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Title: Europe: Between Rape and Racism Author: CrimethInc. Date: February 16, 2016 Language: en Topics: Europe, rape, racism, Read All About It Source: Retrieved on 2nd December 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2016/02/16/europe-between-rape-and-racism
As Europe descends further into nationalism and xenophobia, we are
seeing feminist, atheist, and progressive discourses appropriated to
serve reactionary ends. Following the assaults in Cologne and the media
feeding frenzy about “migrant violence,” many people have struggled to
find a way to speak about the situation without minimizing the issue of
sexual assault or contributing to the demonization of migrants. Yet
displacement and sexual assault are not distinct issues—they are
interrelated components of a larger context that must be confronted as a
whole.
The past decade has seen a series of cascading disasters in the Middle
East and Europe. First, there was the bloody occupation of Afghanistan
and Iraq, which destabilized the region and ultimately enabled the
Islamic State to seize weapons and power. Then a series of civil wars
from Mali to Libya and Syria, combined with economic hardship throughout
the region, triggered a mass influx of migrants seeking a new life in
Europe. In response, European nations closed their borders and attempted
to trap migrants in internment camps. Then, in November, Islamist
attacks in Paris gave the French government an excuse to declare a state
of emergency and intensified the momentum of an already violent backlash
against migrants.
In this charged environment, news reports circulated that “gangs of
migrants” had carried out a series of sexual assaults in Cologne and
elsewhere around Europe on New Year’s Eve. A new series of xenophobic
attacks followed, along with demonstrations from Pegida and other
nationalist groups. Many demonstrators appropriated slogans from
anti-border movements, transforming “Refugees Welcome” into “Rapefugees
Not Welcome” and demanding security for “Fortress Europe”—the Nazi
expression for Occupied Europe during the Second World War. The
overwhelming sentiment from participants was “We need to protect our
women.”
On one side, nationalists and fascists sought to exploit the trauma of
sexual assault survivors as a tool for promoting hatred. On the other,
many people who consider themselves to be feminists and advocates of
migrants’ rights struggled to find a way to speak about the situation,
afraid of minimizing the issue of sexual assault or contributing to the
demonization of migrants.
These are precisely the sort of difficult situations that we will be
confronting as the world slides further into crisis, forcing populations
into conflict and rupturing the neat and tidy narratives of a seemingly
simpler era. If we don’t develop a language with which to articulate the
nuances of such situations, reactionaries of all stripes will have a
free hand to capitalize on them. In many regions, old-fashioned
progressive politics are quickly losing ground to new waves of
nationalism, while the state uses security concerns as a pretext to
target anyone proposing a radical solution. Rather than ceding the
discourse to those who would force us to choose between opposing rape
and opposing racism, we have to articulate the ways that displacement
and sexual assault are interrelated components of a larger context of
oppression that has to be confronted in its entirety.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 opened the latest chapter in a history of
colonial intervention in the Middle East that goes back hundreds of
years. Sooner or later, the consequences of this were bound to reach
Europe. In 2015 alone, over a million people crossed the Mediterranean
Sea, mostly to Greece and Italy, then continued their journey further
north. At least 3735 people died or went missing on the sea crossing,
including many children. Well over three million more people are
currently living in refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and
North Africa.
Doing their best to conceal their part in creating this disaster,
Europe’s political elites dubbed it the “migrant crisis.” This phrase
reduces a complex situation to a question of security; in fact, the
crisis was not produced by migration, but by destabilization and
borders. Tasking security experts with managing the situation, European
governments erected new border walls, expanded the authority of the
military, dehumanized migrants, and criminalized solidarity efforts.
Germany is one of the primary destinations migrants are trying to reach.
Despite its supposed open door policy, Germany has been dividing
migrants into deserving and undeserving, welcome and unwelcome—the
former being mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter mostly
from Northern Africa but also from other war-torn areas such as
Pakistan, Somalia, and Eritrea. This means that many migrants are being
deported to countries in which their lives are in danger. Switzerland,
Denmark, and some southern German states have been confiscating money
and valuables from migrants, as well. Right-wing discourse maintains
that most migrants entering Europe are young men—but in Slovenia,
through which nearly half a million people have passed en route to
northern Europe, the official numbers indicate that the majority of
those crossing are women and children. Almost 300 refugee hostels have
been attacked in Germany, with the pace escalating towards the end of
2015.
