Taharrush

The BBC yesterday on the Cologne attacks on women:

The men suspected of attacking women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve were “almost exclusively” from a migration background, mainly North African and Arab, an official report says.

Addressing state MPs on Monday, [North Rhine-Westphalia state’s interior minister Ralf] Jaeger criticised police for not calling for reinforcements on the night, and also for the way they informed the public about the investigation in the days after the events.

His report details how a group of around 1,000 men of North African and Arabic origin gathered on 31 December. Smaller groups formed, surrounding women, then threatening and attacking them, he said.

These groups were predominately made up of North African men who had travelled to Cologne from different cities.

There’s one new element, that I heard from other sources yesterday too:

Monday’s report into the attacks in Cologne says that the combination of group sexual violence with robbery had not previously been seen in Germany.

It notes that similar crimes took place in other parts of Germany on 31 December, including in Hamburg.

The report describes a modus operandi known as “taharrush gamea” in Arabic, meaning group sexual harassment in crowds, and compares it to incidents reported in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the time of the Egyptian revolution.

Sex attacks on Tahrir Square

Friends of mine say that’s real, and that it started a couple of years before the Tahrir Square attacks. A new technology, enabled by the new technology of Twitter, perhaps.

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