Tell me if this sounds familiar. Then tell me why Finnish police waited a week to mention it.

As in Cologne, this apparently wasn’t a case of drunken revelry leading to boorishness and assault. It was planned.

Helsinki deputy police chief Ilkka Koskimaki told AFP: “There hasn’t been this kind of harassment on previous New Year’s Eves or other occasions for that matter… This is a completely new phenomenon in Helsinki.” Security guards hired to patrol the city on New Year’s Eve told police there had been “widespread sexual harassment” at a central square where around 20,000 people had gathered for celebrations. Three sexual assaults allegedly took place at Helsinki’s central railway station on New Year’s Eve, where around 1,000 mostly Iraqi asylum seekers had converged… “Ahead of New Year’s Eve, the police caught wind of information that asylum seekers in the capital region possibly had similar plans to what the men gathered in Cologne’s railway station have been reported to have had,” police said in a statement.

Strikingly similar to Cologne, from the premeditation involved to the train station being selected as a target to the estimate of how many men were there. To repeat, though: Why’d it take a week for this to come out, especially given the international media attention to what happened in Germany? Forgive my cynical heart for suspecting that Finnish authorities may have held the information in hopes of quietly burying it but then changed their minds, either because the Cologne attacks gave them cover to say what happened in Helsinki isn’t a uniquely Finnish problem or because they feared a cover-up like the one attempted in Cologne would eventually be exposed.

Your must-read of the day on the consequences of importing huge numbers of young, unmarried men from male-dominated cultures comes from Valerie Hudson. Hudson looked at the sex ratios in Sweden among refugees from the Middle East and was struck by how skewed they are, especially among very young (i.e. teenaged) refugees. Sweden already had a slight male skew among 16- and 17-year-olds; when you add in the overwhelming skew among refugees of the same age, you get 123 males to 100 females, a ratio more lopsided than even China’s. Bad things tend to happen in societies where a large number of men are doomed to go unmarried. Young single men are prime recruits for terrorists, sure, but the cultural symptoms of this demographic asymmetry go beyond that:

As my co-author Andrea Den Boer and I argued in our book, societies with extremely skewed sex ratios are more unstable even without jihadi ideologues in their midst. Numerous empirical studies have shown that sex ratios correlate significantly with violence and property crime—the higher the sex ratio, the worse the crime rate. Our research also found a link between sex ratios and the emergence of both violent criminal gangs and anti-government movements. It makes sense: When young adult males fail to make the transition to starting a household—particularly those young males who are already at risk for sociopathic behavior due to marginalization, a common concern among immigrants—their grievances are aggravated. There are also clearly negative effects for women in male-dominated populations. Crimes such as rape and sexual harassment become more common in highly masculinized societies, and women’s ability to move about freely and without fear within society is curtailed. In addition, demand for prostitution soars; that would create a deeply ironic outcome for Sweden, which invented the path-breaking Swedish abolitionist approach to prostitution.

The solution for fans of open borders is straightforward. Exclude men from the refugee pool and start admitting women only, at least until sex ratios are back in balance. The solution for opponents of open borders is also straightforward. Shut the door before Europeans are forced to conclude that mass public celebrations are effectively “no-go zones” for the wider population, particularly women. If Europe’s current leadership doesn’t choose one of those options, whatever replaces them will. And whatever replaces them is more likely to choose the second option than the first one.

As for Cologne, the city’s police chief, who insisted early on that there was no evidence refugees were involved in the assault when his own deputies had reason to believe otherwise, is now out of a job. I’ll leave you with this from Deutsche Welle, reporting that Cologne police found video of some of the New Year’s harassment of women on the cell phones of two suspects, presumably as a sort of trophy: “Police also found a piece of paper with translations of phrases like ‘nice breasts,’ ‘I’ll kill you,’ and ‘I want to have sex with you,’ translated from Arabic into German, wrote the broadcaster.”