https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EE6AISDngGs
I guess we’ll start to talk about this book, pray. Immigration, Islam and the erosion of women’s rights. I had an uneasy feeling reading it continually. I mean, you do say right off the bat. This is a trigger warning for the entire book. Reading it, you should be triggered. Well, I would say I was triggered by reading it. I was triggered partly as a social scientist, I would say, to begin with, because. I as I went through the initial part of the book in particular, which deals with statistics pertaining to the sexual assault of women, I was reminded of the many studies that I’ve been involved in dealing with complex, multifactorial problems, and it’s very, very difficult. To deal scientifically or mathematically or statistically with a complex social issue. And you run into that problem or encounter that problem over and over among many other problems when you’re formulating your argument to begin with. For example, you’re and stop me if I get any of this wrong. You’re you’re making a case that. There is some threat to women’s rights in Europe, particularly, and that that’s associated with immigration and that some of that threat takes the form of enhanced susceptibility, increased susceptibility to sexual assault. And then you start to delve into the sexual assault statistics and then you run into the immediate problems for. And it’s perhaps worthwhile to walk people through what some of these problems are. How do you define sexual assault, for example? Now, you could define it as the if you define it by the most severe crimes, let’s say rape. Then you miss all the data that might be obtained when you consider all the other forms of sexual misbehavior that might be regarded as assault, unwanted touching on a street, for example. But if you include those, then you risk minimizing the magnitude of the extremely serious forms of sexual assault like rape. And especially if you do it over a lifetime and crank up the prevalence rate so high that they start to become meaningless. Now, I know it’s an appalling thing that a very large percentage of women and perhaps an unknowable percentage face unwanted physical, unwanted sexual attention, psychological and physical. But if if the definition of that becomes so lax that it’s 100 percent of women that suffer from it, then you divert attention away from, for example, from the more serious forms of sexual assault. So. It’s and then you outline as well the difficulties of doing cross cultural comparison, cross country comparisons, because the definitions vary so much from state to state and the difficulty of tracking change in sexual assault prevalence in any given country because of the changing definitions of sexual assault that occur within states. And so I was tempted to throw up my hands at one point and think, well, it’s impossible to get to the bottom of this. So in the face of all that complexity, what argument have you laid out? And why do you think it’s justifiable? So the argument I’m laying out, first of all, is an it’s the story of women and their safety in the public space. So in this book, I’m not making I’m not laying out an argument about sexual violence committed by intimate partners. If you wanted that, it would probably be easier to get those statistics. It would be harder to find them categorized along ethnic lines, but still possible. And I’m not talking about sexual violence against women in, say, in the office at work, the themes that were brought to light by the Me Too movement. So those two things are not the subject of this book. What I’m talking about is the public space. And so I don’t start fast with statistics. So I, you know, I really want I’m not a social scientist. And I don’t think of myself as a social scientist in terms of trying to acquire empirical data, analyze that and interpret it. What I do is it starts with experience. It is in northern European countries. A decade and a half ago, maybe even a decade ago, women took it for granted that they were safe once they left their front door. Not all women. Some neighborhoods are worse than others. But in general, in 1992, when I came to Holland, I don’t recall ever being feeling unsafe in the public space. I was with my Dutch friends and asking, I thought it was striking that women took it for granted in the Netherlands that they were safe in the public. And I saw that in other northern European countries. And when I asked questions about that, they said, what is are you out of your mind? What’s wrong with you? Where you come from? Don’t you take it for granted? And I described to them the societies that I grew up in and how incredibly difficult it was for a woman to get out of her front door and enter the public space without being catcalled after. And so then I go from the descriptions of verbal sexual violence or sexual propositions that are inappropriate and lewd and obscene and are harmful and hurtful all the way to rape. And these women were just stunned. A decade later, I’m hearing from white women in some of these countries describing situations that I thought were, but that’s weird. That’s very interesting. That’s a real change. And Jordan, I know you know a little bit of my background, but I’ve also been engaged in this debate about Islam, integration, immigration, the unintended consequences of immigration and all the taboos around that. So when I first proposed writing this book, it was, for instance, my husband saying the argument will not it won’t go anywhere because you will not be able to get the statistics. And I thought, well, I’ll try. And so I started calling up these justice departments of these various countries and they would provide me with the reports they had made of sexual violence against women in the public space. And some countries, again, are totally as you describe the definitions shift. Some countries say we do record sexual violence against women, but not the ethnicity of the perpetrators or the religion of the perpetrators. In some countries, you would find the testimonies of the victims and they would say that was an Arab looking man. That was a black man. That was a man who spoke with a foreign accent. And I would ask the people who say that they’ve collected these statistics. Why don’t you have that information input? And then you would always run. They would always be off the record. But you would always run into the issue of, well, the issue of immigration is really controversial. The issue of Islam is really controversial. And if you take those two and then you link it to sexual violence, oh, my God, you’re going to empower the right wing populist parties. You’re going to stigmatize Muslims and Islam. It’s not all Muslim men. It’s a universal phenomenon. And I agree with all of these things, but we still have a problem. The safety of women in general in the public space is compromised.