News Germany: New Year's Eve gang assaults on women

[Second Summer]

An internal police report reveals officers "could not cope" with the volume of attacks in Cologne on New Year's Eve, German media say.

Women were "forced to run the gauntlet" through gangs of drunken and aggressive men outside the station, it said.

Police say the number of reported crimes from the incident has risen to 121, about three-quarters of which involve sexual assault.

More: Cologne sex attacks: Police could not cope - report - BBC News (7. January 2016)

The perpetrators were drunk and aggressive men of North African / Arab origin. The shocking part is the scale of the assaults (apparently 1000 men or more involved) and that they appear to have been coordinated. Attacks on a smaller scale were reported in Stuttgart and Hamburg.

Time to re-think German and European immigration policies?

 

[Andy_T]

Time to re-think German and European immigration policies?

Not really, although that is what right-wing people want to make you believe now. (including widely circulating the image of a black man supposedly attacking a white woman that can be traced to posts from Spanish media first occurring in 2010, claiming that it is what occurred in Germany in 2015)

Why? Yes, if you look at the horrible occurrences in Cologne, there were about 1000 men there, many of them of North African / Arab Origin, many of them drunk and aggressive, and throwing fireworks. (This, however, is not so uncommon at New Years Eve in most German cities, I have to say )

However, according to the police, the acts of sexual violence - that undoubtedly were horrible and need to be investigated and punished with all severity - were committed by an estimated 80-100 organized criminals (also of North African / Arab Origin) that are obviously known to the police as "intensive criminals" and have been in Germany for a longer time. They likely used their horrible sexual assaults on women as a means of intimidation of their victims and to cover acts of theft / robbery.

So yes, it is a horrible occurrence that needs to be punished, but it is not a reason to re-think German and European immigration policies (as the perpetrators were not refugees, but organized criminals, according to the police).

It also became clear that the police were not prepared at all and were critically understaffed.

*** Update *** .... however, there are also first messages on some German media, that policemen supposedly anonymously commented to the media that there were many asylum seekers among the people they had checked on New Years eve. It is - to me - however unclear whether "getting checked by the police" is the same as having committed an offence, and I am also waiting to hear more confirmation of that.

I do not believe that the German police can and would suppress evidence they have that implicated refugees. From what I know, they are now analyzing the video footage of surveillance cameras in order to identify the perpetrators.

 

[Moll Flanders]

Let’s not shy away from asking hard questions about the Cologne attacks | Gaby Hinsliff | Opinion | The Guardian

 

[Andy_T]

Thanks for sharing, @Moll Flanders , that's a very well written article IMO.

 

[Second Summer]

Let’s not shy away from asking hard questions about the Cologne attacks | Gaby Hinsliff | Opinion | The Guardian

A few good points in the analysis, but I don't feel at all assured the answers proposed will really help:

Which in this case means treating this crime wave exactly as they would any other: policing more effectively, with extra manpower if necessary, and being upfront at all times about doing so. Bluster and blame fools nobody. But neither, it turns out, does queasy silence.

Can we really just throw more police at this kind of problem? How many more police officers would we realistically need to protect women against this? I kinda doubt this is a feasible solution, or at least not nearly the full solution.

Let's face it, these attacks are the result of the misogynous culture these men brought with them from their homelands. How do you fix a broken culture shared by millions of Arab immigrants across Europe? To what extent are these attitudes also shared by second-generation immigrants?

Apparently, Germany was not the only country that experienced these New Year's Eve assaults. The below article reports similar incidents from Austria, Switzerland and Finland where big groups of Arab men assaulted women:
More NYE ‘sex assaults’ in Europe (8. January 2016)

 

[AeryFairy]

Let's face it, these attacks are the result of the misogynous culture these men brought with them from their homelands. How do you fix a broken culture shared by millions of Arab immigrants across Europe? To what extent are these attitudes also shared by second-generation immigrants?

Far-off countries are hardly the only places with cultural issues of sexism and violence towards women.

Apparently, Germany was not the only country that experienced these New Year's Eve assaults. The below article reports similar incidents from Austria, Switzerland and Finland where big groups of Arab men assaulted women:
More NYE ‘sex assaults’ in Europe (8. January 2016)

That article is a bit of a mess... it jumps from incident to incident, drawing links between the attacks purely through including information in the same article. The race and nationality of the Austrian attackers isn't mentioned; only the fact that there were 10-15 of them. The Zurich attackers are only said to be "dark-skinned". The Helsinki police stated that there has never been this kind of harassment problem before (seemingly implicating asylum seekers), but then the article later states that of the 1000+ rapes reported in 2015, only 10 asylum seekers were suspects - so they obviously had a little bit of a problem before refugees turned up.

What has happened to these women is horrific, and it does need to be addressed. But I don't think it needs to be addressed from an immigration angle.

 

[Second Summer]

Far-off countries are hardly the only places with cultural issues of sexism and violence towards women.

Yes, definitely, the UK has a lot of work to be done in that area, but still this kind of crime is virtually unheard of in contemporary Europe, or at least in the countries mentioned here?

That article is a bit of a mess... it jumps from incident to incident, drawing links between the attacks purely through including information in the same article. The race and nationality of the Austrian attackers isn't mentioned; only the fact that there were 10-15 of them. The Zurich attackers are only said to be "dark-skinned". The Helsinki police stated that there has never been this kind of harassment problem before (seemingly implicating asylum seekers), but then the article later states that of the 1000+ rapes reported in 2015, only 10 asylum seekers were suspects - so they obviously had a little bit of a problem before refugees turned up.

Agreed that the article is a bit messy - e.g. the headline mentions Sweden, but when reading the article it seems they meant Switzerland. (Easy to get those confused if you live in Australia, I guess ...) But the reason I linked to it was to show that the incidents in Germany were not isolated to just one country, but they do seem to implicate one particular group - men of Arab / North African origin.

