The tensions simmering
The New York Times story on the Köln (Cologne) mess is deeply depressing.
The tensions simmering beneath Germany’s willingness to take in one million migrants blew into the open on Tuesday after reports that scores of young women in Cologne had been groped and robbed on New Year’s Eve by gangs of men described by the authorities as having “a North African or Arabic” appearance.
The German authorities expressed outrage at the attacks and called them unprecedented in scale and nature, saying hundreds of young men appeared to have participated.
It was not clear that any of the men involved were recent arrivals to Germany over the last year from conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa and elsewhere. But the situation created a new political challenge for Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose decision to take in refugees from conflict-ridden nations opened the doors to waves of migrants last summer and fall. As the number of asylum-seekers has grown and the challenge of assimilating them has become clearer, she has come under intensifying criticism for failing to anticipate the social and economic costs of her policy.
At the other end of the spectrum from Merkel and Germany are the countries that reject refugees altogether, so that you get desperate people pushed from one railway station to another, or drowning in leaky little boats, or held in nightmare refugee camps. It would be nice if the generous thing to do could work out to be also the sensible and productive thing to do, but this story doesn’t seem like a good omen.
The descriptions of the assailants — by the police and victims quoted in the news media — as being young foreign men who spoke neither German nor English immediately stoked the debate over how to integrate such large numbers of migrants and focused new attention on how to deal with the influx of young, mostly Muslim men from more socially conservative cultures where women do not share the same freedoms and protections as men.
The assaults, which went largely unreported for days, set off accusations on the right and among some political commentators that authorities and the news media had tried to ignore or cover up the attacks in order to avoid fueling a backlash against the refugees.
Far right groups are yelping, but so are groups and people to the left of them.
Several hundred people gathered in front of Cologne’s cathedral late Tuesday to protest violence against women. Several groups promoting women’s rights have complained that the authorities have not taken complaints about sexual abuse of women in refugee shelters seriously enough.
Oh I give up.
Apologies for tooting my own horn here. I wrote a post on this very topic, the probable difficulties of assimilating immigrants / refugees. I feel like an expert since I’m a third generation migrant, although my personal circumstances were never that dire. Ignoring the misogyny of many of the migrants and their cultures is a huge mistake. Anyway, if anyone wants to have a look: The migrant crisis and standing in line.
It’s a clash of values isn’t it? Assuming these young men *are* immigrants and refugees they have been let out from under the thumb of highly sexually repressive societies and have wound up in places where, they have been told all their lives, sex is open and available and women are all either prostitutes or immoral and therefore not worthy of respect. It’s unpleasant but unsurprising that when they inevitably blow off steam there is likely to be a misogynistic sexual element to it.
The solution would seem to be education and help for people assimilating into western European culture but that’s expensive and difficult to organise on such a large scale. Not to mention the best people to perform that education and support would be from the same cultural background – earlier immigrants who have assimilated and who understand the points where the two cultural viewpoints will come into conflict.
What do we do though? The right thing is rarely the easy thing. Denying these people sanctuary is inhuman but just dumping large numbers of people with different values and interpretations of social relations into a functioning society is… asking for trouble. The kind of trouble that promotes racism and right wing ideology which we also don’t need.
I’m afraid this has no solution, and the mood in Germany is turning uglier by the hour from what I’m hearing.
Muslim as victim trumps feminism.
The mayor of Cologne, a women, has reacted to these aggressions by publishing guidelines for women to follow so as to avoid future assaults. It is German women who will doing the adjusting…and the covering
I saw a very telling photograph on a website recently showing a group of young migrant men marching to Europe in wet snow.
All six were wearing warm coats and good walking shoes. None carried anything. Accompanying these six young fit men was one women.
That women was carrying two children. One was piggy back and the other was on her arm. At the end of that arm she was carrying a bag ( the food?). Her other arm was holding the hand of a third young child, a girl.
She was barefoot, completely barefoot.
