The best response to a series of coordinated sexual assaults this year in Cologne, Germany, is for European officials to educate migrant men on how they should respect women, according to the New York Times’ editorial board.
“A broader challenge is how to acculturate large numbers of mostly young, Muslim men to the sexual and gender norms of Europe,” the board argued Thursday. “Norway has embarked on a nationwide program to help arriving men understand — and respect — European norms. That program should be an inspiration for Germany and other countries.”
As revelers gathered in Cologne in late December to celebrate the New Year, a group of about 1,000 men reportedly from the “Arab or North African area” had other plans. They attacked the celebration, throwing lit fireworks into the crowd, fighting the police and sexually assaulting hundreds of women.
A police report dated Jan. 4 described “scenes in Cologne of crying women fleeing sexual molestation from crowds of men, passersby trying to rescue young girls from being raped, and groups of intoxicated men throwing bottles and fireworks at a police force no longer in control of the situation,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Officials confirmed that the many of perpetrators appear to be “men with migration background,” and that they’re mainly of North African and Arabic origin.
To date, more than 500 complaints related to the New Years Eve attack have been filed, and roughly 75 percent of those reports involve alleged sexual assault. There were similar coordinated sexual assaults in Hamburg and Stuttgart on New Years.
Germany isn’t alone: Swedish law enforcement agents are currently investigating claims of a possible cover-up of coordinated assaults by migrant men dating back to last August.
The attacks come after German Prime Minister Angela Merkel worked hard last year to accept more than one million asylum-seekers from the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan who say they’re fleeing the Islamic State and the Syrian Civil War.
The Times conceded that the Cologne sexual assaults were horrific, and noted that migrants appear to be in some way responsible for the brutal assaults. But the Times concluded that migrant men “must not be stigmatized.”
“As Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s representative for foreign affairs and security policy, rightly observed, ‘Unfortunately violence against women is something that existed before the events that we faced on Dec. 31,'” the Times reported.
The paper added that refugee women are also frequently assaulted and brutalized on their journey to Europe by their own countrymen, adding that European men are sometimes involved.
The Times also blamed the sexual assaults in Cologne on “woefully infective” policing, which the paper said is “certainly to blame” for what happened on New Year’s Eve in Germany’s fourth-largest city.
