A centuries-old problem

Can the women of Europe be protected from refugee violence?

The recent series of attacks on women in Cologne and other cities in Germany still stirs the minds of the narrow-minded. However, anyone who knows at least something about the constant cases of sexual harassment and rape in the Middle East will not be surprised by the German state of emergency. What blew up Cologne is not uncommon in Casablanca, Algiers, Tunisia or Cairo.

Women's share

In Arab countries, attacks on women have been a problem for centuries. Today only exacerbated it. In war-torn Iraq and Syria, rape and the enslavement of women are a tool of terror in the hands of the radicals. But even where there is no civil war, the situation is little better. In Egypt, Morocco and Algeria, many women also complain about vulgar and hooligan treatment, including sexual harassment, rudeness, vulgarity and insults in public.

For the first time, I happened to learn about the dangers that women are exposed to on the streets of Arab cities a few years ago in Cairo, during the celebration of Eid al-Fitr. I was in Tahrir Square when a group of teenagers started molesting a woman who was talking on a mobile phone. None of the dozens of adult men who were there, did not try to stop the hooligans. In broken Arabic and with the help of sign language, I managed to drive away the boys, who seemed not so much frightened as surprised by the very fact of someone's interference.

It soon became clear that what I saw was in fact a routine. On the Internet, there are a lot of stories of Cairo women about what they sometimes have to deal with in life: some motorcyclist, passing by, strives to grab a woman standing on the side of the road by her breasts or buttocks; then passers-by men try to grab the crotch.

Picket of the German far right against the migration policy of Chancellor Merkel, Halle, Germany, January 25, 2016

In Morocco, the situation is exactly the same. Recently, a Casablanca resident wrote on her blog: “Many men believe they have the right to threaten a woman in revealing clothes; that such clothing is in itself a call to attack. Women who dress in this way are considered cheeky and immoral, even if in reality this is not at all the case. Judging by my experience and what I have heard and seen, no matter what a woman wears, sooner or later she can still be attacked.

But back to Tahrir Square. 2011, Cairo is engulfed in protests. Women fearlessly participated in those historical events without being attacked. But after President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, demonstrations broke out in which women became victims of attacks, sometimes ending in rape. Soon the female part of the population stopped participating in the protests.

Representatives of the authorities behaved then a little better. Egyptian army soldiers detained female demonstrators, after which the officers carried out a visual examination of the female genital organs, explaining this by the need to have evidence at hand that during and during the detention the women were not subjected to violence.

Not all Arab men see in a woman only an object of sexual harassment. But it is also true that in the Arab East both civic morality and religion place women on the lowest social level, and this only indulges unbridled behavior. Young Arab men with whom I spoke at various times often surprised me with irritation and hostility towards women, in whom they see greedy predators demanding material goods in exchange for the possibility of marriage. The word "bitch" is one of the most frequent in their descriptions.

Islam defines women as second-class beings under the leadership of men. Men personify both power over women and protection. And although representatives of "advanced" Islam insist that wearing a veil and hands closed to the wrists is a matter of choice for the woman herself, in practice her refusal to wear such clothes is perceived by many as a kind of invitation to insult or attack. It is not for nothing that in Iran and Saudi Arabia there is a morality police that monitors the observance of standards in women's clothing.

What to do in Europe

All of the above goes against the culture of Europe. But opening the borders to everyone - more than a million migrants in 2015 - German Chancellor Angela Merkel had to take into account all these social collisions of the Arab East. But I didn't learn. And this is a sign of either ingenuous naivety or blatant ignorance.

No, I do not at all insist that all asylum seekers in Europe should be refused: in the huge flow of migrants there are those who really save their (and their children's) lives. However, it is necessary to use the asylum mechanism that has been proven over the years and even decades. Many of the refugees who ended up in Europe initially ended up in camps in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. So it was before. And it was in these intermediate camps that the refugees underwent preliminary checks - biographies, health conditions, and so on. This mechanism, if applied now, would prevent massive and rather dangerous attempts to get to Europe on their own.

“It doesn’t matter what a woman wears, sooner or later she can still be attacked”

The fact that Merkel took back her invitation to Germany to everyone (after all, not all migrants flee the war) is already a positive factor. But this, of course, is not enough.

It is possible to reduce social risks by reviewing the procedure for admitting refugees to Europe: priority should be given to families with children. Single young men, who make up the majority of visitors from the Middle East, can wait. They are able to endure the inconvenience of refugee camps much better than large families.

Both Western countries and Russia, which is now directly participating in the Syrian events, is contributing to the increase in the number of Syrian refugees, should understand that after the end of the current conflicts in the region, thousands, tens of thousands of representatives of the losing side will seek asylum abroad. Europe will also become the main direction for them. Effective response to this crisis requires at least long-term planning and study of the cultural realities of the Middle East.

Photo: AP /fotolink