Judge Colin Daly jailed a Romanian man yesterday. Cristian Gogosiou (40), has been in the country for ten years. He is married with a child. He is also already in prison for the rape of a homeless woman in Limerick in 2019. Yesterday’s sentencing related to a different offence – the 2020 statutory rape of a troubled 15 year old girl, who needed a lift to a friend’s house. Gogosiou agreed to offer her a lift, but only if the child performed oral sex upon him.
Meanwhile in Dublin, security guard Abdiweli Ali (24) was sent to prison for a sexual assault committed last June, where he stood behind a woman on the Luas and masturbated himself to completion, ejaculating on her skirt. He denied the offence entirely, and was caught only because his victim had the presence of mind to go immediately to the Gardai, who were able to match a DNA sample of the semen to Mr. Ali.
Observers of the news will also note the situation in Ballymena, where rioting and disorder has followed the alleged sexual assault of a young teenage girl in the town. The focus of the rioting has been the Roma community, from whose ranks two young men have been arrested and are facing (as yet unproven) charges of culpability for the attack.
It goes without saying that no community or race of people is free from the stain of sex offenders within its ranks. There are hundreds of Irish rapists. There are thousands of Irish men with convictions for sexual offences less serious than rape.
There is also, it must be noted, another side to this story that is entirely ignored in conversations around migration and sex crime, that being that the vast majority of trafficked women in the Irish prostitution and sex trade are themselves migrants, and that evidence would suggest that a very large proportion of those men who pay to abuse those women (deluding themselves in some cases that it is a “consensual transaction”) are Irish.
But for the purpose of this piece we will confine ourselves to a discussion of the elephant in the room when it comes to sex crime and migration.
All sexual assault is, of course, a crime of entitlement. A sex crime is almost (not quite, but almost) always a crime where a man feels that he has some entitlement to the body of a woman. In essence it is a cultural crime. By which I mean that it is a crime which violates entirely our cultural norms around the rights of women. I mention that because these cultural norms are not universal.
India, for example, is ranked by experts as the most dangerous country in the world for a woman, from the perspective of sexual violence. Many Islamic countries, for example, do not believe in such a thing as marital rape. In much of the Islamic world, a man has a legal right to sexual access to his wife’s body, with her marriage to him being effectively considered a permanent abrogation of her right to refuse him. In Algeria, for example, the Algerian Family Code explicitly requires that a wife obey her husband, including in the matter of sexual submission to him.
It gets worse: In large parts of the Middle East, and in many African countries, rape is formally illegal but almost impossible to prosecute because of laws and cultural norms which essentially blame the victim. For example, in Algeria and Tunisia, a man can escape a conviction for rape if he marries his victim. In many cases, tribal societies will compel such a marriage in order to abrogate the “shame” associated with the victim. In effect, this means that in parts of Algeria a woman can be “claimed” through the act of sexually violating her.
Again, in case it is necessary to state it, it is clearly not the case that every man from these societies is dangerous or even potentially dangerous. Indeed many people from such societies flee to the west not only because of economic necessity, but because of a desire to free themselves from places where such backward views dominate.
Yet, it is also readily apparent – just look at the “grooming gangs” scandal in the United Kingdom – that a notable proportion of people from cultures with that kind of heritage bring their cultural attitudes to them to the west. And that the people who often pay the price for that are innocent women in the west.
It is, further, somewhat incongruous that the Irish media – perhaps in a desire to over-compensate – should focus so much when it comes to “rape culture” on changing the attitudes and behaviour of “Irish men”. Those of us with functioning memories will recall the weeks-long “national conversation” after the murder of Aisling Murphy that included such phrases as “talk to your sons, talk to your friends” in order to persuade Irish men to commit fewer sexually motivated offences.
But there is almost no effort made at a national level to have a conversation with people who come from other – much less hospitable for women – cultures about the need to culturally integrate into western values about the rights of women.
The final point is this: The Irish media and Irish politicians have less than zero interest in a conversation about the connection between immigration and sex crimes, but that does not mean that the conversation is not already happening. It is happening – as any observer with a brain can see – in every town and village and suburb around the country which is being told that it must play host to a cohort of disproportionately male asylum seekers, disproportionately from countries with views on sex crimes akin to those listed above.
In addition, people with eyes can see. They can see the instances of these crimes in our courts, like the Brazilian man jailed a few weeks ago for deciding, while working as a masseuse, to perform unsolicited oral sex on a female client. Or the 47 year old Algerian Taxi Driver in March who decided to roughly grab the breasts of an 18 year old passenger after subjecting her to a series of lewd comments.
This is an issue that is not, for Irish politicians, going to go away. And pretending that anyone who raises it is some kind of racist will only work, for so long. Talking about this remains a taboo in polite Irish society. It did in Britain, too, until Rotherham.