Two German feminists debate Cologne in Der Spiegel [View all]

[sibelian]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-feminists-debate-cologne-attacks-a-1072806.html

Schwarzer: The debate over sexual violence has re-emerged as a result of that night in Cologne. Even Germany's justice minister, who for years allowed necessary reforms to tighten Germany's rape laws torot in a drawer, has pulled them out again. But when you only speak using generalizations, you run the danger of denying the specific. In recent decades, millions of people have come to us from cultural groups within which women have absolutely no rights. They do not have a voice of their own and they are totally dependent on their fathers, brothers or husbands. That applies to North Africa and that applies to large parts of the Middle East. It isn't always linked to Islam. But since the end of the 1970s, at the beginning of the revolution in Iran under Khomenei, we have experienced a politicization of Islam. From the beginning, it had a primary adversary: the emancipation of women. With more men now coming to us from this cultural sphere, and some additionally brutalized by civil wars, this is a problem. We cannot simply ignore it.

Wizorek: But it is also wrong to look only at the origin of the perpetrators. When I see the kinds of people that are now jumping into the debate over women's rights, it also includes, among others, the same politicians who, during the #aufschrei debate in 2013, said that women shouldn't be so demanding. Now that men with immigration backgrounds have committed sexual assaults, it is being instrumentalized in order to stigmatize them as a group. I think that is racist.

Worth reading, I'd suggest. Adds quite a bit of perspective.