But her hair was covered, so being barefoot is OK, I guess
The six young men appeared to be quite fine with the portrait, and none showed any inclination to lend the women a hand.
So this is what it’s come to…
“Henriette Reker urges women to avoid being in close proximity to strangers to prevent sexual harassment”
What a ninny!
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/cologne-attacks-mayor-women-keep-men-arms-length-germany
Echoed in this comment from “Heather” on the New York Times thread: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/world/europe/coordinated-attacks-on-women-in-cologne-were-unprecedented-germany-says.html
Dear Ophelia,
I have lurked on your blogs for years. I don’t always understand you, or always agree. But in the myriad of voices on today’s web, yours is one of the most sane and most consistent. Do not give up. Never give up. Never surrender. You make a difference. Your courage and your words mean something.
John @ 4 – good god. Do you remember where it was? I’d like to see that.
Rob @ 6 – why thank you.
This sort of line is the thing that always breaks my will to engage the issue:
There’s two sentiments being expressed here, and one does not necessarily tie to the other. Any attempt to roll back the rights of women is abhorrent and dangerous and wrong in thousands of ways. But the notion that, because these men have been fed a stew of misogynistic bullshit their entire lives that they ‘shouldn’t have qualified for refugee status’ is also abhorrent to me–and I see damned few pundits, let alone actual politicians, willing to see both aspects as wrong-headed.
Steamshovelmama’s post at #2 to me is best analysis I’ve seen of what’s really needed–an aggressive and deliberate effort to both absorb AND educate the refugees in a proper fashion. Yes, it would be expensive, but it’s also the only course that might have a chance of success in actually maintaining our value system. And it’s not like we haven’t done this before. The Marshall Plan is the biggest manifestation of it that I can think of.
Imagine each country in Europe building a city called “Refuge” in that country’s native tongue. Have them built by refugees with appropriate skills (or a willingness to learn). As the city is constructed, other jobs can be created and taken as well–shopkeepers, cooks, the entire front line of necessary labor. And while they live there, and build this city, they attend classes, as well, on the expectations of them if they wish to stay in their new nation–how the culture expects them to act, and to maintain their identity while respecting the cultures of others.
Once done with the courses, they can then be given leave to immigrate to some other part of their nation, and perhaps apply for citizenship. It would not be fast, or cheap, but it might actually succeed.
Oh, the Catholic Church objects to cartoons do they?
Do you know what I object to? Using child labour.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/africa/2016/01/06/Children-labour-on-Catholic-Church-land-in-Uganda-report
@7 I’ve a link to it on the ‘Female Privilege’ thread. It’s at about one minute fifty seconds into the video.
A black Berlin poet has a rather eloquent blog post on the attacks:
http://www.okwonga.com/how-to-deal-with-the-sexual-assaults-in-cologne/
A quote from the middle bit:
Merkel’s arrogance is amazing, she essentially committed Germany to an uncontrolled social experiment and then hoped for the best, it’s not surprising that significant sections of the population are outraged.
“and the challenge of assimilating them has become clearer”
LOL, how do we assimilate adherents of a supremacist misogynist ideology? The default position (promoted by the so-called left) for European women will be the Islamisation of public spaces The Scandanavian countries, those former exemplars of open borders policies are actually closing their frontiers. There also seems to be a disproportionate number of young men amongst the migrants.
I don’t think arrogance is the right word. There really are millions of refugees in desperate circumstances, and it really is horrifying to turn them away. That remains true even if a substantial number of them are misogynist men. I doubt that Merkel was unaware of that possibility. This is a conflict of goods, not a good versus bad.
Don’t forget that some of the refugees are women and some are children.
@14 Ophelia,
‘This is a conflict of goods, not a good versus bad’.
Well, I’d agree with that proposition if both good and bad were evenly distributed, but they’re not, some members of the European citizenry are going to pay a higher price than others, particularly women and people in lower income and rural areas. When I referred to Merkel’s ‘arrogance’ is was specifically to her unilateral decision for Germany to assume the lion’s share of the refugee intake. It’s easy to assume the moral high ground if someone else pays the price, so I’d challenge those who advocate open borders to accommodate refugees in their homes.
