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Notes -
The UK Home Office just published a guide for asylum seekers on... how not to rape women.
Some extracts from this 9-page document:
What could happen if you do not follow those rules?
Prime Minister Andy Burnham defended the booklet saying the government wanted to make UK law "explicitly clear".
Finland has also been offering classes on "how to behave towards women" since... 2016. The fact that a government department, under UK Labour, produced a 9-page guide on these points, in this register, suggests that those migrant crime statistics are not so trivial after all. Incredible.
In a time where even legal immigration has become THE hot button topic for the right and even parts of the left, shouldn't it logically follow that people who treat the law and age of consent as optional are not blending in with the doctors and engineers if you DON'T want to harden public opinion against immigration? It's like they're not even trying.
In principle, I don't see a problem here. If the concept of "asylum" is coherent at all, then we shouldn't be looking to vet asylum seekers for whether they're good additions to the country, the way would ordinary immigrants - any more than hospitals ask for patients to send in resumes in triplicate. Of course some of the refugees you're temporarily taking in out of humanitarian concerns will be ill-suited to coexisting with the locals; by all rights your standards for Jews you are willing to hide in your basement when the Gestapo are on the prowl should be lower than your standards for peacetime houseguests. A booklet like this only looks off if you take it for granted that "asylum seeker" is nothing but a fancy word for "immigrant". Which is understandable in the current status quo, but it's not the booklet that's at fault.
If the Jews I hid from the Gestapo proceeded to rape every non-Jewish girl in my neighborhood that they could get their hands on, I would be well within my rights to turn them over to whomever I pleased, or just kill them myself. It's nonsense to say that people need to accept endless victimization to protect other people from endless victimization. If the asylum seekers want help, they can cooperate with their supposed allies instead of defecting.
Like, what are you actually proposing here? That the British keep letting their women be raped? No turning away anybody, ever, as long as there's a war on?
He's proposing that the British take steps to ensure asylum seekers are socialized and understand local laws and customs. Which is what they did and what everyone is complaining about.
I dispute the efficacy of "please don't rape children" pamphlets. I don't think you can actually "socialize" would-be child rapists with mandatory HR training.
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There are many times in life that Doing Something that are so egregiously tone-deaf and counter-productive that they are more likely to make the problem worse. By producing this booklet, the government has almost certainly reduced the rate of assault 0%, but generated even more outrage about the problem and opposition to immigration. It would be too-clever-by-half for fiction; as it is, it's just sad.
Do you really think any rapist has had their mind changed by a brochure? How about one from a completely different culture? I note that the only examples of the brochure publicized are in English. Did some pathological progressive say it would be too racist to distribute them in meaningful languages?
I'm reminded of, during COVID, British Columbia producing propaganda encouraging LGBT+ people (well, we really know which letter, but still) to use gloryholes to avoid face-to-face contact and reduce the spread of COVID. This ran concurrent to advice that people not host holiday parties or visit their dying relatives. Or, like, 90% of similar "harm reduction" ideas. Or the XKCD about voting machines, from back when it was funny.
I mean, yes? What, do you think all non-Europeans are just animals that can't understand words? How do you propose to teach someone the rules of a society - should we strap them down Clockwork Orange-style? Or just chemically castrate them as a prerequisite for asylum?
I know, I know, the real solution is: let's not allow anyone into the country that isn't already a Western liberal. It's a bit late for that though.
Obviously this brochure isn't the complete solution, but it's a step in the right direction that admits to the problem and tries to address it.
I guess it's whether you think the modal immigrant rapist is a mistake theorist or a conflict theorist. Shabir Ahmed moved to the UK when he was six, he absolutely knew the rules. But he also thought that white slags were okay to rape and that Pakistanis were '...the supreme race, not those white bastards' (an exact quote from his trial).
I don't think these guys are children who don't realise that rape is wrong. I think they consider it a wrong (as in, a wrong was done to me) but their circle of empathy doesn't extend to the women of their host society.
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Maybe it's my failure of imagination but my experience with criminals is that they are not dissuaded by brochures. I find it hard to swallow that there's much overlap between "people that think women are second-class citizens, think rape of an unconscious person is acceptable, etc" and "people that are convinced to not do something because of a finger-wagging brochure." I just- I won't say strictly impossible, it's probably not a true null set, but there's probably not many people going "oh I was gonna go rape that 12 year old, but this brochure telling me that's not nice convinced me not to."
Now that is an impressive lack of charity!
I do rather doubt that English is their first language, for the relevant population at hand. I also doubt that potential rapists are dissuaded by polite pamphlets when there's probably no consequences anyways.
Scott's famous pieces like Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled come to mind. The kind of person that needs to be told this and hasn't already learned it is not the kind of person that's going to change their mind by reading.
IIRC Denmark requires migrants to attend language and culture classes to receive any benefits, but doesn't strap them down.
Deporting anyone that refuses to attend the class seems like a fine standard, but since the UK won't even deport rapists if they can avoid it, it's a lost cause.
Second best time to plant a tree and all that. They could at least stop accepting more, but that's apparently too difficult too.
Reasonable punishment for the rapists among them, at least. But alas, someone decided they have a right to recidivate instead.
I'll concede to a little hyperbole, but I was responding to the question 'has any rapist had their mind changed' - not, is this brochure the best way to change minds, but literally 'I don't think a single one of these people could be convinced to stop raping'.
Anyway, I think there's two groups you're conflating. Rapists in modern cultures are generally sociopaths who don't care that what they're doing is wrong. But rapists from these immigrant communities are much more common than the incidence of sociopathy. They see nothing wrong with things that in Western countries we consider rape (e.g. date rape, marital rape, rape of those from a lower caste) because they are from a culture that sees these things as normal. They're not raping because they don't care about the rules, but because they are following different rules. It follows, then, that part of the solution must be educating them on the new rules. Not the whole solution, but a start at least.
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I think people are primarily complaining about how they did it, rather than what.
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