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

I think Malala Yousufazai has a fund which works in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and others to get girls access to education

Interesting conversation, can we keep to the tradition of not expending energy on ploppers... ?

Ultimately without data I think we are going to talk in circles. I'll check out that book at some point.

@RiveDroite yes, that's right

@lifeturnsonadime
I think the misogyny within the ranks of the police force goes a bit further than tolerance. It is active.

Oh yes, sorry I didn't mean to understate it. But if the police themselves are like that then the signal sent will be this is OK. And while some men would never be predatory under any circumstances, and some probably also would some will be as bad as they can get away with. Thats just human nature. Combine a toxic/misogynistic policing culture with young men who are able to give themselves moral permission to behave badly towards an out group, with a wider society that views working class girls as expendable and it's only going to get worse. Avoiding the subject to avoid accusations of misandry/racism/anti-police sentiments blah blah is wrong.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to look up Dyncorp/other UN scandals etc this is nothing new (and they were Canadian). But they acted that way because they were allowed to.

I don’t really understand how anyone could argue against this, women as a whole are treated appallingly by men in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Albania etc when men come to the UK from those countries they aren’t going to be magically transformed into feminists as soon as they step foot onto British soil. They are going to continue their sexist beliefs and behaviours in this country (or any country they live in) because it’s what they have been brought up to believe is right and acceptable.

In western society women in general have more freedoms than in patriarchal societies, in terms of where we go, how we dress, our behaviour etc., which these types of men resent and interpret as meaning we are not only responsible for, but are “asking” for violence and harassment.

I think anyone putting this down to men being in groups without families is very naive and clearly has not spent a lot of time with women from patriarchal cultures, because these behaviours and attitudes are prevalent amongst men with their entire families in the UK and even men who are born and raised in the UK. They are also perpetuated by women unfortunately, due to social conditioning, religion, culture and internalised sexism.

I grew up and live in a very multicultural area of the UK and have friends from many cultural backgrounds. Sexism and patriarchal beliefs/cultures do not die out easily, they are passed down from generation to generation until someone pushes back and breaks the cycle. I have close friends who have been born and raised in the UK their entire lives whose parents and family control almost every aspect of their lives (while their brothers are allowed almost unlimited freedoms). I have friends whose parents refused to allow them to attend university, stay out after 10pm despite them being grown women, wear certain clothing, move out from the family home (unless they are married), date or choose their own partner, who are pressured or forced into marriages to abusive men and their controlling abusive families. This is not a race issue, it’s a cultural one, this happens within white communities as well (travellers, being one example).

Ditto

This.

namitynamechange Moral permission is a great way to put it, and I'll be saving that.

Here on FWR, we all know about rape myths, and how they are used by juries, and by victims' family members to put the blame on the victim instead of the rapist. I tend to presume that rapists of all races also use any rape myths they've grown up with, in order to excuse themselves.

I have close friends who have been born and raised in the UK their entire lives whose parents and family control almost every aspect of their lives (while their brothers are allowed almost unlimited freedoms). I have friends whose parents refused to allow them to attend university, stay out after 10pm despite them being grown women, wear certain clothing, move out from the family home (unless they are married), date or choose their own partner, who are pressured or forced into marriages to abusive men and their controlling abusive families. This is not a race issue, it’s a cultural one, this happens within white communities as well (travellers, being one example).

As a first generation immigrant, I often find the notion that people born and raised in the UK are far more liberal quite misguided. My experience is the absolute opposite. I find those from my country who are born here often incredibly old-fashioned and preserved in aspic. Meanwhile, back in the homeland, women are going to university, becoming doctors and engineers, and choosing their own partners.

Successive UK governments have been full of rhetoric, but little on substance and meaningful actions.

There should be mandatory sessions on the laws and cultural norms of British society for anyone who moves here.

There absolutely must be a tough stance on men who come to the UK and if they are found to be engaging in any kind of sexual harassment or crime, they should be sent back to their native countries. There are enough home grown sex pests - women shouldn't have to deal with more.
The threat of being kicked out of the UK (and one that is properly enforced and not just mere words) is the only thing that works. Such men don't change their behaviour unless the consequences are severe enough. They can continue to have contemptible attitudes towards women as long as they keep their hands to themselves and their mouths shut.

Direct, no-nonsense public messaging is needed, especially in areas where these problems are severe. It's infuriating that these problems have been allowed to fester and get out of control because certain types of people love to throw words like 'racist' around like confetti so they can feel good about themselves.

While I don’t disagree that some cultures treat women worse than others, the problem with these claims about Rotherham is that the collective failure to respond to the gangs was rooted far more in misogyny than racism. The fear of being labelled racist was just an excuse for an inexcusable failure.

The police and council services labelled the vulnerable girls as “bad girls” and victim-blamed them. It was widely known to be going on, there was report after report, but no-one cared enough to do anything about it. There were some girls from middle class homes but they were predominantly working class and some had been in care - they were just seen as valueless and expendable from both sides.

