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In reply to the discussion: Mayor of Cologne says women should have code of conduct to prevent future assault [View all]anigbrowl
(13,889 posts)1. I'm European. I just live in the USA now.
2. I know what Germany is like, though I have only visited rather than having lived there for any length of time. Yes it's safer than the US, but it's not like crime is an unknown phenomenon.
3. Of course people have had to worry about their safety before. Open a history book for heaven's sake. Perhaps you meant younger generations born after reunification?
4. Safety advice doesn't endorse a culture of danger.
5. None of what you write has anything to do with whether the mayor was blaming the victims, which I still do not believe to be the case. Nor do I think that reiterating basic safety advice is an endorsement of criminal activity.
I am in no way endorsing the misbehavior of these 1000 guys harassing women, but you're talking as if sexual assault was unheard of in Germany. This incident is newsworthy because it was concentrated in both time and place, which is new, and seems to be correlated with a wave of refugees, whose relatively sudden arrival in Europe has been controversial. Stories like this often get blown out of proportion or exaggerated for political reasons, but mass migrations do sometimes involve conflicting norms of behavior in the short term.