Chapter 1
The Clock Turns Back
We in the West are used to seeing women everywhere around us. We see them as colleagues in the office, sitting next to us on the bus, as patrons in restaurants, jogging on the streets, and working in shops. We are also seeing more women than ever in leadership positions as prime ministers, politicians, chancellors, directors, and bosses. Women born in the West in the 1990s onward take this as a given. They do not consider that walking to school or sitting in a cafĂ© is a triumph of liberalism. But in some parts of Western cities and towns these days, you may notice something strange: there are simply no women aroundâor very few.
Walking in certain neighborhoods in Brussels, London, Paris, or Stockholm, you suddenly notice that only men are visible. The shop assistants, waiters, and patrons in cafés are all men. In parks nearby, it is only men and boys playing soccer. In the communal areas of apartment buildings, it is men talking, laughing, and smoking. On the continent to which millions of tourists travel each year to see the female body as an object of art or wearing the latest fashions, this seems a little strange. What happened to the women? Why are they no longer sitting at sidewalk cafés or chatting in the streets?
The answer is that some women have removed themselves from those neighborhoods, others have been hounded out, and still others are at home, out of sight. As more women erase themselves from public places in such neighborhoods, the few who remain are exposed, drawing the attention of men inhabiting the area. There is no formal segregation, but a feeling of discomfort and vulnerability is enough to make any woman walking alone shudder and think âI wonât come this way again.â
Women in such areas are harassed out of the public square. Some men call out to them, âHey, baby, give me your numberâ or âNice assâ or âWhat are you doing here?â Whatever their age or appearance, if they are female and especially if they are alone, they get the same treatment. A persistent harasser might follow a woman up the street, touch her, and block her path. If a woman looks vulnerable, some men will go further: they pick her as a target, they encircle and intimidate her, groping her, pulling at her clothes, and occasionally doing worse.
Such incidents are becoming more common. Women and girls across Europe speak of being harassed walking to the shops, at school and university, in swimming pools, in nightclub bathrooms, in parks, at festivals, in parking lots. They say that local streets and public places are no longer safe. And their assailants have no shame about perpetrating their harassment in public.
Finding robust data about this phenomenon is notoriously difficult. My research assistants and I have spent two years combing through the available sourcesâcrime statistics, court reports, police reports, government accounts, academic sourcesâand none of them offer a complete picture. We know that only a small fraction of women report being sexually assaulted after they have suffered it and even fewer report sexual harassment, which most women shrug off as being part of the course of their daily lives. Frustratingly, many of the relevant experiences of ordinary women rarely make it into the public domain, beyond isolated posts on social media.
In speaking to European women, however, I have come to see that the problem goes much deeper and wider than the stories that appear in the news. Their testimony has convinced me that we are living through a quiet but significant erosion of womenâs rights in some neighborhoods in Europe. If this trend continues, it will affect more and more places in Europe; more and more streets will become unsafe for women. For now, these neighborhoods have two things in common: low income and a large number of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.
A CHANGE FOR WOMEN IN EUROPE
As a Somali arriving in the Netherlands in 1992, I was shocked to see young women alone on public transport and in bars and restaurants. I had grown up knowing that to step outside the house without covering my head and body, or without a male relative to escort me, would make me a target for harassment and assault. But in Holland, women freely walked the streets at night without men to chaperone them, their hair uncovered, wearing whatever they pleased.
Of course, there were exceptions. There were assaults, rapes, and occasionally murders of women, even in Holland. But those cases were so exceptional that they made national news for weeks. As I acclimated to life in a Western city, I learned that the position of women there was radically different from what it was in the world I had come from. Today, almost three decades later, that can no longer be said with the same confidence. A growing number of European women are questioning their safety. Cases of rape, assault, groping, and sexual harassment in public places seem to have become more numerous.
It is no secretâthough it is considered impolite or politically incorrect to point it outâthat the perpetrators are disproportionately young immigrant men from the Middle East, South Asia, and various parts of Africa. Often operating in groups, they are making it increasingly unsafe for women to venture into a growing number of neighborhoods in European cities.
It is a truism to say women have always suffered the threat of sexual violence. But for at least the last four decades in Europe, it was the exception, not the rule. In the 1990s, I assumed that developing countries would gradually become more like Europe. Back then, few people would have predicted that parts of Europe would begin to...
