‘Women refugees sexually harassed by Cologne ‘security’ mercenaries’

This video says about itself:

Freedom from Violence for Refugee Women | Women’s Refugee Commission

1 May 2015

Violence against women and girls doesn’t end when they stop running. But refugee women have a right to live free from violence. For more than 25 years, we’ve listened. We’ve been their advocates. So their voices are heard. So they can rebuild their lives

Translated from NOS TV in the Netherlands:

‘Women refugees in Cologne harassed sexually’

Today, 13:01

Female refugees in a camp in Cologne say that women are sexually harassed by the security guards. Yesterday fifty refugee women talked about this with the police after a demonstration. An open letter by the women raising the alarm was put by several German media on the Internet.

According to the women they are filmed when they are showering or when they are breastfeeding. They also say that some women were forced violently into sexual intercourse.

Too scared

In the letter the refugee women said that they can hardly estimate how many women are victims of the practices. “Many of us are too scared to talk about it”, it says. According to the women, there is a team of security officers consisting of nine men.

Cologne police are investigating the allegations.

Some of the abused persons are said to be minor girls.

From The Local in Germany today about this, mentioning the guards are not government employees, but private mercenary employees, like many prisons etc. are privatized:

Refugee women ‘abused by camp security guards‘

…

The women meanwhile accuse employees at the security firm which runs the emergency shelter of filming or photographing them while they shower or while they breastfeed.

The security personnel ambush the women and try and convince them to have sex with them, the letter claims.

One young Syrian woman, who has been living in the sports hall for slightly more than a month, told the Kölnische Stadt Anzeiger “one asked me if I’d go with him, saying he wanted to be alone with me. When I told him I was taken and I wasn’t interested, he told me I’d soon be kicked out.”

The woman was one of around 70 asylum seekers who showed up in front of the Office for Migration and Refugees to hand in two letters of complaint.

The mercenary corporation at this refugee camp is called Adlerwache, ‘Eagle Guard’. Eagles are beautiful birds. However, humans often use them as metaphors for predatory and violent behaviour.

Somehow, I am reminded of the abuse of eagle images in Adolf Hitler’s nazi party.

The headline about this Cologne issue in German weekly Der Spiegel is: Frauen werfen Sicherheitsdienst sexuelle Belästigung vor. ‘Sicherheitsdienst’ means literally ‘[so called] security service.’ ‘Sicherheitsdienst’, often abbreviated as SD, was also the name of the ‘security’ service of Hitler’s SS.

This 2014 German video from the Cologne region is about private ‘security’ employees abusing refugees then.

What will all those racists who suddenly, after New Year’s Eve in Cologne, discovered that they oppose sexual harassment of women, say now about this? Will all white ‘security’ guards now be banned from swimming pools, like happened to refugees in Germany, in Austria and almost in Belgium? Though it turned out that the Cologne crimes were overwhelmingly by non-refugees? And that Syrian refugees present there had helped to stop the crimes?

My guess is these extremely recent opponents of crimes against women will be extremely silent on this. Like they are extremely silent about the recent sexual harassment of Belgian TV reporter Esmeralda Labye by white German men during the Cologne carnival.

The numerous sexual assaults against women on the night of New Year’s Eve in Cologne and other German cities have sparked a big debate in the last months. Unfortunately the argument has been hijacked by the far-right, distorted and used to justify the anti-immigration agenda. The discussion revolves around hatefully attacking immigrants and European muslims rather than the effective measures for the victims of sexual assault. Let’s refocus the discussion: here.

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