The police claim of fearing to appear racist doesn’t stand up to scrutiny - it doesn’t stop the police stopping and searching unrepresentative numbers of men of colour does it? It doesn’t stop the disproportionate numbers of men of colour who die in police custody.

So as much as you could blame the misogyny of the perpetrators for exploiting the girls, misogyny was also responsible for the failure to act. No-one gave enough of a shit about the girls to think they were worth saving.

I suspect that one of the reasons this happens is that in a given culture, there are a set of widely held beliefs, and also other cultural norms and standards that all work to keep people in line, in terms of behaviours. The tendency for humans to want to do certain kinds of bad things - greed, lust, anger - is pretty much universal, but how the society manages those things can differ.

When you take a person out of the culture and plop them in another, there can be a sort of a mismatch. The scaffolding that matches the up-bringing and cultural beliefs is no longer there. The scaffolding that exists in the new culture is more suited to support people with a different kind of up-bringing and a different belief system.

It's a difficult problem to address because changing these often subliminal thought and behaviour patterns, which develop over a lifetime, is not simple, and it's arguable if it can ever be complete. Plus - people don't always want to change in that way.

Came to post pretty much what Mirabai has just said. The police and social workers were completely aware of the exploitation of young women by gangs. But in their mind they were just wh tr and deserved what they got. Moreover the state in failing to fund proper safe accommodation for vulnerable young women were allowing them to be returned time after time to what are called unregistered accommodation (there has just been a Parliamentary Committee meeting on this and it also impacts on DV survivors) which just means the young women are basically being put back into a circle of abuse.

If not only social services but the police actually thought the young women being abuse where "worthy" of their time they could have stopped the cycle. And as happened in Yorkshire some years ago, and Wales, the police have often been the procurers of vulnerable young people not just to gangs but groups of upper class men.

The police played the racism charge to cover up not just their failure but their collusion.

And anybody who has read about how young girls are brutally exploited by the men who run county lines will know that this certainly has nothing to do with men bought up in other cultures. The men exploiting women in country lines are all British.

The common factor is men on the margins exploiting and abusing vulnerable young women to carve out a place for themselves.

I am not saying this to excuse the men, because women living on the margins of society dont behave in this way.

And it may well be that the idea of lessons in British culture will just mean the same groups of men just wont be so overt. They will assimilate and being able to behave in a very British two faced way.

Has the police and social services done their job the women who were exploited would have been saved much earlier.

But as has been said, with the police being as misogynistic and exploitative of vulnerable women, it isn't sadly a surprise that so little was done. And continues not to be done.

For a minute I thought I had been transferred to a comments thread on the Daily Mail, although of course everyone is trying to be polite.

I've worked, mostly supporting migrant women for probably 20 years or more, and with most groups with the exception of Albanians, so I would guess I have a very good insight into migrant communities in the UK.

Some random points I would make. Migrants are real men, real women, real people they are not a homogeneous group who all behave in the same way. There are good and bad in all communities as there are in the white British community.

I see many people whose background is from what I would call the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, etc). These are, almost exclusively, EU citizens who have refugee status in a European country and came to the UK under the previous right to work rules. Their background, often from a very young age, is Western and liberal. Many of these women are strong, independent and with a good education. However, they find their qualifications are not recognised here so inevitably they work as cleaners or in the care industry.

Most migrants are not from poor families 'back home'. Many are well educated but are frustrated at being excluded from decent employment.

Those who are going through the asylum process cannot work or claim benefits apart from a very basic subsistence level. They are often housed in relatively large groups in poor accommodation, or in hotels so end up becoming a visible presence on the streets as they have nowhere else to go. They are unable to integrate as they don't have access to settled communities here. It would be helpful if they could work, which would encourage integration.

The issue of what is generally referred to as grooming is, I would say, very different and specific. I'm not aware of the statistics but I would hope now there is a greater awareness in the population and those supporting young women are more aware, that this will be in decline. In the not too distant past I could identify hostels for young women easily by the fact that there were always big flash cars and seedy looking men outside. This doesn't seem to be the case now.

There's plenty more I could write, but I'll leave it at that. The key point I'm making is that all migrants are individuals and not a homogeneous group where all men are mysoginists and all women are passive and submissive.

Grey nowhere on this thread has anyone said any of that. The concern is about many thousands of young men arriving and changing the demographics of the area they are housed. Thousands of young men is not 'a community'. Thousands of young men who have been brought up in a society that does not value women can cause problems for women in their new country.

There's plenty more I could write, but I'll leave it at that. The key point I'm making is that all migrants are individuals and not a homogeneous group where all men are mysoginists and all women are passive and submissive.

I don't think anyone has said they are.

I think my point is that men and men who offend sexually are not one homogeneous group either.

It seems to me that it is seen as acceptable to look at the reasons that a male from the Uk is a sex offender and holds misogynistic views against women, we look at the socio economic background, whether there was a father figure present or child abuse, for example. But the minute the male is a migrant and we start looking at the cultural reasons and possibly even the difference in the nature of the offence then this is perceived , by some, as racist.

