Society and space

This article is part of the Echoes of Cologne forum. Click here to read the introduction and the other contributions.

In March 2010 a landmark study, ‘Violence Against Women: An EU-Wide Survey’, was published by the European Union. The study found that violence against women was endemic across Europe, reporting that one in three women had experienced some form of physical or sexual abuse since the age of 15, while one in twenty women across the EU had been raped. This pattern of mass sexual violence is met with low prosecution rates; every year in the UK, for example, an average of 15,670 rapes are reported to the police, yet only 1,070 rapists are convicted of their crimes.

When news of the events that took place on New Years Eve in Cologne, Germany – reports of over 1,000 men of “North African and Arab origin” carrying out a mass sexual assault – reached me on New Years Day, I was filled with dread. Dread not only at the acts of sexual violence, but at the racist response that I knew would unfold. Having grown up in Europe’s Maghrebi diaspora, I am all too aware that rather than situating these events within the figures outlined above, the assaults would be attributed to the supposedly inherent barbaric and violent masculinity of northern African and Arab Muslims.

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