The common denominator in most sex attacks is not race or ethnicity, but gender

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Carolyn Leckie: The common denominator in most sex attacks is not race or ethnicity, but gender

JANUARY 11TH, 2016 - 12:12 AM

CAROLYN LECKIE

5 COMMENTS

WHEN I was very young – no more than 13 – I still enjoyed going to the football. I followed a Rangers team that had the majestic Davie Cooper in it. But my diverging politics were propelling me away from a team steeped in Unionist Orange tradition.

 

What also pulled me away from football was that I’d stopped looking like a boy. And so I became fair game for groups of drunken men who thought it was their right to grope me as I ran a gauntlet from Ibrox along Paisley Road West.

 

I was also regularly subjected to the rather unpleasant sight of lines of men, who had no doubt been taught how to use toilets, brazenly displaying their penises as they peed up against walls. But it was all considered something girls and women had to put up with if they wanted to go to the football. If you dared to enter a man’s world, you’d just have to put up with the consequences.

 

Not long after I stopped going to the football, I reported a teacher for asking inappropriate questions and pinging my bra strap on multiple occasions.

 

Because the culprit was not of Scottish origin, the head teacher asked me if I was being racist – and I was shifted out of the highest class to one where nobody was expected to pass their ‘O’ grade. So I didn’t get it.

 

The attacks in Cologne on Hogmanay – on hundreds of women by drunken young men who felt entitled to assault women – reminded me of my experiences.

 

Women reported that most of the perpetrators were of North African and Arabic appearance, while the police were accused of standing back and allowing it to happen.

 

These atrocities have prompted two conflicting responses – neither of which offers any serious insight.

 

On the one side, we have heard the predictable cacophony of far-right and racist voices, who seize any excuse to demand the deportation of refugees. In their blinkered little world, immigrants, especially from the Muslim countries, are the root cause of every problem that rears its head, from terrorist violence to common criminality and the abuse of women.

 

On the other side, there are those who play down the seriousness of these outrages, because they feel uncomfortable that they might be helping fuel the flames of racism.

 

But this is not about race or religion. The clear common denominator between the attackers in Cologne and the guys who assaulted me on Paisley Road West is that they are men.

 

Feminists like me are often castigated when we point that out. There is always the immediate response: “But not all men behave like that.” And of course, that’s true. Not all men are misogynists. And that applies not just to middle-class white men, but to black, Asian and Arabic men. And to refugees.

 

There can no equivocation when dealing with sexual violence. Whoever the perpetrator, actions such as were seen on the streets of Cologne deserve uncompromising condemnation. Any prevarication on this issue can only endanger women by sending out the message to men everywhere that sexual violence is a trivial matter.

 

Failure to condemn the street scenes in Cologne on racial grounds is the other side of the racist coin.

 

It is to treat men differently because of their ethnicity. And it is to betray women of all races and religions. Women everywhere have a right to be safe in their communities and free from the fear of men’s violence.

 

Perpetrators of rape and sexual assault should be shown no fear or favour in holding them to account. And the justice system should identify the correct perpetrators and allow the criminal justice system to proceed.

 

If any of the accused are convicted, any punishment should be exactly the same as it would be for a white, native German. Any policy response should be about eliminating men’s violence against women and the sexism and misogyny that underpin that violence.

 

If the response is to put up more barriers to refugees or to deport people for their crimes, then it is entirely the wrong message to send – that rape is a racial problem.

 

It leaves women at the mercy of the thousands of white men who commit rape and sexual offences. In 2014, 8,031 rapes and sexual assaults were reported in Germany. It’s estimated that’s about eight per cent of the actual number carried out because the other 92 per cent were never reported.

 

Germany is far from unique. Across the globe, Rape Crisis estimates one in every four women experience sexual violence at the hands of an intimate partner. Every week, millions of women across the planet experience rape and sexual assault.

 

If women were to suggest that the solution to this global crisis is to deport men from the planet, they would be ridiculed. But it makes no more sense to suggest that the way to deal with sexual violence in Germany is to deport non-white men.

 

I admire the women of Cologne who took to the streets with placards declaring "no sexism, no racism".

 

All men are brought up in a world, where, to varying degrees on a continuum, women are seen as the property of men, who in turn have a right to use and abuse female bodies as they please.

 

Right here, right now, women, girls, boys, and men, are being raped, abused and assaulted by men. Every weekend, in your town, in your city, groups of men in nightclubs harass women, and hone in on those they’ll think they might get away with assaulting. And many will.

 

So, no, we shouldn’t be frightened to talk about Cologne, and the men who assault women. And let’s make sure we also talk about the sexual violence happening around us, in our homes, our streets and our country. Without fear or favour.

 

This girl is getting called all names on another Rangers Forum. I feel that because of this story I have to tell of the experience I and my sister went through when we went to watch Rangers in a game which would have been in the early 70.s. My sister was 3 years older than me. We went to watch a Rangers game with a pretty large crowd. I have now forgotten who we were playing. I would think that my sister was about 16\17 and I was about 13. All of a sudden my sister started screaming and tried to pull me away through the crowd. She later told me that a number of people started putting their hands up her skirt and sexually assaulting her. My sister who was a mad Rangers supporter never ever returned to Ibrox and although loving football actually hated Rangers. I often tried to explain to her that the club had done her no wrong that it was a group of idiots but her memories of that incident kept her bitter to the end, She died on October 31st 2015 at the age of 61 hating the club the rest of our family all loved.

That hurts me like hell.