From top: German coverage of the Cologne New’s Year’s Eve incident; Dr Julien Mercille

The reported sex attacks in Cologne, Germany, over the new year provided far right groups the perfect opportunity to demonise refugees.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

Many migrants and refugees fleeing war zones in the Middle East have recently reached Europe. Sadly, they have been used by some in political circles and the media to stir up racist feelings across the continent.

There’s nothing better than a Muslim to act as a scapegoat for the failure of European governments to provide jobs and essential services, or simply to rally citizens behind the flag irrationally so that they follow their leaders blindly.

And when refugees or migrants commit crimes against women as in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve, far-right groups were handed a Christmas gift, the perfect opportunity to whip up fear and xenophobia.

To be clear, the reported sexual attacks in Cologne and elsewhere in Europe need to be dealt with firmly. The correct response is to pursue the perpetrators, whatever their migration status or ethnic origin.

But the wrong response is to blame and punish and expel all Muslims or refugees. Germany has by now received over a million refugees and migrants. Some will commit crimes, but most won’t. Stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs shouldn’t be the basis of policy.

As Amnesty International stated, “The German government must not allow the crimes committed by a number of men to dictate the fate of over 1.1 million refugees in Germany”.

It’s easy to see the racist double standards at play in the media and among certain political groups. For example, in 2014 there was a big report on abuse of women in Europe published by the European Union’s fundamental rights watchdog, which interviewed 42,000 women across the 28 EU member states.

The report found an astonishing fact: 1 in 3 European women have been the victim of physical or sexual violence since the age of 15, with the majority of perpetrators being men (and we’re not talking about inappropriate emails or phone calls here, but about real violence, things like to be beaten, burned, slapped, or forced into sexual intercourse).

On top of that, about 50% of women in the EU have experienced sexual harassment—that’s 90 million women.

This is the real scandal about the abuse of women in Europe. Yet, you won’t find too much coverage of that in the media, and certainly not the hysterical coverage found in some outlets about the Cologne events.

Moreover, a few days ago, at almost the same moment as the Cologne attacks happened, a similar tale of abuse surfaced in Germany: an investigator found that 231 boys had been physically and sexually abused, including raped, in a Catholic choir between the 1960s and 1990s.

Guess who led the choir? Rev. Georg Ratzinger, the brother of former Pope Benedict (Joseph Ratzinger). You’d think you’d have a scandal here about the Catholic Church that the media might want to expose. But all we heard about are the crimes of the Muslim refugees.

Right-wing political groups have used the Cologne events to demonise refugees, who they called “Rapefugees”. For example, Lutz Bachmann, the leader of the far-right anti-Islam Pegida movement, can be seen here smiling and wearing his t-shirt that says “Rapefugees not Welcome”.

The German media also poured oil on the fire. For example, the Suddeutsche Zeitung, a leading liberal newspaper, used a picture of a black arm reaching right in between the legs of a white woman (top).

This image was used to illustrate an article in which a psychologist said that every time young Muslim men meet with women they take it as a highly sexualised encounter. The editor-in-chief of the paper later had to apologise and wrote: “We regret the fact that these illustrations could have hurt the feelings of our readers and apologize for that”.

Also, the conservative magazine Focus ran a front-page cover showing a naked white woman covered with black hand marks (centre). One editor described it as “disgustingly racist and sexist.”

But the magazine didn’t apologise, it even defended its image, saying that it was used “to symbolically present what happened in Cologne. Therefore we’re showing as representative for the many female victims a woman who has been made a sex object and been degraded—but who is determined to fight back”.

It’s easy to see how fast xenophobic fears can spread. Migrant men have already been banned from a swimming pool [] in Germany, in addition to protests against refugees in general.

In short, we need to keep a cool head and treat sexual crimes for what they are without indicting refugees as a group—explicitly or implicitly.

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Julien on Twitter: @JulienMercille