By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Immigration, Islam, and the erosion of women’s rights.
From the cover:
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 isn’t a figment of alt-right propaganda, Hirsi Ali insists, even if neo-Nazis exaggerate it. It’s 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. If this doesn’t happen, the calls to exclude new Muslim migrants from Western countries will only grow louder.
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.
Why should you read this book?
Immigration and religious systems are nuanced topics. This book brings some of those nuances into light. It’s dangerous and wrong to vilify immigration and religions as a whole. But it’s just as dangerous and wrong to deny the problems that exist within toxic institutionalized beliefs. Immigration exists because of poverty, war, radicalism, and destabilized countries. The point Ali is trying to make in this book is that we need to do better to protect women by improving integration and assimilation for migrants who come into Western countries.
This book should not be used to condone racism or xenophobia. But it does call us to address the problems that come with immigration.
Excerpts:
“For a few decades, discussion has focused on how some men treated their own relatives: wives, sisters, cousins, nieces, and others. The forms of violence justified in the name of honor—including murders, beatings, and incarcerations—are by now familiar or should be. In Europe, as in the rest of the West, it has taken a lot of activism and some high-profile cases to bring these issues into the open and to expose the numerous cases when sharia tribunals have endorsed child marriages, forced marriages, polygamous marriages, wife beating, and unjust divorce settlements. Survivors have been accused of lying; those who sided with the victims have been accused of various forms of bigotry. Even to acknowledge that Muslim women were being denied their rights in the name of culture and religion, often by their own families, has been difficult. Often the victims have simply been ignored.”
“Put simply, evidence of sexual misconduct by some Muslim immigrants provides populists and other right-wing groups and parties with a powerful tool to demonize all Muslim immigrants. If we bring this issue out of the taboo zone, discussion will cease to be monopolized by those elements.”
“The overwhelming majority of these young men have arrived from countries where women are not regarded as equals or near equals, as they are in Europe. In some of the countries of origin, for example, boys and girls are separated in the household from the age of 7. They are discouraged from mixing, and sex education is taboo. They come from a context that does not give equal rights to women and discourages them from working, remaining single, or following their own aspirations.”
“As an immigrant and former asylum seeker of Somali origin, I am for immigration. I have no objection to people packing up their possessions and leaving their homes to try to improve their circumstances. I completely understand why they would wish to do so because I did it myself. My concern is with the attitudes some bring with them, with the behaviors that these attitudes generate in a minority of migrants, and with the seeming inability of Western countries to understand how to cope with the resulting problems. In fact, the West is failing migrants by refusing to prepare young men for the culture clash they will experience and then by refusing to hold them accountable for their lack of self-control.
I am aware of the fact that I am generalizing. The reality is, of course, more complex than even a book can convey. There are huge differences between people living in cities and those living in rural areas. There are differences among individuals in the amount of importance they attach to faith and tribal constraints. It is not my intention to dismiss all immigrants as incapable of adapting to their new surroundings. There are many who, once they come to the West, find it easy to reconcile their tribal or religious heritage with life in a hypermodern society, or, like me, gladly jettison their cultural inheritance in favor of Western norms. But there is a problem with the attitudes and behaviors that some immigrants bring with them. These things might have been a source of survival or even wealth in their country of origin, but in the West they lead to conflict and stunt immigrants’ opportunities.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali proposes steps that need to be made to address this problem with immigration:
Repeal the existing Asylum framework. Rather than focusing on where people come from and their motivations for leaving, Ali suggested the main criterion for granting residence should be how far they are likely to abide by the laws and adopt the values of their host society. Rather than leaving it to a bureaucratic lottery, migrants should therefore be selected on the basis of their likelihood of adapting and flourishing in the West. These would be individuals with the highest probability of entering the labor market, rather than the welfare state, and those who genuinely wish to become Dutch, French, or British and live among, as opposed to just near, their fellow citizens.
Address the push factors: It’s impossible to reform the asylum system without addressing the cause of mass migration. This means Western countries will have to invest in the security and economic issues in the countries where migrants are coming from. Stating this is “somebody else’s problem” only furthers the problem.
Address the pull factors: “A crucial part of the overhaul is reconsidering the attractiveness of western Europe’s generous welfare states. The social contract between citizen and state is breaking down in places where welfare schemes are accommodating large numbers of beneficiaries whose families have never contributed to the system. The original welfare state was predicated on a notion of reciprocity, but to newcomers it looks more like universal basic income.”
Reinstate the rule of law: Many European national governments are simply too lenient toward violent offenders and permit unconscionable exceptions to the rule of law for migrants.
Listen to the successful immigrants: “It has struck me time and again as I researched this book that successfully integrated immigrants are the people doing the most to crack this debate open. I think we should therefore hear much more from those people who have migrated from the Muslim world and come out of the process as well-adjusted liberal Europeans. Surely, their advice is what policy makers should be taking into consideration.”
Provide sex education to all children and young adults: Sex is extremely taboo in fundamental Muslim communities. Women are not seen as equal. This is why there needs to be stronger education on sex and relationships at an earlier age. While many parents won’t allow this, we can do more education about healthy relationships, consent, violence, and the harms that children and young people are exposed to. Children should be taught that they will explore their bodies when they are young, and that sex comes with responsibilities—risk of pregnancies, disease, and consent. Young men and women need to be taught to respect each other’s physical boundaries and when in doubt, stop pursuing physical contact. Boy must be taught girls are fellow human beings with an equal right to sexual self-determination.
About the Author
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born women’s rights activist, free speech advocate, and the New York Times bestselling author of Infidel, The Caged Virgin, Nomad, Heretic, and The Challenge of Dawa. Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, she grew up in Africa and the Middle East, before seeking asylum in the Netherlands, where she went on to become a member of parliament. Today she lives in the United States with her husband and two sons.
