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

On an entirely separate note and something that's just occurred to me, imagine how difficult it is to change men who believe that women should be covered or else they are whores. They've got it all going for them, haven't they? In extreme cases they get to control 'their' women, in terms of what they're allowed to do, who they're allowed to see, what they're allowed to wear etc and meanwhile harass and assault women who don't cover up with no conscience whatsoever, because it's the woman's fault for being a 'whore', she's asking for it etc. They get to justify this to themselves via religion (some would argue through a corrupted interpretation). They would need a compelling reason to change, particularly men who are lower on the social ladder, who feel downtrodden and cannot exert control over other men. They can't massage their egos that way, so women must be their victims, women both within and outside of their communities.

This is so true - the lack of harassment. Everyone is so busy and if you see a group of young men, they are definitely doing something purposeful, I’ve never felt unsafe. I actually get the strong feeling the men (as well as the women) are all afraid of harassment themselves.

On the other hand, religions seeking converts cause a nuisance don’t they? It’s intimidating these blokes aggressively trying to save our souls over a PA in high streets. And your heart sinks if you get a knock at the door and someone wants to leave a copy of Watchtower with you. I think you are onto something about how the fact that the Hasidic Jews concern themselves with their own conduct and don’t really consider the outside world, means they are a completely different consideration.

So I feel that any measures taken to push back against the regression of women and girls’ rights in the UK, needs to factor in the freedoms of these communities.

However, if any sect of any religion or culture popped up and women (or any sub group, for that matter) started routinely walking about completely covered up (so they look like non-persons), I think it would be a step too far. To me, it is like the way the GRA was suddenly pushed through and I was immediately uncomfortable about people being about to lie on their birth certificates and all the pieces in the press were basically saying “this is the way things are now” and being sort of positive about it. It was obviously a step too far in being accommodating and tolerant and was going to make society worse.

Men also leave.

I'm fairly familiar with the Hasidic Jewish community.

There's a lot of nuance here about attitudes to women and general integration into UK society. But tbh I don't think it's that relevant to the thread for the simple reason, as a PP pointed out, that Hasidic men do not make a habit of harassing non-Jewish women who wander into 'their' territory. Plus, in practice they live in 3-4 small pockets of the entire country so are not very widespread.

Is anyone watching GMB this morning?

They've just shown a journalist who has a program on Channel 4 at 10pm Monday. She's showing sexual harassment in two UK cities at night (London and Liverpool).

They showed a clip where she was mock stumbling down a road, near bars pretending to be drunk and alone.

She sits down on one of those plastic barrier things and within a few minutes she is accousted by a male who clearly grabs her chest. He is with a group of other men who surround her.

They then showed another clip where one male had followed her all the way to her hotel, into the hotel and pushed past into her room. So confident is he that he takes his shoes off and sits on the bed. At that point she tells him she's actually sober and why has he done this.

She said on GMB his attitude was he did nothing wrong, they came in together. She was firm that she told him not to follow her.

He was clearly an Asian male. So was the other group.

I'm interested to watch the program on Monday and would hope if the majority of predatory behaviour captured is from this group it would begin a discussion. However, I would imagine someone will say it's deliberately shown mostly one group as an excuse because of course we aren't allowed to flag it.

I did like as well that she was clear that her program isn't an attack of women going out for a drink, or to preach that women need to do everything to keep safe. She said to her, it's more the case of why are men behaving like this on a night out? Why is it always our problem and we must not have more than a sip of wine and always be in at least pairs, have our phone charged, taxi money etc. Why can't men just bloody behave?

I agree too. Also, the problem with harassment of working class girls (for sex) is not new. My DH was a youth worker in a northern town in the 70s and remembers working class parents constantly complaining of harassment of their daughters by various non-ethnic groups. He - and everyone at the time - dismissed these complaints as rabid racism. He now knows better and is deeply saddened that he did not listen at the time.

They can't massage their egos that way, so women must be their victims, women both within and outside of their communities
I agree, it perfectly allows them to have their cake and eat it, no wonder they will not relinquish

Why can't men just bloody behave?
Because they don't want to
because they are bigger than us and we can't make them

There is an element in many Muslim communities where the age of covering has gone down, not because the theology has changed, but because there is a sense that this is part of their cultural identity. And in my experience, when you try and ban things that represent cultural identity you often end up having the opposite effect. So a better approach is often to be quite neutral about them.

I'd also point out that in Islam, men also have significant restrictions - including clothing and behavior. I suspect the difference with the Hasid community is that in many ways, they are actually set to remain a kind of enclave, and an orthodox approach to Jewish observances are arguably almost designed to create that kind of situation. Similarly groups like Mennonites - they have very deliberately chosen to create a community that is not integrated. That makes them, in some ways, easier to manage for the larger population.

But how can a fully covered six year old veiled girl be about ‚Cultureal identity‘ when it is basically a new phenomenon in the communities?

It doesn‘t make sense. And it is also quite cynical to be ‚neutral‘ about some trend that harms a child. (The veil restricts a girl on many levels.)
And why not be neutral about FGM then, when the main objective is not to radicalize a Community by pushing back?

