Imagine it was you. Just imagine if you or someone you know was raped.
Across the road, an angry megaphone-wielding man paces behind police barriers, a self-styled ‘protector of women and children’ who ‘protects’ us by yelling abuse at defunct hotels. ‘Unite The Clans’ (UTC), formerly ‘Aberdeen against Illegal Migration’ (AAIM), whose core membership includes proud Nazis. They feign horror that we are not on their side, and accuse us of protecting “‘paedos’ and rapists”. “Don’t we understand?”, they shout. “Don’t we care?”
On our side, it happens to be mostly women this week. We look at each other and laugh bitterly.
Imagine it was you. Imagine.
When women were ‘safe’
We share our stories, as women often do. There were no protests when we were raped. None of us ever saw justice. Statistics sometimes say non-white demographics are more likely to be convicted of sexual assault, but we know how unlikely white men are to be convicted.
People who have exposed grooming gangs explain that the issue wasn’t that “police are afraid of not being PC“, but “police don’t care about girls from poor families“. Police only recently stopped openly calling 12-year-old rape victims “child prostitutes”, and delivered them back to their (mostly white) abusers. Authorities expose certain grooming gangs, but rarely those which include their bosses, politicians, doctors and judges.
UTC insists we need to go back to ‘before’, when women were supposedly ‘safe’. When men in Scotland could legally rape their wives (all the way back to 1989) and women couldn’t open a bank account without a man’s approval? But that’s their worldview. They only care about ‘their’ women and children. It has always been like this. They didn’t care when it was white men raping us.
When these protests started, we tried to engage. We answered their questions. We explained that what they’re suddenly angry about – housing, wages, NHS waiting lists, child protection, women’s safety – are things we’ve been working on all this time. They’ve always been welcome to join us.
The real threat
We shared the open letter from 100 plus women’s rights organisations, condemning their use of rhetoric about sexual violence as a tool for racism. Feminists have spent decades trying to get people to understand that the real threat is in our homes, relationships and workplaces, and that this is rolling back progress.
The men yelling at us are almost certainly the same men who’d laugh at jokes about drunk girls, and call us lying whores if we accused a man they like. They call us “cunts”, “spunkbuckets”, “fat”, “ugly”, “cripples”, “faggots”, “trannies” and they encourage small children to join in.
Seeing an attractive woman on our side, they describe her being gang raped by asylum seekers. After the hotel riots last year, 41% of those arrested had been previously reported for domestic violence. We recognise the anger in the men behind the barriers. We’ve seen it before.
Imagine it was you.
They stand outside hotels screaming “paedo” and “rapist”, accusing us of protecting “beasts”, because they believe all the residents are rapists. They point to the handful of terrible cases where asylum seekers have been convicted. When we still engaged, we tried to point out the obvious flaws. A white Scottish man raped me, therefore I should be outside their homes twice a week howling “rapist”, right? They’ve discovered two paedophiles in their small group already – one a convicted sex offender another been accused of grooming. Yet this group have asked people not to judge them for it. It’s different, they insist. They’re ‘our’ men.
Women who shout at hotels
A few women stand with them. Some are just as vicious and abusive as the men. Some seem to believe they’re doing good. Many have left, after realising that allying with Nazis goes too far, or seeing how ‘protectors of women’ treat women who aren’t ‘theirs’. A few hold on, though.
People familiar with sexual violence and the justice system recognise them. There are always women who blame the victim. It’s unbearable to know the person most likely to hurt you is a man you love; we have to believe there is a way to keep ourselves safe. So we invent ‘rules’. We decide that if bad things have happened, it must be because she didn’t follow them. The men in their lives won’t angrily bring up ‘false accusations’ or ‘silly mistakes’. No one will ask what the victim was wearing. But when a rapist comes from outside their community, they can finally condemn him directly.
In Falkirk, UTC yell at women, saying that they don’t have to worry about being raped because no sexual predator would want them. We could try to explain that rape is about power, not lust; that beauty is not relevant, but it would be pointless. Hotel shouters do not understand the cause that they claim to defend.
Imagine it was you.
Where are the women and children?
They play terrible AI-generated songs. One starts, “where are the women and children?” During the summer we answered. They laughed.
They have macho power fantasies about what they’d do if their own families were threatened. They confidently say they’d never leave ‘their’ women and children behind in a war zone. It’s a nice idea, if you don’t know anything about war zones. But when you understand what happens to women and children as they flee violence, you know why they stay behind in mass refugee camps or where family can support them.
Do you know how many children went missing from refugee groups moving through Europe? Do you know what happens to women in precarious situations, reliant on gangs? Do you know how unlikely it is that a baby will survive a capsizing boat? Do you know that women cannot usually tread water as long as men? As any women’s refuge knows, escape is often at least as dangerous as the place you’re escaping from.
That’s why a man, who loves his family, will risk his own life to find and create a safe place for them all to land. That doesn’t make a catchy song. Asylum seekers are largely fighting-age men, because these are the people who survive the trek. I wonder how many of the men I watch over the road every week could handle the years of sacrifice and strength required?
Are men inherently predatory?
But they cannot imagine men, who don’t look like them, as being selfless or brave or loving, only as rapists. Two main possibilities for this failure are haunting. Rapists believe all men are inherently predators and the only reason they deny it is due to lack of opportunity or courage. They cannot believe a man would not just rape someone given the chance. Therefore, they believe that anyone from an ‘inferior’ culture with (they assume) fewer cultural guardrails, must be a rapist.
The other possibility is their own experience of men. If they have grown up around, and possibly been hurt by, predatory men, they may think this is inevitable. As with victim-blaming women, it’s easier to focus on something far away as it is perceived as easier to contain.
Imagine it was you or someone you know
Imagine saying that to a crowd of women. Imagine thinking we don’t know what it is to be raped, to have police tell you it would never get to court. Imagine thinking we don’t know what it’s like to hold a friend’s hand and watch her be betrayed by the justice system. Imagine thinking the only rapes that count are violations of pure white women by evil brown invaders. Imagine believing this sprang out of nowhere, when people seeking asylum were allowed into the country.
Imagine it was you. Imagine.
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