Article content continued

In North Africa, it doesn’t require a war for sexual abuse to become routine.

Yet this kind of event shouldn’t come as a surprise in a year when more than a million asylum seekers arrived in Germany, many from across the Middle East.

Consider Syria. During the war, rape has been used as a weapon. Women who have lost or left behind their husbands and brothers as they flee the country have been subject to systematic abuse by landlords, employers and gangs of other refugees. Human rights organizations had already been reporting sexual abuse in Germany’s makeshift centers for asylum-seekers. The situation for Sudanese women, following that country’s civil war, is similar.

In North Africa, it doesn’t require a war for sexual abuse to become routine. Some of the anecdotal stories told by victims of the Cologne attacks are strongly reminiscent of what women in Cairo have suffered over the past few years.

Morocco still lacks any specific criminal offence for domestic violence

During the 2013 protests that preceded a coup against former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, for example, 101 sexual assaults (including at least three of rape) were reported among the crowds. These, by the way, were the supposedly secular crowds, not the Muslim Brotherhood protests that followed Morsi’s removal. Here’s what would happen, according to a detailed study by the Worldwide Movement for Human Rights, a non-profit umbrella for 178 organizations:

“According to survivors and witnesses, these attacks tend to form a clear pattern. Attacks are perpetrated by groups of men who single out one or two women and separate them from the crowd by forming a circle around them. The men are mainly in their twenties and thirties. The survivors are groped by the mob and dragged violently to different locations. Sometimes their clothes are removed. Many survivors report members of the group saying, ‘Do not be afraid, I’m protecting you,” while they are being attacked. Attacks last from a few minutes to more than an hour. Several cases of rape have been reported and some survivors have required urgent medical treatment.”