The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

by Douglas Murray

In 2009 police in Norway revealed that immigrants from non-Western backgrounds were responsible for ‘all reported grab-rapes’ – those in which the assailant grabbed the woman off a street or public place – in Oslo.23 In 2011 the Norwegian state’s statistical bureau was willing to note that ‘immigrants are overrepresented in the crime statistics’. They did, however, also suggest that this was not due to any cultural differences, but rather perhaps to the predominance of young men among the immigrant populations. One former head of the violent crime section of the Oslo Police Department, Hanne Kristin Rohde, testified to the extraordinary unwillingness of the Norwegian authorities to admit to what was happening. In relation to the ‘clear statistical connection’ between rapes and migrants who came from cultures where ‘women have no value of their own’, she said that ‘This was a big problem but it was difficult to talk about it.’ As for the rapists’ attitudes towards women, ‘It is a cultural problem,’ said Rohde.