This was the climate in which Cologne’s 2016 New Year’s celebration took
place.
According to state reports, approximately a thousand men “of Arab or
North African appearance” congregated around Cologne’s Central Station,
where groups surrounded, groped, and robbed women. By the end of
January, over a thousand people had filed complaints to the police about
that night, including three rapes and 433 sexual offenses; charges have
been filed against 44 people, ten of whom are in custody. Of those
detained by the police, dozens were identified as asylum seekers or
other migrants. Similar events were described in Hamburg, Frankfurt,
Dortmund, Stuttgart, and as far as away as Helsinki.
The events in Cologne were a windfall for nationalists and xenophobes
who had long labored to build a narrative framing migrants as criminals,
rapists, and purveyors of militant Islam, despite the fact that many of
them are fleeing Islamist violence. Suddenly, all the repressive
measures that governments had carried out over the preceding months were
retroactively justified.
How seriously should we take this story about a wave of crime, rape, and
misogyny? Contrary to right-wing propaganda, official reports show that
crime rates among migrants in Germany are no higher than among European
citizens. This is significant when we consider that white men are more
likely to be treated leniently by the police and court system than men
of color.
At the same time, we should never reduce our concern with sexual assault
to a matter of statistics; the state does not document all the sexual
violence that takes place, nor does it offer any constructive response
to it. Likewise, we must not relativize such attacks in a way that takes
them for granted. We consider the events in Cologne significant because
we oppose all sexual violence, whether the perpetrators are from the
upper echelons of political parties or the most oppressed sectors of
society. For us, the attacks are specific acts of harm against
individual human beings, not a public relations nightmare or an
opportunity to promote an ideology. Addressing sexual violence and
harassment is always important, even when nationalists attempt to hijack
the discussion.
So we must begin from the standpoint of solidarity with everyone
targeted by sexual violence, while refusing state and nationalist
narratives about how to respond. We need not have the illusion that all
migrants are above reproach to see the value in resisting the state
repression and racist violence directed at them. On the contrary, since
different forms of violence reinforce each other, we recognize that the
more effective we are in interrupting the violence of governments and
nationalists, the more capable we are likely to be of putting an end to
sexual violence and misogyny.
The best way to counter nationalists’ attempt to exploit the Cologne
attacks is to take the initiative against rape and misogyny ourselves,
while debunking racist narratives about who the majority of rapists and
misogynists are. Likewise, one of the ways to put a stop to sexual
violence is to oppose the segregation, repression, and xenophobia that
fractures the population into mutually hostile factions. This is
especially important in the current climate of hatred, when
nationalists, Islamists, and media outlets are all bent on representing
us to each other in ways that breed distrust and violence. All of them
have an interest in fomenting a religious war, dividing Europeans and
migrants between the rival camps of Le Pen and al-Baghdadi so we will
not find common cause against leaders and wars together. And the more
fear, the more conflict, the less trust, the less mutual accountability…
the more sexual assaults.
Racist narratives aside, we can’t rule out the possibility that as
nationalist violence intensifies, many of those who are targeted will
turn to anti-social activity. Already, we have seen how the alienation
that led to the Banlieu riots in 2005 is now offering a fertile
recruiting field to ISIS. This is yet another example of how reactionary
movements and social conflicts spring up wherever we fail to demonstrate
the virtues of fighting for total liberation. Unless we act effectively
against nationalism and misogyny now, we will find ourselves more and
more alone in our efforts to promote a world in which people are not
divided along lines of gender, citizenship, ethnicity, and religion.
The demand for more policing complements the militarization of the
borders. In a society in which the function of police has always been to
preserve the state and male privilege, police will never be on the side
of women and others targeted by sexual violence. If sexual violence is
really the issue, it would be more effective to promote self-defense and
mutual aid between targeted groups. But the nationalists who are
suddenly talking about rape and misogyny were not exactly volunteering
at domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers before New Year’s
Eve.
