Large groups of young men who surround girls and molest them
Oyyy, it’s not just Germany. It’s Sweden too.
Sweden’s prime minister has condemned a “double betrayal” of women after allegations that police covered up sexual harassment by recent immigrants at a music festival in Stockholm. Meanwhile, reports have emerged of attacks on women in Malmö on New Year’s Eve.
Groups of refugees molested concertgoers at We Are Stockholm, Europe’s largest youth festival, in the summer of 2014, according to internal police memos obtained by Dagens Nyheter, a daily newspaper.
“These are so-called refugee youths, specifically from Afghanistan. Several of the gang were arrested for sexual molestation,” one police memo said.
But the official police report on the festival didn’t mention the assaults or harassment. No one was prosecuted.
The reports come as police in Cologne, Germany, investigate hundreds of claims of assaults on women on New Year’s Eve. Officials say nearly all of the suspects in the attacks were “people with an immigrant background”. Police and the media have been accused of deliberately under-reporting the events in order not to encourage anti-immigrant sentiment.
I don’t want to encourage anti-immigrant sentiment either, and especially not anti-refugee sentiment. But nor do I want police or governments concealing attacks on women, especially organized planned gang attacks on women.
During the 2014 festival, organisers picked up on rumours of a new phenomenon, said Roger Ticoalu, head of events at the Stockholm city administration.
“It was a modus operandi that we had never seen before: large groups of young men who surround girls and molest them,” Ticoalu said. “In the cases where we were able to apprehend suspects, they were with a foreign background, newly arrived refugees aged 17-20, who had come to Sweden without their families.”
Ugh, what a nightmare.
Separately, police in Malmö, Sweden’s third city, said that on New Year’s Eve gangs of young men surrounded women and molested them.
A couple of hundred men, described as “unaccompanied from Afghanistan”, were involved in what was “a new phenomenon”, a police spokesperson told the Sydsvenskan newspaper. No women made a formal complaint, police said.
It’s enough to make you despair.
“Police and the media have been accused of deliberately under-reporting the events in order not to encourage anti-immigrant sentiment.”
That, if true, would indicate a remarkably arrogant and patronising attitude towards the plebs, unfortunately, after Rotherham it seems quite plausible. In the long term it’s counter-productive since it’s an obvious propaganda gift to the ‘Islamophobic organisations’. Law enforcement becomes a distant second to “community relations”.
The task of the media is to report the news.
Articles like the one I’ve included in this post make me wonder about the true scale of the problem. I don’t necessarily trust articles you can find on the Internet, and I personally think it is incredibly wrong and misguided to equate all asylum seekers with rapists, but sometimes the issue terrifies me to the point of overwhelming my rational response. While women are attacked by men from every culture and ethnicity, it is true that there is a more overt and virulent form of misogyny in many of these new migrant groups in Europe. The struggle is to hang on to your humanity through all this. I wish Europe all luck in striking the correct balance between humanitarian aid, and protecting the rights and freedoms of all women in Europe.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape
Well I don’t necessarily trust any articles, but articles you can find on the internet include ones from academic publishers, all the major newspapers and magazines, etc. The fact that they’re findable on the internet is hardly a sign of dodginess by itself.
On the other hand the Gatestone Institute is not one of the more trustworthy sources, so…
That’s true and I was probably too sweeping in my comment generally. I suppose it is more that I have been bombarded with so many competing online articles on this subject (among others) from the left, the right and the strange middle that I no longer know which ones to trust. Especially following recent revelations about the police and media misrepresenting or concealing crimes involving migrants (not necessarily for bad reasons), it feels hard to stay grounded in the debate.
This is partly why I’ve come to rely on you blog as a source in these discussions – I feel that even if you don’t always agree with the news source you are discussing, you and your regular commenters are always prepared to think, debate and consider the issues. It feels a bit like a haven online, where free discussion is still possible, even if I usually don’t comment.
Wouldn’t it be nice if crimes were treated like crimes? A group of men came together for the purpose of violating the law by violating women. Their background should matter strictly for the sake of finding the culprits, and in terms of targeting education against future assaults. Not doing collective punishments against the group, but at the same time, not shielding the criminals from being found and punished.
If they had gone through the business districts of cities and slashed the tires on all the cars with government plates, or that cost over 20,000 Euro, I have a feeling it would be treated more like a simple matter of crime.
Dealing with the actual crime would mean functioning outside the relentless politicizing that suffocates contemporary societies. It happens here in the U.S. all the time. When news reports DON’T include descriptions of suspects, that means they’re Black. The evasion is absolutely shocking, and as racist as any far-right rant that they are trying not to fuel.
Aw hey, Elsa @ 4, thank you – that’s one of the best reader compliments ever. That’s how I want this blog to work, so I’m happy to know it works that way for you. (I get a lot of crap from hostile critics for not doing more writing myself as opposed to sharing writing by others – but I don’t want to blather endlessly myself, and I do want to share writing by others and then discuss it with readers. It’s one way to do a blog, and it’s the way I like to do it. So there.)