The alarming fact is that the potential for both economic migrants and genuine refugees to enter Europe from Asia and Africa is simply enormous, no society can possibly absorb such rate of immigration and remain stable. That’s the lesson the Romans learned.
it wasn’t just Cologne:
http://www.huffingtonpost.de/2016/01/06/stadtevergleich-sex-delikte_n_8924084.html?utm_hp_ref=germany&ir=Germany
I would like to remind everyone that misogyny and assault of women is a feature of every culture. The idea that educating refugees in “our” culture means telling them that assaulting women is not on is laughable. Treating women like lesser beings is totally OK in our culture.
We had a case a number of years ago, where a group of young Lebanese Muslims raped several young women. They texted each other “We’ve got an Australian girl”. When the trial came to court it was possibly the first time the victims were not blamed and the leader of the group got 50 years. Only time evah.
The authorities in Cologne have persistently been reported as saying the men responsible for the assaults are known to them, and are not refugees.
Yes but there’s also such a thing as degree. Some places are worse than others – much worse. I’ve told the story several times here of how stunned and amazed and horrified I was when I went to Paris at 17 and was not allowed to cruise around by myself looking at everything. Then I went back to the UK, where I was. Then again in Paris I was never surrounded by packs of men so that a few could rob and grope me, and clearly that’s not routine in Germany either.
When I say I wasn’t allowed, I mean I wasn’t left alone. I was followed and harassed constantly.
learie @17
Yes, as Ophelia commented, it’s a matter of degree, we live in an imperfect world. I’m sure you’re not implying that the legal, political and social status of women in Muslim societies or Hindu India is equivalent to women in the West.
Take a minute to consider how long it has taken for women to achieve those legal, political and social gains Rob; and how hard it was to achieve; and how many Western women are still killed and assaulted and harassed by strangers and men they know who still have EXACTLY the same attitude to women as men in Saudi Arabia and India.
I read an article that suggested the experience of the women in Cologne must have been like what the women in Tahrir Square went through. The quotes I have read, the women have expressed shock that it happened in public and that they were faced with such a large group. We’re used to be assaulted and harassed by individuals in pubs or clubs or someone passing on the street, but we generally feel safe in public.
Florence used to be a very bad city for getting groped and pinched: it’s much better now.
learie@21
“Take a minute to consider how long it has taken for women to achieve those legal, political and social gains”
That’s the point, Western women, unlike women in many other cultures, have made considerable political and social progress, of course mores are often very difficult to change, in the West or anywhere else. How many Western women, despite the disadvantages they experience in the West would chose to live in, and accept the cultural norms and religiously sanctioned misogyny of majority Hindu and Muslim societIes?
I apologise to Rob for confusing him with RJW.
RJW: my question was; “how many Western women are still killed and assaulted and harassed by strangers and men they know who still have EXACTLY the same attitude to women as men in Saudi Arabia and India?”
Really puzzled by your response.
Western women have made more progress than women in other parts of the world: access to property and education have made all the difference.
learie @23,
I’d assumed that your question was rhetorical, it didn’t seem relevant to me.
What point are you making, that there’s a moral equivalence between Western societies and Hindu or Muslim societies because both have examples of misogyny? Or that the West should put its own house in order before criticising other cultures. I’d never accept that proposition. Or are you suggesting patience in regard to non-Western societies, ie they’re making progress towards gender equality, there’s not much evidence. It seems naive to assume that women in Muslim societies would, without Western pressure, achieve social and political equality in a thousand years, there’s also no reason to believe that progress is inevitable. One popular misconception is the notion of steady progress towards equality, in fact the relative status of women in many ancient societies eg Celtic, Etruscan, Egyptian and Scythian was far higher than many contemporary cultures.