Women’s Rights Challenges in Europe

 

Women’s rights have been an important subject for a century, and this month is Women’s History month in America.  Christianity has had a major influence over gender equality.  See my work on this at A Christian Perspective on Gender Equality, 15 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol’y 339 (2008).

While women have seen greater legal and social equality over the past 100 years, women’s rights around the globe continues to be a struggle.  A new book approaches the subject of growing sexual violence against women in Europe with links to migrant young men.  Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, discusses these concerns.

In Prey, the best-selling author of Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, presents startling statistics, criminal cases and personal testimony.  Among these facts: In 2014, sexual violence in Western Europe surged following a period of stability. In 2018 Germany, “offences against sexual self-determination” rose 36 percent from their 2014 rate; nearly two-fifths of the suspects were non-German. In Austria in 2017, asylum-seekers were suspects in 11 percent of all reported rapes and sexual harassment cases, despite making up less than 1 percent of the total population. 

This violence is not a figment of propaganda, Hirsi Ali insists. It is a real problem that Europe—and the world—cannot continue to ignore. She explains why so many young Muslim men who arrive in Europe engage in sexual harassment and violence, tracing the roots of sexual violence in the Muslim world from institutionalized polygamy to the lack of legal and religious protections for women. 

A refugee herself, Hirsi Ali is not against immigration. As a child in Somalia, she suffered female genital mutilation; as a young girl in Saudi Arabia, she was made to feel acutely aware of her own vulnerability. Immigration, she argues, requires integration and assimilation. She wants Europeans to reform their broken system—and for Americans to learn from European mistakes. Deeply researched and featuring fresh and often shocking revelations, Prey uncovers a sexual assault and harassment crisis in Europe that is turning the clock on women’s rights much further back than the #MeToo movement is advancing it.

Family restoration calls for women to be protected from sexual violence and to be continually empowered with equality of law, dignity, and value.