In fact, the narrative that women are being victimized by people of a
rival ethnic or religious group is the oldest tool in the nationalist
toolbox. It is easy to revive this narrative whenever it is convenient
because, in a patriarchal society, assaults against women are always
taking place, so nationalists can emphasize or conceal them as it serves
their purposes. One of the easiest ways to justify violence is to argue
that it will prevent or avenge violence against the innocent and
defenseless—so in this narrative, women are always portrayed as victims
on whose behalf others must take action.
Local Europeans, not migrants, are responsible for most rapes in Europe.
Again, this is not a justification for minimizing or relativizing the
attacks that took place in Cologne. But the events in Cologne must not
be used to justify further attacks and racism in the name of the women
who were assaulted.
Let’s look at some earlier instances of this narrative about defending
women. In the late 19^(th) and early 20^(th) century, thousands of black
men in US were lynched; many of these killings were justified with
rhetoric about protecting white women. In 1923, an entire black
community was massacred in Florida in response to rumors that a black
man had sexually assaulted a white woman. In 1955, white men killed a
14-year-old boy accused of flirting with a white woman. In some cases,
lynchings occurred as a result of white women reporting that they had
been raped in order to conceal their love affairs; in other cases,
lynchings were provoked by the jealousy of husbands. Even explicitly
consensual sexual relationships between white women and black men were
interpreted as sexual attacks.
Who owns white women’s sexuality? Sexual access to white women has been
traditionally seen by white society as a privilege reserved for white
men as a symbol of their authority. This legacy continues up to today.
In June 2015, 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, announcing “You rape our
women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.” He shot
and killed nine people.
Despite the general agreement that this was a white supremacist hate
crime, Roof was represented to the public as an unfortunate, mentally
troubled individual. By contrast, when Muslims engage in violent acts,
pundits are quick to identify those acts as terrorism, because such acts
are supposedly an inherent part of Muslim identity.
If we compare the lynchings in the American South with the revenge
attacks on migrants after the news spread from Cologne, we see two
correlations. First, such revenge attacks are randomly directed at
members of a group that is portrayed as an undifferentiated whole—in
other words, they are racist violence, pure and simple. Second, even in
the cases where sexual assaults had in fact taken place, the resulting
attacks were not directed by the survivors and involved no real attempt
to achieve accountability or take measures against sexism.
Such claims of ownership over women’s bodies and sexuality often
coincide with war. During the Balkan wars at the beginning of the 1990s,
between ten and sixty thousand (mostly Muslim) women were raped in
former Yugoslavia, often repeatedly, in front of family members, or in
special camps. Sensationalist media reporting took no steps to protect
the identities of women who were raped, while creating a discourse of
victimization and erasing the voices of the survivors.
Most (male) politicians interpreted the mass rapes as an attack on
national sovereignty. They drowned out the voices of rape survivors by
speaking over them, presenting them as victims in order to fight wars in
the name of their honor regardless of what the survivors actually
wanted. They reduced the survivors to their ethnicities—to playing
pieces in an ethnic conflict. The targets of rape were not individual
human beings, but Bosnians, Serbs, Croats. This discourse was heard from
all sides in the Balkan conflicts: the survivors were “their women.” Not
surprisingly, those same men socially rejected survivors who became
pregnant as a result of rape; many of their children are still orphans
in Bosnia today.
Already in the 1990s, Balkan feminists identified mass rapes as attacks
against specific women, not just against an ethnicity, and openly
opposed the war itself. Many women organized informal mutual aid for
survivors during the war, refusing to permit the care of raped women to
be left up to state institutions. These feminists were branded traitors;
often, they were assaulted themselves. In 1992, an infamous article in
the Croatian newspaper Globus claimed that “Croatian feminists are
raping Croatia.”
Here we see how women’s attempts to defend themselves not only against
assault but also against unsought “defense” place them outside the
narrow zone of protection afforded under patriarchy. Insofar as men or
the nation itself are understood as owning the female body, women’s
bodies will be considered a resource to be controlled or attacked during
wartime—and the desire to own or attack women’s bodies will function as
an incentive to go to war. Rather than understanding rape as a weapon of
war in a way that creates the demand for other weapons of war to be
deployed in response, we can set out to oppose rape in ways that also
oppose war itself. This offers some insight into how we might respond to
the events in Cologne.