Particularly when it comes to large scales offences such as the ones that took place in Cologne in 2015/16. No one seemed to dare to really investigate the causes of that because it was apparent that the perpetrators were recent migrants and there were fears of xenophobic reactions. Closer to home there were obviously similar issues in Rotherham.

I think it is this reluctance to name an issue, even where it arises, that concerns me. I certainly did experience a collective nature to the way that Algerians immigrant males treated me as a young woman in Paris which was different from the treatment I experienced from males from other backgrounds which I believe is due to cultural attitudes to women. There are two other women on here who have had similar experiences (not in the UK admittedly but in countries where these were migrant men) and have posted about it upthread.

It is not racist to discuss these issues. It is harmful, in my opinion , to ignore them. We can't protect women and girls if we can't discuss the reasons behind offences against us, even if those reasons don't make some people feel very comfortable.

Another ex-Bxl here. Each and every one of my expat friends was sexually assaulted in the street - we look back in horror and incredulity that by pure luck none of us were raped.

as I said on a deleted thread, we took to going to bars with an entry fee as the final straw for me was having someone masturbate over me IN a bar just off Blvd Anspach.

I have been baffled by the reaction of some (third Wave) feminists on this issue. After decades of (succssfully) pushing for changes in language, discourse and education, basically the socialization of males, so that our males become less sexist, they now turn around and act as if socialization were totally irrelevant…

When I was teaching BTEC the students had to do a research project, one student was looking at the dowry system and how people who moved from the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s and 1970s had changed their values in regards to arranging a marriage. She concluded that in the UK your education is your dowry, at least for the people she canvassed.

It was a very interesting read, particularly coming from a 17 year old.

Hmm. Do we generally look at 'the reasons' why any man is a sex offender or holds misogynistic views?

Do we not just usually punish him within the bounds of the law for his behaviour, where criminal, whatever his background, ethnicity or views?

I don't care what the 'reasons' are. There are no valid 'reasons'. Pretending that race or culture = a direct line to criminality is racist and not helpful. To me it just seems to be the other side of the same coin, of those who claim that the men can't help it because they are just brought up that way (sympathetically to the men) to those who claim that the men can't help it because they are brought up that way (attacking men from those cultures). Both seem to suffer from the poverty of low expectations, both are racist; neither solves the problem.

The solution is not to label whole cultures as inferior or as infiltrating our perfect British culture. The solution is to have a culture like that the poster from the Netherlands described above, which is a culture of high expectations for everyone, men and women, whatever their culture, which tells everyone that whatever their culture or sex, women in our society have rights and sexual harrassment, assault, rape etc are illegal and will be punished to the full extent of the law. And those punishments then need to be rigorously carried out against any man, whatever his ethnicity, who oversteps that line and breaks the law. No ifs, no buts.

The problem in this country is that we don't hold that line and rape is virtually decriminalised. Whatever the perpetrator's ethnicity or background. I want the law to work the same whatever the ethnicity of the perpetrator. Or the ethnicity of the victim.

And an over-focus on the ethnicity of the perpetrator rather than on catching him and locking him up, are helping no-one. I don't want threads on how certain cultures are 'bad'. How does this help me? Or anyone? I want threads on how all men who commit sexual crimes are caught and locked up. No excuse, no misdirection, no turning a blind eye because they're black, white, rich, poor, British, non-British, whatever.

That was in response to @MangyInseam and @lifeturnsonadime

I haven’t read the whole thread, but it’s refreshing to see this subject being openly discussed. I am from India and while India has a lot of positives, society and attitudes are quite patriarchal and misogynistic generally (of course there are exceptions but I am talking as a whole)

. It is a real worry for me and as the mother of young daughters, there is no question in my mind that the city where I live in the UK is far safer for them than Delhi where I am from. I don’t think it is racist to say that.

with that said, there are some wonderful organisations such as Swayam in India which do a lot for women and carry out gender equality training in communities and so on. Extremely important work and what I feel will really make a difference to deeply entrenched beliefs.

xxyzz ignoring the reasons for any kind of criminal behaviour is rather asinine.

It is like ignoring that Male violence is a systemic threat to women and consequently shoving bepenised ‚women‘ into women‘s prisons with the argument that the individual will be punished in case of transgression.

Why even have social sciences when you can‘t make policies based on the findings?

I lived near Paris. I understand the discussions women are having on this thread and where op is coming from. I went to Tunisia and managed to walk less than 100m from the hotel alone before turning back. Please don’t negate women’s personal experiences.

It's not just race though. If you look at different areas you see different groups of men causing the issue. One of the issues in Rotherham and other cases remains the whole of society's attitude to women and girls. And, often, girls considered to be 'lower class'/vulnerable. Girls considered to be vulnerable get to be targeted and society in general victim blames.
The last president of the US bragged about 'grabbing women by the pussy'. Over here there's that awful men only dinner where they harass the waiting staff that Walliams has spoken at several times. This is deeply rooted in society and is a wider problem. This isn't to negate anyone's experiences but to say this isn't a race/religion issue, it's an entitlement issue and is more complex to solve than some here seem to suggest.