We
Could Have Seen Europe's Muslim Rape Crisis Coming
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
January 19, 2016
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 In the aftermath of
New Year's Eve's mass rapes of European women by Muslim refugees, the
questions have been repeated: Should we have known this kind of thing would
happen? Could we have known? And from local bars to parliaments,
from family dinners to the nightly news, the answers keep coming back: Yes;
we could. Yes, we should.
But interestingly, the people who say this with the most conviction are
not right-wing Muslim-bashers, or activists opposed to the settling of
Syrian refugees in Europe. They are Muslims, and mostly Muslim women.
Over and over, these women, and other Western women who have worked in
the Middle East and North Africa, pointed out the commonality of rape in
the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia (the MENASAS region), and
noted the oppression of women in most cultures there. (The Kurds form a
notable exception.)
Many point to the rapes in Tahrir Square in 2011 and 2013 as cautionary
tales, describing the so-called "circle of hell" that women faced
then: lone women surrounded by men whose hands groped and pulled, ripped
and pressed, and eventually overpowered. A 2013 study conducted after the attacks showed that a
stunning 99 percent of Egyptian women had experienced some sort of sexual
harassment.
True, these asylum-seekers are not Egyptian, but the signs were there
all along. And despite new crackdowns on male asylum-seeker from the region,
the problem is likely to continue so long as conservative Muslim men remain
among their ranks, finding their way into European cities as new citizens.
Observed Brenda Stoter, a reporter and sociologist who has spent several
years covering women in the region for Al Jazeera and Dutch newspaper De
Groene, in a recent essay, "Anyone who thinks that you can
bring the Arabic world to Europe without social inequality, cultural
differences, and the influence of religion, ignores the facts."
In fact, one of the most shocking revelations about the attacks in
Germany was the authorities' admission that they had had an indication
such a thing could and likely would happen. In meetings with police,
politicians had been apprised that there were entire gangs of North
Africans with "serious" criminal records among the refugees,
according to a report in De Welt.
Yet they had collectively determined to say nothing of their histories
of "excessive drinking, attacking people on the streets, robberies and
pickpocketing," in order "to maintain the peace" and avoid
stigmatizing the refugees as a group. No one, apparently, considered the
probability that, since such molestations generally go unpunished in these
men's home countries, they would be inclined to repeat them here. Perhaps
they might have spoken first to "Alaa," a 30-year-old Muslim
apostate from Saudi Arabia now living in an asylum center in Cologne, who
told Dutch newspaper Trouw, "They think that they can get away
with it, that no one will put them in jail, that no woman would dare to say
anything, because that's how things are in the Middle East."
But now that the proverbial cat's out of the proverbial bag, stories are
spilling out, and not just reports about the high rate of rape and sexual
assault in MENASA countries. Now we're also learning about the assaults
against women asylum-seekers perpetrated by fellow refugees and, occasionally, by
the traffickers and smugglers who have helped them escape.
Look deeper, and other, more sinister tales emerge, revelations of
sexual abuse and oppression among the Muslim communities already settled in
the West. "You might think that Moroccan boys who grow up here [in the
West] would view women more liberally and equally. But this is usually not
the case," Dutch-Moroccan writer Fadoua Bouali observed back in 2004. "These boys grow up in
families where their own mother takes a repressed place. Daily they see
that she, the most important, sacrosanct person in their lives, still does
not receive the respect and value that she deserves as a human being. Why
should they then have any respect for other women?"
Such insights put the lie to the insistence by many Muslim women, and
particularly Muslim converts, that wearing the veil and full-body coverings
in some way desexualizes them, liberates them from the lustful looks of
men, none of whom can be trusted to look at them as anything but sex
objects. Yet evidently, non-Muslim men can largely view even scantily-clad
women without attacking them, while for many Muslim men, such coverings
make absolutely no difference at all.
Still, sadly, the New Year's events also reveal our own sins. For too
long, we ignored what was happening to Muslim women even in our own
countries, as if they didn't matter. It is now clear we did this at our own
peril. Perhaps if we had cared more about them, we would not have had to
face this now.
But we do. And so in facing it, we must join with Muslim women in the
West and elsewhere to change the thinking of their fellow Muslim men –
their brothers, their husbands, and most of all, their sons. Because this
is the only way that we can help to change their futures and the futures of
women everywhere.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands.
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