What has happened to these women is horrific, and it does need to be addressed. But I don't think it needs to be addressed from an immigration angle.

Which angle is the correct one, then? Integration? What solution do you propose?

 

[Second Summer]

Yes, definitely, the UK has a lot of work to be done in that area, but still this kind of crime is virtually unheard of in contemporary Europe, or at least in the countries mentioned here?

To clarify, I mean the kind of openly aggressive, sexist attitude on the scale described in these news articles -- this represents something new in contemporary Europe.

 

[AeryFairy]

Agreed that the article is a bit messy - e.g. the headline mentions Sweden, but when reading the article it seems they meant Switzerland. (Easy to get those confused if you live in Australia, I guess ...) But the reason I linked to it was to show that the incidents in Germany were not isolated to just one country, but they do seem to implicate one particular group - men of Arab / North African origin.

Again - the article does not definitely implicate men of arabic or north african origin in two out of the four cases it cites. The "dark-skinned" men in the Zurich attacks could be native to Switzerland or any other country. No race or origin is mentioned at all for Austria.

Which angle is the correct one, then? Integration? What solution do you propose?

It's not an easy problem to solve. There's a massive way to go in how rape and sexual assault is dealt with in general. Most attacks go unreported in the first place, largely due to the way they are dealt with and the horrifically low conviction rate. Anyone found guilty of anything like this needs to rot in jail as far as I'm concerned. Better public education on consent has been proven to work, too.

But even if 1000 people were involved across these attacks (which seems to be a fairly large exaggeration but it makes the maths easier), that's around 0.1% of the million+ asylum seekers and immigrants. That's around the same percentage of the population of the UK responsible for reported rapes and sexual assaults in 2014 (106000 reported rapes and sexual assaults to a population of 64.1 million = 0.15%).

 

[Moll Flanders]

Far-off countries are hardly the only places with cultural issues of sexism and violence towards women.

Well, exactly.

 

[Mischief]

Germany obviously needs to keep Americans out of the country also:

Out of the 34 suspects, 21 were asylum seekers — and the majority of those, the spokesman said, arrived this past year. The 34 reportedly include 10 Algerians, 10 Moroccans, five Iranians, four Syrians, two Germans, one American, one Serbian and one Iraqi.

Germany confirms asylum seekers are suspected in New Year’s Eve assaults

 

[Spang]

Immigrants are not responsible for rape culture in Germany:

A 2004 study on the living conditions, security, and health of women in Germany, showed that 13 percent of German women have experienced a form of criminal sexualized violence. The scandal is that only 8 percent of these women filed a complaint with the police. If you include multiple complaints, then the figure decreases to 5 percent. That means that an incredible 95 percent of women in Germany who experience sexual violence don't report it to the police.

 

[Second Summer]

Germany obviously needs to keep Americans out of the country also:



Germany confirms asylum seekers are suspected in New Year’s Eve assaults

Nationality isn't the shared characteristic in the perpetrators. I suspect it's more the cultural background.

 

[ledboots]

Whenever that many refugees are admitted simultaneously, there has to be a massive and fast increase in services such as police, schools, medical services, etc. I hope they get more law enforcement STAT. Women are always the first victims in a cultural change.

 

[Moll Flanders]

Rival groups protest in Germany over sex assaults - Al Jazeera English
Al Jazeera’s correspondent is saying there that in Germany today the left-wing demonstrators, who protested against PEGIDA, outnumbered the right-wing protesters.

 

[ledboots]

And jobs. You can't have tens of thousands of men displaced from their lives with nothing to do, no way to advance or feel valuable and expect no repercussions. Jobs, schools, training programs, etc are needed. And they must need housing, so construction work is probably paying well at this time.

Such an overwhelming task for Germany in particular, with so many refugees so quickly. I haven't kept up with their efforts, but I hope they are getting asistance.

 

[Moll Flanders]

Immigrants are not responsible for rape culture in Germany:

Yes, I think some people are very unaware of how much harassment girls and women face from predatory men/youths in everyday life.

This is not just a specific problem in Germany obviously, but I was in Cologne when I was 14 on a school trip and a group of us were out for an evening walking around the city and an old white man approached us and exposed himself.

Living in London most of my life I have had other incidents and harassment and crude comments, especially when I was in my pre-pubescent and teen years. Predators see women, particularly young women, as easy targets.

 

[Mischief]

Nationality isn't the shared characteristic in the perpetrators. I suspect it's more the cultural background.

Back when a large number of the Gastarbeiter were Italian, there were a lot of sexual assaults by Italian men. If you were a young female in Germany, it was difficult to make your way through any crowded place (train station, etc.) without getting your rear end and/or breasts pinched. I don't recall there being an international outcry to ban international travel by Italians.

Moll is right - women, and especially young women, encounter a lot of predatory sexual behavior. It's not limited to any specific cultural group.

 

[AeryFairy]

This is not just a specific problem in Germany obviously, but I was in Cologne when I was 14 on a school trip and a group of us were out for an evening walking around the city and an old white man approached us and exposed himself.

When I was in Germany a month ago I was groped six times in one evening, and a random stranger physically picked up my friend and tried to walk away with her. Similar things have happened to us pretty much everywhere, in the UK and abroad - and I bet every single woman could rattle off a bunch of identical experiences without thinking about it.

 

[Andy_T]

I was shocked to learn today that "groping" is actually not a crime or felony in Germany.

In order to be classified as sexual assault, the assault has to be "significant", and according to credible sources, groping does not fulfil that requirement .

It seems that sexual assault short of rape is only reglemented if it happens in the workplace.