You are the kind of pompous, suicidal liberal that has opened up Europe to the teeming hordes of expansionist Islam.

You'd rather die than notice a problem that yes, has a racial and religious element. No one is making up stories about Muslim gang rapes in Australia or Muslim bus burnings or Muslims throwing rocks at Jews in France.

Try to deny these things, go ahead and try. All you can do is spout platitudes about how they're so oppressed. Boo hoo, they get to live in societies with advanced technology and welfare that don't even require them to integrate! That's so much worse than the sandy shit-holes they left behind, I'm sure.

Wake up.

www.rapestop.net

I haven't had a chance to try it as it isn't yet available in my part of the world, but the idea is intriguing.

I can't believe what I just read. Rather, I can't believe that what I read was published in Salon.

Re-reading the letter, substituting USA for Scandanavia, and Blacks for Muslims, I sincerely doubt that it would ever appear in Salon. And, for good measure, Cary links to a blogger's website that reads like a European version of Klan propaganda.

I find it puzzling that such a letter, and response, would appear on what i thought was a progressive website.

an anti-rape device

www.rapestop.net

I haven't had a chance to try it as it isn't yet available in my part of the world, but the idea is intriguing.

Ummm no. This isn't going to PREVENT anything or keep anyone SAFE.

Heather--real bad advice. The FBI reported that over 94,000 women were raped in 2004; if 10% were raped by offenders unknown to the victim, nearly 10,000 women were victims of stranger rape. Try telling those women that they were victims of unscrupulous self defense course promoters and the media, trying to maintain the hegemony of a patriarchal culture. Rather, don't, because that's bullshit. This facet of the crime exists and deserves to be taken seriously.

If you bothered to do so, you might figure that the proper thing to do is to teach people how to be alert in their surroundings, yet not be paralyzed by fear (someone suggested The Culture of Fear--also a great book, which similarly shows that the things we all think we're afraid of are not really the stuff to worry about). You would also figure that teaching people how to defend themselves (if they choose to do so) is not predatory or fear-mongering. But I suppose that's too reasonable; after all, I'm a man, and I'm making this argument, so I suppose I'm disseminating fear tactics against women.

Hans--So a bunch of disenfranchised Muslim youths acted antisocial. Yeah, and what's new? The fact is that lots of similarly anomic young men all around the world (white, black, Muslim, Jew, etc.) do similarly antisocial activities, with innocent people victimized, and this has been going on for a long, long time. Muslims are simply the latest group to be assigned the blame for the utterly non-unique practice.

Oh, and nice touch suggesting that the LW carry an illegal weapon. So you think that it's safer that a young woman terrified of Muslim immigrants will be walking around with a loaded gun when she feels that "there's a man with the Quran in his coat pocket hiding behind every bush, waiting to clubber me down and steal my chastity"?

Freddie--I wouldn't exactly call CT's answer "toxic and bigoted fear-mongering." He was making a completely reasonable point--if you're afraid of victimization, why not get the facts and learn to defend yourself? This has more benefits than the immediate ones of personal safety; learning to defend oneself, after all, can also instill a great deal of confidence, which may be what the LW needs to start addressing her fears.

To be fair, rational responses to irrational fears often don't do much to dampen the initial fear.

Unfortunately, a real emphasis on fear reduction has been lacking in all these responses--including CT's, which I think makes his response inadequate and ignorant, but not "toxic." The LW admits that her fears are irrational, and she ought to address that. Wandering around with irrational fears blinds you if something really is dangerous, plus it just wears you down after a while. How does she do that? I don't know. I am sure that other people, more knowledgable than I, can figure that out.

Glad I got that out of my system.

I suspect that stranger rape in Scandanavia is less common than in the US but statistics are comforting only if you aren't the victim. But the LW's comments about Middle Eastern males pestering her for sex ring true. I have observed and been told about similar behavior toward woman in the US by Middle Eastern (mostly Saudi) students. The approach was that of finding out the female in question was unmarried but sexually active. She was then harrassed for sex. The guys really could not understand that a woman could be selective about who she had sex with. Women were either off-limits (chaste virgins, obedient wives) or public accommodations. No middle ground. When refused, the guys got nasty and sometimes physical. Does this mean that all Middle Eastern men are potential rapists? Of course not. But to pretend that cultural attitudes don't exist or don't influence behavior is silly. People move to decadent, secular societies to enjoy the economic and political rewards of said societies. If they can't handle this freedom they should be politely escorted back to the safety of their tradition-bound homelands.

I guess my initial point that CT's response was "good advice" was not clear; the advice he did give was reasonable in my opinion--he hardly seems to be pushing the Islamophobia that he has been accused of here--but incomplete. I doubt the LW will be completely satisfied even if she does get the facts and learn to defend herself; irrational fear doesn't just go away when confronted with reason, unfortunately.

The situation is different in each Scandinavian capital, but there are similarities among them all. Stranger rape is slightly up everywhere, and the increase is atributable to young Muslim males. I live in Helsinki, and if that's where the LW is, she's right, there has been an increase in rapes. Several young women have been raped by the main train station by immigrant youths, and a "gang" of Muslim youths (to use the term very loosely) recently went on a spree of robbing passersby in and near a large, popular waterfront park (Kaivopuisto). These types pf crimes are more rare in general in the Nordic countries relative to the US, and their increase is a direct result of greater immigration and its concomitant socioeconomic and cultural disparities.

Acquaintance rape and domestic violence are no strangers to Scandinavia, fueled by high alcohol abuse rates; and these crimes are perpetrated by white, "ethnic" Finns, Swedes, Danes, etc. But "attacks out of the dark" are much less common, and their increased incidence is because of the immigration dynamic.

Obviously, women are not to blame; but many of the Muslim youths in question see Finnish, Norwegian, etc., girls as little better than sluts, and attire and behavior that is considered normal by western standards in widely interpreted by many of these young men as an open invitation to heckle, harass, and in some cases, attack. My wife and her friends have been the targets of this type of harassment on two occasions since we moved to Finland in 2003, once at a dark bus stop with few other people around, which was quite unsettling. To date, we have experienced no threatening behavior of this sort by Finns or other European males.

So my advice to this young woman is-- forget your liberal guilt and ignore atempts to make you feel guilty over common sense. You know that not all young immigrants are rapists and misogynists, but you need to be very careful if you're out alone, out partying, etc., in areas where these young men hang out. Be safe.