There’s an attempt shaping up to associate refugees with criminality, in particular assault crimes against women. It’s a clever maneuver to taint them not just as potential terrorists but also as potential rapists–which explains why they’re targeting single men among refugees for deportation. It’s good that attention is brought to crimes against women since we’re more accustomed to having them dismissed as exaggerated claims. But this is just another twist on the theme of using feminism to promote racism, xenophobia, & militarism.
It’s hard to find meaning in the statistical comparisons of rape from different countries. They’ve been done but you can’t figure out what they mean. Quite frankly, they’re almost worthless. We know sexual assault against women & children is a massive problem everywhere but on face value, in the statistical charts, the highest rates are in places like Australia, the US, Sweden, Costa Rica, South Africa, Belgium, New Zealand, Iceland, Norway, Israel. The countries from whence the refugees are coming have the lowest rates.
Of course there are criminals among the refugees–like in any society this side of Utopia. But this scare-mongering is nothing more than the age-old technique of discrediting refugees & immigrants by associating them with criminality, including drugs. They’ve been doing that with Mexicans & Central Americans for decades but repeated studies by reputable research institutes going back nearly a hundred years show they have considerably lower crimes rates across the board than native born residents.
Let the xenophobes put that in their pipes & smoke it.