A leaked police document shows that 2,000 men assaulted over 1,200 women across Germany on New Year’s Eve.
The police have only caught 120 suspects. Foreigners make up the majority of suspects, which shows that the increase of refugees and migrants is linked to the rising sexual assault and rape cases across the European Union.
Germany added stricter rape laws due to the influx.
German courts have convicted four men:
On Thursday, a court in Cologne sentenced two men in the New Year’s Eve assaults. Hussein A., a 21-year-old Iraqi, and Hassan T., a 26-year-old Algerian, were handed suspended one-year sentences. Both arrived in Germany in the past two years, a court spokesman said. He declined to specify whether the two had sought asylum.
The Federal Criminal Police Agency (BKA) document states the assaults took place in Cologne, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, and other towns. BKA President Holger Münch admitted that the majority “of these crimes will not be followed up on.” From Süddeutsche Zeitung:
Throughout Germany, the result of the BKA survey, it had 642 given pure sexual offenses, 47 suspects were identified. In so-called combination offenses – when sexual offenses were associated with about theft – counted the Bundeskriminalamt 239 offenses were identified 73 suspects. Most suspects should come from North Africa.Some of these crimes several women have been affected. So the BKA is a number of a total of about 1200 victims of sexual assault: about 650 in Cologne, more than 400 in Hamburg and other in Stuttgart , Dusseldorf and other places.
The suspects “have been in Germany less than one year.” Münch said “there is a connection between the occurrence of the phenomenon and the strong levels of immigration in 2015.”
The BKA plans to publish the full findings this week.
The assaults caused Germany to add the “No means no law.” Before that, a woman had to fight back against her attacker in order to claim he raped her:
Under the previous law, defined in Section 177 of the criminal code (in German), victims should have defended themselves for an act to constitute rape. Simply saying “No” was not sufficient to find the defendant guilty, and there was no attempt to define what constituted consent.The inadequacy of the law meant many perpetrators got away with rape, according to a 2014 study of 107 cases by the German association of women’s counselling centres and rape crisis centres (BFF).The authors said that in every case, sexual assaults had been committed against the victim’s unambiguous will, which had been communicated verbally to the perpetrator. However, they said, either charges were not filed or there was no court conviction.The study went on to note that the law placed too much focus on whether the victim resisted and did not reflect real-life scenarios in which people were raped.
The new “No Means No” law will also allow the country to easily deport any foreigner convicted of sex crimes. People involved in a group of others committing sexual violence may also face charges even if they did not participate.
In March, a study showed that sexual assault in Germany has risen since the government accepted over 1.1 million refugees. The Gatestone Institute chronicled the reported assaults and rapes in 2016. At least one occurred every single day.
In April, outlets reported that a politician tried to pressure police into removing the word rape in their reports from New Years Eve:
Local officers had produced an internal “important event” memo entitled “rape, sexual harassment, thefts, committed by a large group of foreign people” – the first indication of the scale of the incident which would go on to make headlines around the world.According to Cologne newspaper Express, officers received a phone call from the state police control centre ordering them to take down the report “or otherwise delete the phrase ‘Vergewaltigung’” – “rape”.A senior Cologne police officer told Express he was informed of the order by a colleague who took the call, and that state police understood it to be “the wish of the state interior ministry”.
Henriette Reker, mayor of Cologne, caused more controversy when she said women need a “code of conduct” to prevent men from sexually assaulting them.
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