or perhaps that I’m seen as fair game because I am. I have also been spat on in one of these areas by a group of teenage boys, simply for riding through on a bicycle. I was told ‘this is the ghetto’. I feel that when I go out into any of these areas I have to think carefully about what I’m going to wear, so as to attract as little attention as possible. I also don’t go to the swimming baths since that first time I went and was groped, so my daily activities are being limited due to the fact that I am a woman living among immigrant men, which is not acceptable to me at all. There were a series of sex attacks and rapes in a local park by immigrant men that were ongoing, with the police turning a blind eye, until recently when a woman who had a lucky escape started a petition for greater safety measures being put in place.
I’m sick to death of, when speaking about the times I have been sexually assaulted, having to give some sort of caveat that ‘I’m not saying all immigrant men are like this’. It’s bad enough that women already feel speaking of sexual assaults is taboo because it makes people uncomfortable. It’s this taboo that means we carry the burden with us, an extra burden to the sex attack itself. Having to grovel when we dare to talk about our sexual assaults lest we appear racist as well is just another way of silencing women about male violence.
When my sexual assault case made the local papers, the BNP had an article about it on their website. I deeply resent either the left or right using women’s sexual assaults as a political football. This is a women’s rights issue, and women should have the right to talk about this without either side using it for political manipulation or gain. I’m sure it makes people who don’t have to live with the ongoing risk of sexual assault every time they step out their front door feel very warm and fuzzy and self-righteous for shutting down any talk of immigrant sex attacks against women, but frankly your egos shouldn’t figure into this. Similarly, I was disgusted with the BNP trying to use my misfortune for their own agenda. Neither side actually cares about the feelings of female sex attack victims, it seems.
I agree that we need reliable data, but as I’ve already mentioned, the majority of assaults go unreported – and as for the person suggesting that women may be more likely to report a sex crime committed by an immigrant man than a white man, well, where’s YOUR data for that?! The data is not being collected on race and sex crimes for fear of what it might reveal, as Hirsi Ali points out in her excellent book. We’ve seen the increase in far right party support across Europe in the past few years due to the other parties’ neglect of the issue of mass immigration. If you want the growth of a far right movement in the UK, carry on neglecting this issue and silencing women.
It’s very clear to me that the majority of victims of this male antisocial and sometimes criminal behaviour are working class women, due to the neighbourhoods where immigrants tend to settle. This is why nobody cares, and people are accused of ‘just being racist’ for speaking up about it. Working class women (not just white working class women, I might add) and girls are shown time and time again to be seen as the lowest of the low in our society, and I’m sick of it.
Yes, it’s wrong to tar all of these men with the same brush, and I’d feel bad for those men I’ve known who have been respectful if they were discriminated against. A lot of these men are very vulnerable and some have been through hell. But I’ll be damned if my way of life as a woman is going to become limited due to the actions of those misogynistic men who see me as a worthless object. Wishy-washy, idealistic and inconsistent ideas of a utopian multicultural society with open borders come from those who don’t have to deal with the consequences. The adults in the room needed to start having this discussion a long time ago, before so many women were made victims. It’s so incredibly obvious that if you import hundreds of thousands of men from cultures where women are second class citizens into Western European countries then that’s going to have a detrimental impact on the women these men interact with. Working with these men definitely ground down my confidence, especially as I felt so unsupported by many of my colleagues and society in general, as this subject is taboo. I constantly felt torn that whilst I do support those in need coming to the UK and believe integration (as well as keeping your own culture) is possible, I was being treated badly by a lot of misogynistic men and could see that they would not integrate and nobody would care about the detrimental impact this has on women.
I might also add that in brushing misogynistic immigrant men’s attitudes under the carpet, we are also doing nothing to help women living within those communities. I remember one of the women I worked with who was the victim of domestic violence and one of the other female members of staff trying to get her some support. Of course, this is a crime perpetrated by men of all cultures, but it does nothing to help women to ignore the specifics of how abuse of women happens in different cultures and how it is often excused. I also had women who were now having to find work after their husbands had run off and committed bigamy, for example, which was an accepted practice in the culture these women were from. The sexual assaults I dealt with outside of work had mental health impacts, as well as limiting my activities in terms of how I dress, where I feel I can go safely and the activities I feel safe doing. We should be working to improve the lives of all women rather than letting the lives of British women degenerate so that we have to dress modestly, not be out on the street unaccompanied, only go to female only swim sessions and never make eye contact with a man lest we are seen as encouraging unwanted attention. Fuck that. Abusive men thrive on people’s politeness and reluctance to talk frankly about this issue,