I think re rules for men - often when people uproot/are uprooted into a new place they take on some off the culture of the new place and keep other traditions quite strongly. What this often seems to mean in practice is boys/men getting a lot more freedom - maybe drinking, wearing western clothes, having extramarital sex; but girls/women are expected to remain within quite strict rules. So young men end up with a lot less social constraint. You see it happen the other way round too - Western men going to other countries and opining on how much more feminine/more respectful etc women are but completely missing the point that men there are expected to have more responsibilities/specific constraints on their behaviour. (Though on balance I am happier personally with the UK system). So you get a lads on holiday dynamic.

*Not all men

Yeah, I'm not really 'neutral' on little girls being veiled and covered. If an adult woman chooses it for herself, that's one thing - it can be debated how we work with that in settings like education and healthcare where we really need to see people's faces. But children - no, never. I do think it should be banned for little girls.

I’m Jewish and in our defence we don’t try and convert - you either is or you ain’t! 😉

I know Hasidic communities have their problems and it can be hard to leave - however, under Jewish “law” a woman can get an abortion and is under no obligation to even tell her husband, never mind seek approval.

I do think it should be banned for little girls.

but from a purely practical perspective this will lead to little girls missing out on education if their parents choose to homeschool rather than comply with the ban

On a technicality - you can convert 😉
But yes, it's something you have to battle to do rather than the community actively trying to convert you.

I mean, that raises the question, how essy it should be made for parents to homeschool. In some EU countries there are laws prescribing kids need to attend at least the Last year of preschool. This was introduced with an eye on nonnative speakers, but the rule applies for all kids alike.

I am sure there are cases, where Homeschooling is warranted, but this should be a rare exception for special circumstances, not something parents should be free to choose.

Als it is my basic point about numbers again. We have 200,000 jews of all kinds in the UK but 3.9m muslims so vastly vastly more muslims. it is the large numbers that can be an issue for the host population as that has a bigger impact on the people already there. Eg in World war 2 the uk brought in 10,000 jewish children in the Kindertransport programme. The difficulty today is sheer weight of numbers - 1m immigration a year (504k net immigration), 120,000 asylum seekers.

I was amazed to learn recently that Canada has 38m people in total. For some reason I thought it was much larger in terms of population. The UK has about 70m. Canada is hugely bigger than the UK in terms of land mass.

The example above of the sober lady pretending to be drunk and then someone from a different culture even goes with her into her bed room is pretty good illustration of the issue with some (but of course by no means all) people from cultures who treat women differently (i.e. worse).

On head coverings for girls (or boys for that matter) I would not stop that happening and I am glad they are permitted in many schools, but I would certainly hope those girls could be exposed to some Western values of freedom. I know these are very difficult issues when we also mostly believe in religious freedom. New arrivals should be helped to learn what is acceptable and what is not here for a start - even if it very basic information that shows how if they do Z X the man might go prison and be expelled from the UK. They not care less if girls are harmed in the UK but if it means the man goes to jail and has to leave the UK they might take a bit more notice.

See we home educated for several months when the bullying I mentioned upthread left DD scared to be in a school of any description.

You would think with the total lack of support from the school and the basic attitude of "don't like it then leave" of the head, the LEA would've backed us.

Except they didn't. They were an utter nuisance. Within 48 hours of us notifying school we were withdrawing our DCs, we had some utter cow on the phone demanding lesson plans and educational plans and timescales of when we would return to traditional school. They wanted to know what groups we would sign up for to promote social skills, they wanted explanations of why we were giving up their places. Had we tried to speak to school. It was just a constant barrage of talking at me. Then the killer of "if WE don't think you are doing enough, we will move to get a court order to fine for non-attendance and we will find a school place and they will have to attend".

They didn't get that actually, I didn't want to home educate, but their shit school has damaged her mental health so much, the idea of school made her vomit. She would cry in her sleep and woke up screaming many nights.

There was no understanding at all.

Does it surprise me that other communities may not get the third degree? No, of course not.

But it's another way authority promotes us and them and let's down children.

Isn't homeschooling regulated? If you're not sending your daughters to school (but you are sending your sons) wouldn't this trigger a visit from Ofsted or other supervisory bodies? Because it's illegal not to educate your children?

Am I being completely naive? Are we just letting little girls down completely?

Home schooling is regulated, although my information isn’t up to date

my mother was a social worker and was responsible for visiting homeschooled children to make sure all was well at one point in her career

she was very wary of some of the motivations for homeschooling she saw, and related to me later that she had worried about the children of first generation immigrants being homeschooled. It was a long time ago, and we didn’t talk about it in detail. But my mum is a perceptive woman, and if it rang alarm bells with her then it does with me

I think the implication was she could be as worried as she liked, but it was bloody hard to get anything done unless the shit was really hitting the fan

It’s interesting where this thread is going, I have been thinking along the same lines too today.

