I’m beginning to sense a pattern . . .
Finnish police reported Thursday an unusually high level of sexual harassment in Helsinki on New Year’s Eve and said they had been tipped off about plans by groups of asylum seekers to sexually harass women.
Helsinki deputy police chief IlkkaKoskimaki 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. [via Yahoo! News]
In my piece yesterday on the link between sexual violence and Europe’s new immigrant populations, I touched on Finland:
Looking at violent offenses in Finland in the Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, a trio of researchers found that immigrant populations from Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, and the rest of Africa (taken as a single statistical unit) were more likely than native-born Finns or other immigrant populations to include violent offenders.
The relevant ethnic groups are slightly different, but the same is true in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.
Meanwhile, back in Germany, where Cologne state police have now received 170 complaints of crimes, 117 of which involve sexual assault — or, as the mayor of Cologne might call them, “celebrations” — some attackers apparently studied up for their night on the town:
Officers arrested two men, aged 16 and 23 and apparently of North African origin, overnight on Thursday in connection with the sex attacks, according to German media. . . . Officers also discovered a note on one of the men containing Arabic-German translations for phrases including “nice breasts”, “I’ll kill you” and “I want to have sex with you”, the broadcaster said.
Seductive.
I usually start with an “I really like your dress” or “Would you like to get coffee sometime?” But, then — who knows what women want, really?