Nationalists aren’t interested in protecting anyone—they just seek to
justify the violence they hope to perpetrate. The rhetoric of protection
is a thinly veiled threat.
Today’s nationalists aspire to preserve Europe as a gated community;
their aspirations are couched in the language of property ownership. At
the beginning of the migrant crisis, they asserted ownership of the
territory of the state: “We must defend our borders against migrants.”
Then they asserted ownership of their roles in capitalist production:
“The migrants are going to take our jobs.” Later, they took it upon
themselves to protect their perverted version of multiculturalism: “We
must defend our language, culture, and traditions from migrants.”
Finally, they have started to claim ownership of female bodies as well:
“We must defend our women from migrant rapists.”
This portrayal of migrants as terrorists who rape European women is
nothing new; it has played a central role in right-wing political
propaganda for decades. This is the Other—the Foreigner, the
Perpetrator—who exists in relation to the European white man, the
Protector. The events of New Year’s Eve only confirmed a narrative that
had long been circulating on right-wing blogs and message boards,
catapulting it onto the front page of the mainstream news.
The narrative that “migrants are rapists” encourages hatred towards all
migrants as a single homogenous population. In Europe, particularly in
the southeast, this idea that a given ethnic group has an inborn
propensity for crime has historically been associated with the Roma
population. News reports of assaults by non-white individuals have
always specified ethnic, national, or racial descriptors—“A young
migrant (or black, or Romani) man raped a woman”—while white men from
the dominant ethnic group are not similarly identified.
Today, this sort of racism is often concealed under the argument that
Islam is inherently more violent and oppressive than other religions.
Even setting aside the obvious counterarguments (the Inquisition, the
forcible conversion of the Americas, slavery and genocide in Africa,
abortion clinic bombings, Anders Brevik…) it’s clear that this narrative
functions to justify the same colonialist interventionism that produced
the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the first place. Nationalists are
trying to coopt progressive and radical ideas, including atheist
critiques of religion as a whole, to craft a story in which the
civilized West is forced to do battle with superstitious religious
barbarians. Even some ostensibly anarchist groups have published texts
that assert this narrative. In fact, if your goal is to undermine the
repressive cultural values associated with some forms of Islam, it is
more effective to support rebels in Muslim communities than to demonize
Muslims as a whole.
The goal of these narratives is to render it impossible to imagine a
world without borders. Whoever rejects nationalism is branded
naïve—“What would you say if they raped you, or your sister or mother or
daughter or wife?”—or else as a supporter of rape. Right-wing rhetoric
alleging that “Western women” are to be “sacrificed on the alter of mass
migration” in a “rape epidemic” aims to divide radical movements between
two subjects we have worked hard to push into the public awareness—rape
culture and migrant solidarity. Nationalists are especially eager to
force this division, since they have a lot to be defensive about when it
comes to misogyny.
If it is possible to make such a distinction in the first place, it is
only because those critiques reached the public in a watered-down
single-issue liberal form. Likewise, the storyline of man as protector
or perpetrator and woman as victim only reinforces the gender binary,
pressuring people to adhere to their assigned genders for fear of
becoming targets. Claiming to protect women is a way to police
everyone’s gender and sexuality.
By the same token, as soon as they speak out about the links between
sexual violence and racism, women are considered legitimate targets for
the same assaults white men claim to be protecting them from. In
Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana, graffiti appeared around the city
proclaiming Posilmo Levičarke, “Let’s rape leftist women.” In Slovenia,
“levičarke” is a right-wing slur referring explicitly to anarchists,
queers, and other antifascists and feminists. The message is clear:
everyone who does not line up to support the nation and white manhood is
a traitor who should be taught a lesson. Meanwhile, social centers
throughout Europe that show solidarity with migrants have been targeted
with the same violence aimed at migrant hostels.
Likewise, a month after New Year’s Eve, white Germans groped a reporter
who was speaking live on television in Cologne. So long as the idea
prevails that women are men’s property, all women can expect to be
treated thus, even those who don’t threaten the nationalist agenda.
