A young German woman is to be sent to jail for a hate crime because she sent “insulting” messages to a man who walked free after being part of a gang rape of a 15 year-old girl. Critics have noted that she will do prison time, while he, a rapist, was given a suspended sentence.
The twenty year-old woman will be sent to a juvenile facility for 48 hours because she sent a message to the defendant in 2021 after his identity began to be circulated when a court in Hamburg ruled that eight out of nine men accused of raping a teenager should not serve time.
The woman sent WhatsApp messages to one of the perpetrators, referring to him as a “dishonourable rapist pig” and a “disgusting freak”. She asked him if he was ashamed when he looked in the mirror, and said that if he went anywhere he would get “a punch in the face.”
The rapist reported her to the police, and now she has been punished by judges who reportedly found her guilty of a hate crime, deciding she was being “insulting and threatening”. That is an appalling reflection of the growing disorder at the intersection of immigration, ‘hate speech’, and women’s rights in Europe.
It was a case that “stunned” Germany, and much of the rest of the world. A teenage girl, just fifteen – a child – at the time of the brutal and prolonged assault, had been gang-raped by nine men in a public park in Hamburg.
The child was showing signs of intoxication when she became isolated from her friends and was raped by nine men in the Stadtpark over a period of hours.
First, four of the men led the girl into a bush and sexually assaulted and raped her. They also stole her mobile phone and wallet. Then another two men raped her, and when she came across another of the men, he also raped her.
None of the men tried to help her, no-one showed mercy, or pity, or kindness or even common human decency. It’s one thing to see headlines about gang rape, but reading how it unfolds against a brutalised child should fill us with revulsion.
The rapists were by now inviting other groups of men to the scene via group chats, explaining where they could find the victim while also telling their revolting friends that there were no witness near the defenceless teenager. They even began sharing videos of their depravity, another horror that the girl will have to live with.
Three more of these depraved men then took the teenager into the bushes to sexually assault and rape her again. One of them was acquitted as the court found it unclear as to whether he had taken part in the last of the gang rapes.
The child was raped by at least nine men over a two and a half hour period. It is a the kind of harrowing, traumatising, experience that is really beyond our understanding. The mindset of the kind of people who would carry out such a crime is also inexplicable. It is animalistic behaviour, devoid of empathy.
According to one expert, the group factor can be a strong motivator for this sort of aggressive, impulsive and violent behaviour. “The men involved in gang rape may be worried more about their reputation with each other, and their status as dominant males, than the life of the women they assault,” forensic psychologist Dr. N.G. Berrill said.
The rapists might not care that they’re “damaging another person,” he explained – and that was clearly the case in Hamburg. They made videos and invited their friends – how devoid of empathy or decency do you need to be to indulge in that sick behaviour?
The victim was hypothermic when she was found and had to be rushed to intensive care. The court heard that she suffered from PTSD. DNA evidence showed that sperm from nine of the attackers was found on the victim.
Dr Berrill also noted that group violence perpetrated by men is most frequently targeted at women, who are often seen as socially subordinate. While Western culture – and the kind of machismo that is all too prevalent in certain sports in particular – is also surely tilting in the wrong direction, it would be absurd to ignore the outsized role that immigration and a culture that is hostile to women’s rights has in the disturbing cases of gang rape now being seen across Europe.
According to Spiegel, four of the men who stood trial for the gang rape were from Hamburg, while another four have Armenian, Afghan, Kuwaiti and Montenegrin nationality, and the nationality of the other two had not been clarified. BILD reported that they showed no remorse during the trial. Because the perpetrators were aged between 17 and 21 at the time, the case was conducted by a youth chamber and the public was excluded from the proceedings.
Almost incredibly, the Hamburg Regional Court last December sentenced just one of the rapists – a Serbian – to prison with a sentence of two years and nine months without parole. The other eight defendants got off with probation, with some “instructions for educational support”.
In other words, eight of the 9 rapists walked free. The outrage that erupted was further fanned by comments from psychiatrist Nahlah Saimeh, who reportedly appeared before the court as an expert witness.
She told Spiegel that the group attack may have been a way to vent “frustration” due to “migration experiences and sociocultural homelessness”.
“Disordered, unprepared migration experiences and sociocultural homelessness increase the risk of addiction and psychosis,” she said.
“Sex is also a means of venting frustration and anger, a means of warding off sadness and emptiness, and in a group of men with the same fate it also creates identity and strengthens the group feeling.”
She added, “The victim becomes a pure instrument for their own sexual gratification. It’s about an immediate need, opportunity, inner conviction and the right of the stronger.”
Her comments seem to draw a very strange dichotomy between understanding the difficulties migrants can face, and the right of women not to be gang raped. That frankly disturbing positioning has been hinted at again and again in recent times in some media reports and from some commentators.
Consider the attempts to cover-up the horrific events in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2015 when 1,200 women were sexually assaulted in the city centre by what the police eventually admitted were large groups of Arab or North African men.
Initially, the police said the night had been “mostly peaceful”. Only when women persisted did the truth emerge, including the revelation that similar attacks had happened in other cities across Germany.
Suspicion of cover-up were heightened when it emerged that officials had asked that a preliminary report of the attacks which mentioned “rape, sexual assaults and thefts carried out by a large group of foreign nationals” be toned down. Cologne police were asked to remove the word ‘rape’ from their description of the night’s assaults.
In the UK, the now notorious rape of thousands of girls in areas like Rotherham and Rochdale by grooming gangs of largely Pakistani heritage were not fully investigated for years for fear of stoking “racial tensions”. Girls as young as 11 had been raped, abducted, beaten for years but tiptoeing around identify politics was deemed more important than their right not to be sexually assaulted.
In February of this year, the alleged gang rape, by seven Egyptian migrants, of a 13-year old child in Sicily in a public park led one international news agency to fret that the attack would assist the ‘far-right’, even while acknowledging that at least two other similarly horrific cases had taken place in Italy the previous summer – one where a group of seven men allegedly raped a 19-year-old girl in Palermo, and another where nine men were arrested in relation to allegedly “raping two cousins aged 10 and 12 near Naples and broadcasting the attack live on social media”.
What does it say about the media, and much of the establishment, that they sometimes seem more concerned with the impact of gang rapes by foreign nationals on the status of migrants than on the actual victims – usually young women who have been put through a horrific and brutal ordeal?
We’ve seen it in this country when media largely chose to ignore the powerful testimony of Ashling Murphy’s boyfriend, Ryan Casey, when he made profound and compelling observations about migration and violent crime. In fact, the young man, whose girlfriend – the ‘love of his life’ – had been murdered, was even accused of incitement to hatred.
There is something deeply wrong with how commentary on trends around violence crime against women is being monitored and controlled if migrants are involved. And its a trend that doesn’t serve the many decent and law-abiding people who come here to work and who are equally appalled at these attacks.
Either women’s safety is paramount or it is not. In the strange and shifting hierarchy of who has priority from the media and the establishment in regard to reporting and protection is it evident that women are no longer of primary concern.
The young German woman who will now have a criminal record for expressing her anger and frustration may have broken the law. But I suspect that many women reading the messages she sent will agree with her. She should not be jailed. The men who raped a 15-year old girl should.