The Center for Women's Studies, with the support of the Women's Network Croatia and the "Welcome" Initiative, offers this reaction to the mass attacks in Germany and the political scapegoating of refugees and migrants.

We witnessed in January the sexual and political violence against women in Germany, violence which we condemn, and we want to warn that reactions to these events further aggravate the situation of refugees and migrants in Europe.

Two-faced

The events in Germany should be denounced, but it is also necessary to understand them in a political context and oppose generalizations of sexual attackers as exclusively young men from North Africa or the Arab area.

Reactions in Germany and all over Europe are at least two-faced: the same people who rarely condemn violence against women in their own communities are today displaying themselves as soul defenders.

Instead of condemning the individuals behind the attacks - and thereby the crimes against women - they identify the attackers with the Muslim community and influence public opinion on the refugee crisis.

To identify a group of criminals with a certain religion or ethnicity is intolerable in democratic countries, and one should also question to what extent and how deep sexism is still rooted in Western culture. This was evidenced by the 'code of conduct' for women suggested by Cologne's mayor in the aftermath of the assaults.

Unbridgeable differences

We should warn about political sources of sexism, not only the cultural ones, and question the sources of sexism in all religions. Structural violence is behind every balance of power, capitalism and globalization, and abusers from Cologne are the citizens of the same global world.

We know that women rarely report violence because of many unfavorable legal provisions in Germany and elsewhere. After the attacks in Cologne, the number of sexual abuse and violence reports increased, which indicates that the recent public debate about sexual violence against women has had an encouraging effect.

But, on the other hand, there is the worrying observation that the debate intensified because most of the perpetrators were not German and because of alleged unbridgeable cultural differences.

A global problem

We join the German and international feminists in condemning the attack in Cologne. In solidarity, we draw attention to the global problem of violence to which women are exposed on a daily basis around the world - regardless of age, origin or social status.

On this occasion, we also condemn the violence against women in Croatia - the year has hardly begun and we are already witnessing the murders of women, and we demand that the perpetrators be punished regardless of their origin or social status.

Center for Women's Studies, Women's Network Croatia, Initiative Welcome

For Center for Women's Studies: Nataša Medved, Rada Borić