Oh great, now street harassment of women is being organized.
The mayor of Cologne has summoned police for crisis talks after about 80 women reported sexual assaults and muggings by men on New Year’s Eve.
The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central railway station has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were involved.
At least one woman was raped.
What is particularly disturbing is that the attacks appear to have been organised. Around 1,000 young men arrived in large groups, seemingly with the specific intention of carrying out attacks on women.
Police in Hamburg are now reporting similar incidents on New Year’s Eve in the party area of St Pauli. One politician says this is just the tip of the iceberg.
…
One man described how his partner and 15-year-old daughter were surrounded by an enormous crowd outside the station and he was unable to help. “The attackers grabbed her and my partner’s breasts and groped them between their legs.”
A British woman visiting Cologne said fireworks had been thrown at her group by men who spoke neither German nor English. “They were trying to hug us, kiss us. One man stole my friend’s bag,” she told the BBC. “Another tried to get us into his ‘private taxi’. I’ve been in scary and even life-threatening situations and I’ve never experienced anything like that.”
If it’s a whole crowd, there’s really nothing you can do.
Comments
23 responses to “Female privilege”
But don’t dare call it misogyny! Probably just some lads having fun….after all, boys will be boys. (Gag!)
Didn’t notice this post when I commented on another thread:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2016/the-continuing-need-to-cringe-and-grovel/#comment-2620768
But don’t mention the elephant in the room.
A comment by “Katie” to the New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/world/europe/coordinated-attacks-on-women-in-cologne-were-unprecedented-germany-says.html
I’ve travelled through the Middle East and would believe men there capable of just about any atrocity against women. But what I can’t believe is large groups of migrants banding together to commit crimes in public. I’m surprised if they’re that stupid.
Does this innuendo about the involvement of some variety of misogynist foreigners have a basis in fact?
I’d be much less surprised if it was homegrown skinheads of some type. I wouldn’t even put it past them to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment with some sort of false flag operation.
But actual Muslim / North African immigrants getting drunk and harassing women in mobs in Europe? Doesn’t seem like their MO.
As the NY Times article mentions the German police are now concerned about a repeat of the sort of incident at future large public gatherings, so if you are a young German woman you’re faced with the fear of attending events. Some percentage may decide to skip events they would otherwise attend, and bit by bit a European country is brought culturally closer to the countries of origin of the perpetrators.
This won’t happen all at once but gradually.
Well, I checked Der Spiegel and, sure enough, “according to consistent accounts, the perpetrators came from North African and Arabian countries.”
Wow.
As I say, I did credit them with more intelligence. Crazy, stupid, criminal sods.
The Times is a depressing read. Now Merkel is up against it because of those million refugees. God damn it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/world/europe/coordinated-attacks-on-women-in-cologne-were-unprecedented-germany-says.html?_r=0
Oh, Helene already gave that link. Ah well.
Quixote,
It’s not “foreigners”; it’s foreigners raised in a culture where women are not supposed to walk freely, alone, in public. A modern Islamic version of (ironically, an old German Christian formula): Kinder, Küche, Kirche. A similar orgy of violent misogyny occured in Cairo during the so-called Arab Spring when young women dared to venture out into Tahrir Square to participate in political protests. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/05/egypt-women-rape-sexual-assault-tahrir-square
Areas of some western European cities (Sweden in particular) with substantial numbers of unassimilated Muslim immigrants have become virtual rape zones.
Turns out rape culture can be imported wholesale.
Yes, Helene. I’m aware of what goes on in violently misogynist countries. I’ve also lived in Germany for a few years, been friends with what were then called “guest workers.” The ones I knew were mostly Turkish, since those were the majority of guest workers then. This was a while ago, back in the Paleolithic.
Like immigrants in the US, in Australia, everywhere else I’ve had personal experience from living in their midst or not far away (rents are cheaper there), all they want is to keep the lowest possible profile.
