Alongside the increase os immigrants arrivals to Europe, sexual violence has proliferated

 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born into a Muslim family in Somalia, and after a brief period of living in Saudi Arabia her family settled in Kenya, where she was raised. In 1992, at the age of 23, fleeing an arranged marriage she sought asylum in the Netherlands. Successfully escaping from her family who had forced her to undergo genital mutilation as a child, she integrated into Dutch society. She learnt the language and studied political science at Leiden University. 

Soon, she became a prominent critic of radical Islam, triggering the wrath of Muslim extremists (she was put on an Al-Qaeda hit list in 2010) as well as achieving international recognition, making it onto Time’s top 100 most influential people in the world in 2005. A US citizen since 2013, she now works at the Hoover Institution where she did her research writing under the title Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. 

Hirsi Ali establishes a link between immigration and increasing sexual violence against women, and traces back the root of the problem to the cultural differences between Christian Europe and Muslim-majority countries. She argues that while Western Europe has evolved culturally to the point that it presumes the innocence of women in a case of sexual assault, and protects their rights and safety, in Muslim-majority countries the attitude is still that women can be blamed for being sexually assaulted. 

In her book, Hirsi Ali emphasizes on multiple occasions that only some immigrant men commit such crimes, but she draws attention to the fact that due to cultural differences and the lack of integration there is a correlation between the increase in sexual violence in Europe and the influx of immigrants.

Since 2009, around 3 million immigrants have arrived in Europe. In the year 2015, at the height of the migration crisis, a record 1.8 million illegal border crossings were reported in Europe.¹ In the last ten years, 67 per cent of asylum seekers in Europe have been male, and 80 per cent of them have been under the age of 35. Approximately 2.4 million asylum applicants were from nine Muslim- majority countries (e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria), so most immigrants are indeed of the Muslim faith. Four European countries (Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and France) host 70 per cent of Europe’s unauthorized immigrant population.²

Alongside the increase in arrivals to Europe, sexual violence has proliferated on the continent, as detailed in ‘Chapter 3: Sexual Violence by Numbers’. Between 2017 and 2018, there was a 17 per cent increase in instances of rape, and a 20 per cent increase in other forms of sexual assault in France.³ In French public places, 3 million women have experienced unwanted sexual attention and advances. 

In Germany in 2017, the number of victims of ‘sexual coercion’ rose by 41 per cent. Compared to the previous year, Sweden witnessed a 12 per cent increase in reported sex offences in 2016—the staggering jump in these statistics is all the more shocking because rates of sexual violence were relatively stable in Sweden between 2005 and 2011. Although Hirsi Ali recognizes that some of the increase in sexual crime statistics might be explained by new legal definitions of rape and greater public awareness about the issue (due to #metoo), she argues that it must also be acknowledged that the countries with the largest intake of immigrants have witnessed the largest increase in sexual violence. Therefore, she concludes, assessing the link between immigration and the rise of sexual violence is vitally important.

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