Wizorek: But it is also wrong to look only at the origin of the perpetrators. When I see the kinds of people that are now jumping into the debate over women’s rights, it also includes, among others, the same politicians who, during the #aufschrei debate in 2013, said that women shouldn’t be so demanding. Now that men with immigration backgrounds have committed sexual assaults, it is being instrumentalized in order to stigmatize them as a group. I think that is racist.

SPIEGEL: Do you consider Ms. Schwarzer to be a racist?

Wizorek: It is racist to act as though it is only immigrant men who (commit sexual assault). I would really like to see a more nuanced debate about sexual violence. Such violence is a problem for all of society, for all genders, and it cannot be allowed to become the standard in gender debates that only male migrants are considered to be those responsible.

Schwarzer: It is always the right move to take a closer look. Of course we in Europe also have epidemic, structural sexual violence. Violence is always the dark core of dominance. The men who are now coming to us from Islamic cultural circles are, of course, shaped by conditions there, which are still much more antiquated than here. That’s a problem that we have ignored for far too long. In the name of a false tolerance, we have accepted that women are kept at home like prisoners and are forcibly married.

Wizorek: But now we have reached the core of the issue. We have to engage an integration debate, not an exclusionary debate.

Schwarzer: But who’s leading an exclusionary debate?

Wizorek: The majority society in Germany.

Schwarzer: I’d like to tell you something about majority society. Majority society has really been taken for a ride over the past 25 years. There was and there is a growing uneasiness within majority society as a result of this false tolerance. Parallel societies have emerged. A young woman can no longer go through certain neighborhoods without one of the young men shouting, “You slut!” Friends of mine who live in Kreuzberg (eds. note: a neighborhood in Berlin with a large Muslim population) have told me about it.

Wizorek: I live in Berlin and I have never heard that in Kreuzberg.

Schwarzer: Then you’ve been lucky. But if we keep denying that there are problems with some male immigrants, then we will just drive the people into the arms of the right-wing populists. Without the ignorance or the trivialization on the part of all the political parties, there would be no Pegida (eds. note: a xenophobic movement based in Dresden) or Alternative for Germany (eds. note: a new, and growing right-wing populist party in Germany).

Wizorek: I am not denying that the patriarchal structures are stronger in some countries than in Germany. But the core of the problem is not Islam, it is patriarchy.

Source: A Feminist View of Cologne: ‘The Current Outrage Is Very Hypocritical’ – SPIEGEL ONLINE