Nor am I surprised that there are bags of trouble with individual men being criminals. That is their MO, and that rings much too true.
I’m just amazed they’d do this crap in a mob in the open. Any idiot knows what the backlash is going to look like. They never struck me as idiots. (It takes a lot of smarts and courage to leave with nothing for what amounts to another planet.) But, obviously, too many of them are now criminal idiots.
The overwhelming reaction is going to be to slam the doors shut. And to deport plenty of perfectly harmless people. What a mess.
Quixote @11,
I’m familiar with Germany, as I’ve visited and lectured there on several occasions. In general the older Turkish immigrants (aka “guest workers”) have assimilated reasonably well. It’s the newer arrivals from North Africa and the Middle East who are problematic. Islam worldwide has become more aggressive and with the advent of electronic media and the Internet, the new generation of Muslim immigrants have reflected this. As you say, this will affect many innocent and needy people.
The only two things I see that have really changed that could result in this kind of behavior are 1) the easy availability of porn, and 2) the way it’s now possible to live inside a hermetically sealed echo chamber.
And no mainstream desire for solutions to either of them.
When the days are short and the nights are long, I tend to think we’re doomed.
This is bad on so many levels.
A friend of mine is an interpreter for a public agency, and has worked with lots of refugee organisations in Europe. She’s in her I think late 40s but looks a lot younger, and is very ‘feminine’ in appearance. She says she and her colleagues have never before encountered the kind of hostile and frightening behaviour they’re getting from current refugees, anything from ignoring them and dismissing what they say to physically attacking and molesting them. I’m ‘liberal’ on the subject of immigration, and feel like I have to be to avoid being a hypocrite, but this is clearly a serious problem and I don’t know how it can be dealt with. I remember reading recently that Sweden? is offering training courses for male refugees to teach them, for example, that women in their host cultures are permitted to wear what they want, to speak with men, to appear in public unchaperoned, and to have sex with whoever they want, and that it’s not permitted in their host culture to harass or punish them for behaviour that these men might consider inappropriate. I guess that’s one way.
Quixote #11:
“It takes a lot of smarts and courage to leave with nothing for what amounts to another planet.” Not if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t worry about consequences. In any group of migrants (refugees or not) there’ll be a few of those mixed in with the smart, courageous people.
#13:
1) doesn’t have that effect, 2) has always been possible if you really wanted to.
Ezra Levant is a gasbag, but this image is nonetheless very telling
https://youtu.be/CScAkhiSmok
I’m sure the “I am NOT Charlie” gang will soon tell us that they don’t condone rape… but…
And Joyce Carol Oates will still be looking for something “celebratory & joyous”.
That image from the Ezra Levant show is jarring. It’s at about the 1:50 mark.
@19She’s little more than a beast of burden. She looks to be about 45 but is probably no more than 30. One wonders…is she also pregnant?
Heartbreaking.
The usual hellish waffling. Holding back details to keep the anti-immigrant blowhards from having a field day. Racialising what appears to be a religious/cultural outrage.
One note I’ve seen said that the perpetrators were largely known to police, having long-term criminal records in the train station area. In other words, NOT refugees. The ‘guest worker’ fantasy of the 50s—that foreigners would work in the West and then go home to Turkey-Greece-Yugoslavia-etc. helped build the isolated, cut-off, pseudo-communities. Ghettoization makes for BOTH generic urban thuggery and gangs, AND provides a fertile ground for Saudi-funded salafist crazies.
The incident is begin described as ‘organized.’ By whom? Criminal street gangs (a Rotherham in fast forward?) or some imported Imams?
I recall seeing something recently, I’m not sure whether it was here or another blog (likely Mike the Mad Biologist) about a country (probably one of the northern European ones) holding classes to teach immigrants the acceptable social norms, including treating women in public as human beings? In any case, we need much more in that vein, and perhaps make such classes a requirement for immigrants being allowed out in public.
OK, still not sure where I was pointed to it, but this is probably the story I meant.