The way I see it, is that within any culture, certain things are just taken for granted as normal and you’d seem a bit nuts to want it written into law. It’s just an understanding. I don’t know the background, but I heard that in Germany it is illegal to name a child something other than a proper name. Perhaps there was a trend at one point, for people giving their kids stupid, humiliating names, and legislation was brought in to stop it, I don’t know, but we don’t have an equivalent law here.

We are reluctant to bring in laws to curb freedoms, generally, for good reasons, so we default to being tolerant, but I bet if people started naming their kids as numbers, or ‘thing’, ‘it’ or ‘idiot’ - dehumanising and humiliating names, then I am sure we’d bring in a similar law to Germany to stop it.

In the topic of this thread, the argument seems to go:

a - what can we do to stop men from other cultures harassing western UK women?

b - let’s not make this solely about them harassing western UK women, women within their own cultures suffer too, and we must think about them too.

c - but surely people should be free to practice different ways of life, as long as they are insular and don’t inflict any negativity outside their enclave.

d - well we can’t just abandon the women and girls to suffer culturally sanctioned abuse - FGM, child marriage, so-called ‘honour’ crimes, etc on British soil, just because their community doesn’t kick up much dust on the outside.

So the dilemma is - how much intervention? How much interference? Do we need new laws?

I think we need to do some basic spelling out of what is and what is not acceptable in the UK and enforce it. For example, all children are expected to go to school full time until they are sixteen. All children must wear clothes which do not restrict their physical activity or put them at a disadvantage in sports. It shouldn’t need to be said but it does.

We should also strongly enforce the laws we have and not hold back ‘because it’s their culture’, for example, a poster upthread said they knew of women who had been brought here as child brides from Bangladesh and could speak no English. Maybe their husbands should be prosecuted child sex abuse and all the relatives and facilitators who arranged it should be prosecuted for child trafficking.

Maybe we should spell out some things, equivalent to Germany’s naming law, that you are not to insist a family member wears a costume to dehumanise themselves when they go out in public. Perhaps a woman walking out and about fully covered, could be viewed as a victim of domestic violence and the family members who insist upon a woman doing it are prosecuted.

Basically, and I think this would go part of a way towards getting the message out there that you can’t disrespect women and girls here.

s’cuse the really excessive typos

Because when you take people out of one environment, the meaning of an activity can change.

What was previously mainly a religious practice, that wasn't unusual, sudden;y becomes something that differentiates you from the people around you, and becomes a symbol of a difference. People start to think about it in a different way.

You can see similar kinds of phenomena in other displaced cultural groups in places like the US, where practices that were more low-key in the home country can actually become more intense in the expat community.

It's not really about your opinion being neutral, it's about what the law should or should not try and control in the behaviour of individuals and families.

Banning wearing a headscarf or hair covering is pretty invasive.

Maybe there is some way, other than banning, to stop parents covering their daughters hair?

In my street, I am friendly with three Muslim families, two of Pakistani heritage and one where the mother is of Eastern European Heritage and a convert and the father is Middle Eastern.

Of those families, the families of Pakistani heritage are of second generation (apart from the grandparent) and the women don’t really bother with a headscarf, just wearing a long, lightweight, rectangular scarf, and it seems if they want to look glam, they sometimes loosely wrap that over the back of their heads.

The family from the mix of Eastern European/Middle Eastern heritage are first generation, and they had their daughters covered with a pretty big headscarf, covering the shoulders and chest, pinned under the chin, from a very early age. I did a bit of a double-take at first, and I do think it is a socially negative thing to set children apart like that. But I wonder if it might be the zeal of the convert thing?

i suppose I am refuting this idea that existing resident Muslims are reacting to a pushback and are wanting to be more visible. Perhaps what is happening instead is that existing Muslim families are fairly stable and it is newer first generation influxes who are bringing in these cultural practices with them?

I feel it is coming from a completely different place than the young adult, second or third generation women, who are choosing to cover their faces to signify their extremism.

IMO, the family who put headscarves on their young daughters, would probably respond really well to a friendly word from some longer established Muslims, who could say ‘your lives will be easier, better here if you do XYZ’. I think this family are probably completely unaware of the fact that a lot of people find it off-putting, and how they are limited in their friendship pool by it.

One thing which is a massive deal, influencing the men to harass women who have the temerity to leave the house, un-chaperoned, uncovered, maybe even wearing clothes that are a bit sexually provocative, maybe even engaging in premarital sexual activity - oh my goodness! The brazen hussies! Is all the pornography these men consume. Also the strip joints and the brothels, etc, that they visit at first opportunity, which completely prejudices their view of western/westernised women.

Women and girls are starkly either Madonnas or whores. No middle ground.

Men who are brought up in these places where women barely leave the house and are covered from head to toe when they do, still consume huge amounts of pornography made in the west. I am sure any woman who has travelled in the ME will have stories of men saying words to the effect of how they love the women in the country where they are from, they make the best porn, or whatever.

How do you get these men to see that a twelve year old girl on her way to school is not one of these stereotyped, hyper sexual, ‘dirty’ women, who are overjoyed having anything and everything a man could fantasise about done to her?