While I understand the knee jerk reaction to the charge of Muslim rapist, that hardly changes the facts: from Europe to Australia to the Middle East, incidents of Muslim youth targeting "whores" (i.e., unveiled women) is well documented - in fact, broadsheet recently ran a piece on the grand mufti of Australia opining on the fact that unveiled women bring rape upon themselves. In Paris, there's a group called Neither whores nor submissive (Ni putes ni soumises) in response to the attacks brought by Muslim youth to unvieled women - though this particular group focuses on the ghettos outside of Paris - in Austrailia, the Muslim men convicted of gang rapes targeted Aussie looking (i.e., white) women - and felt that they were entitled to rape these women because they were - you guess it - unveiled. To the liberals who charge racism regarding this issue, maybe if it's your wife, daughter, mother or, if you're one of those suicidal feminists who defend the veil as a cultural marker of freedom, yourself, that might change your tune...

Yes, it is an issue for concern, especially in Sweden, and especially in some specific parts of the country. Why the leftists, why feminists do not care, Cary asks. Because this bigotry of hiding facts is exactly in their agenda. If you delve into peculiarities of Swedish immigration laws, you would be convinced so too (they are different from laws in other Nordic countries, which in fact helped forming the out of control city Malmoe). Statistics is there, but you have to go to the library, and you have to know how to read it, and it is boring. By the way, the informal NGO that can give most throughout information on this is Faithfreedom.

Yet I see big red flags here. Frankly, this time I doubt that letter writer is a real, genuine person. Students in Scandinavia are not the meek types that silently consider taking themselves out of street life before 11.30 p.m., albeit this is a minor remark. What truly rings is the fact that neither Cary, nor the majority of column’s readers have visited Scandinavia. Hence constructing a question about a personal phobia based on general troubles of Islam in (generalized for the whole of) Scandinavia, and posing it to a L.A. based person whose column is this well read, but not yet in Scandinavia (and we are the emotional crowd that takes on discussing Cary's advice for days if not entire weeks)? One label, aside from what the letter writer signed by (‘Bigot’): Flamer.

I went to college where we had a lot of Scandinavian exchange students (Norway, Denmark and Sweden). Most of them pretty smart well educated kids. They almost all told me, especially the Norwegians, that their government had serious problems dealing with gangs whose members comprised of kids if Pakistani origin. But they also admitted, and also in light of recent Danish cartoons controversy, that they were all worried immigration from other countries, especially non white ones. So media and politicians tended to hype the crimes committed by Pakistanis and Arabs so that they could propose ways to get rid of them. That said, its probably not that far a claim that most of the Pakistani kids, their parents were not highly educated when they immigrated to Scandinavia, so they dont have time to properly tend to the kids and the kids tended to turn to religion when they cant find ways to integrate.

Germany is by no mean a perfect example, but even they have a large Arab

/Turkish popn, but you dont hear the kind of hysteria that you are now maybe

hearing in Scandinavia.

To LW, maybe your fear has more to do with prejudice than fear of rape.

In college, the first thing any harassment prevention counselor will tell

you that rape is committed by people you know. I am guessing you probably

dont have any Muslim friends or acquaintainces, so chances are that, God

forbid, if a chance of harassment occurs then it will be by some one

you already are friends with and you trust them. So you wanna protect yourself? g

et rid of your prejudice first. and yes, get advice of of agencies that give

good advice of protecting you.

Cary, I usually respect your advice, but today you are way off the mark. You've conflated the proximate cause of the LW's fear - the phobia of Muslim men she exhibits - with the ultimate cause, which is much more slippery and insidious.

She is a young woman in a new, disorienting, frightening city and a student at a new university who is probably feeling a great deal of stress about her academic career. Add to that the normal incidents of sexual harassment that are experienced in many large cities, and naturally she feels anxious and frightened!

I cannot speak to the actual rate of Muslim-on-Scandinavian stranger rapes, but I suspect that this idea is a bit of a red herring. Muslims are, for a whole host of reasons too complicated to get into here, the standard bogeymen for the LW's society right now. It stands to reason that she would fear Muslim men in the same way that many white Americans fear young black men. Again, I am not making claims about the reality of those fears one way or another. That's just a description of the archetype operating in her mind: the sexually voracious, dark-skinned Other who invades places she previously considered safe.

So what to do? First, I agree that LW absolutely needs to take a self-defense class. They can have a truly amazing effect of confidence boosting, not to mention reducing the chances of rape. She should look into classes that specifically offer techniques for physically smaller defendants to use against larger armed assailants. She is not helpless!

Second, I think she needs to work on reducing this phobia of Muslim men. Are there any Muslim-oriented youth centers she could volunteer at? Or maybe she could take a class on Islam or Muslim immigrants at her university? It might help simply to learn a few words of Arabic - I have used this technique to help defuse harassment by Latinos and it usually works. Many travel books contain phrases that one should use in commonly encountered situations.

LW: Best of luck in overcoming this fear.