Nationalists aren’t interested in protecting anyone—they just need a way
to popularize the violence they wish to perpetrate against migrants and
women alike. The rhetoric of protection is a thinly veiled threat.
Nationalist violence continues the process of silencing that began with
the sexual assaults, in that it replaces and drowns out the voices of
the survivors who should be the ones speaking in the first place.
Foremost among those are the migrants who are themselves targeted for
sexual assault and harassment. Women traveling from Turkey to Greece and
north through the Balkans into the European Union have reported being
sexually assaulted and harassed at every stage in the journey. In the
transit camps of Croatia, Greece, and Hungary, where they are forced to
sleep in the same spaces as men and to use same shower and toilet
facilities while being watched, some stopped eating or drinking in order
to avoid having to use the toilets. They are often pressured to offer
sexual favors to smugglers, camp guards or other security personnel, or
other migrants. If nationalists were truly concerned about sexual
assault, they would begin with what migrants have been going through.
Sexual violence threatens people everywhere that there are “secure
borders” and military controls. In the process of crossing the border
between Mexico and the US, almost 80 percent of women from Central
America are raped by government officials, cartels, guides, or other
migrants. It just came out that minors were raped by United Nations
peacekeeping units in Central African Republic, following last year’s
revelation that UN troops had sexually abused children in Central
African Republic as well as more than 200 women and children in Haiti.
It is no coincidence that so many rapes are perpetrated by
representatives of the state. Putting some people in a position of power
over others structurally increases the likelihood of rape. Sexual
assaults often occur within hierarchical institutions such as prisons,
mental heath institutions, churches, schools, offices, and
heteronormative families in which the same structures that are supposed
to protect people render them vulnerable. If we grant that misogyny and
sexual assault exist in Muslim communities—citing, for example, the
sexual assaults in Tahrir Square, which Egyptian black bloc anarchists
took the lead in resisting—that doesn’t mean that white Europe is free
of rape or sexism. They just don’t come to light as often because the
perpetrators are protected by their status.
The central question here is not who the rapists are, but how to respond
to sexual assault and rape culture in a way that puts an end to them.
Imposing more coercive force, exacerbating power imbalances, and
creating more conflicts between “peoples” will only intensify the
factors that produce rape in the first place. The fight against sexual
assault and patriarchy cannot prioritize any specific group, culture,
society, or territory. Sexualized violence exists in a feedback loop
with other forms of patriarchy, heterosexism, trans oppression, ageism
and oppression of youth, colonialism, and genocide. To fight any of
these effectively, we have to fight all of them.
Racism and fascism have gotten a makeover in Europe, casting off the old
uniforms in favor of suits and ties. Meanwhile, many previously
apolitical people are embracing xenophobia, blaming all the problems
caused by capitalism on the most vulnerable and marginalized. As
discourses and power alliances are reconfigured in this context, we must
be careful not to be drawn into the narratives of our enemies.
No state or nationalist security could offer us the safety that comes
from social ties and solidarity that extend across the lines of
ethnicity and religion. Just as we seek to unlearn our own sexism and to
take responsibility for the ways we do harm to others, we have to
understand our world as a single unified space in which neither
exclusion nor coercion will put an end to misogyny and sexual violence.
The solution to sexual assault has never been to externalize the problem
behind bars or across borders. The fight against sexism is not a fight
against something external, but against all identities that are
constructed within gendered matrices of power, including our own
identities. This is a fight we can share with migrants, with survivors,
with everyone who has a stake in creating a different world.
The nationalists have no real plan for putting an end to the violence
they pretend to oppose. Their strategies of division can only exacerbate
it—and perhaps that is their true intention. Dehumanizing or deporting
migrants will strengthen the position of the Islamic State, Ansar Dine,
Boko Haram, and other groups who want to create a situation in which
Muslims have no choice except to join their religious war. This makes it
all the more pressing to establish a common struggle with migrants while
demonstrating empowering and inclusive solutions to the problem of
sexual violence. Rape and racism are manifestations of the same thing.
Let’s fight them together.