Some of these attacks were carried out by people who had arrived in Europe during the migrant wave of recent years. Other attacks were carried out by individuals who had been born in Europe. The search for easy answers was as elusive as ever. Those people wishing to blame terrorism on the lack of integration strategies in Europe were at a loss to explain the sense in importing so many new arrivals to a continent so bad at integrating its earlier ones. Those who wanted to talk only about the recent migrant wave were at a loss to explain why even people born and brought up in Europe could carry out such attacks. Those who looked to explain the motives away found themselves struck by the sheer range of the targets. Those who believed that the staff of the rumbustiously secularist and anti-theist magazine Charlie Hebdo in some sense ‘had it coming to them’ in January 2015 could not explain what a priest saying Mass had done to deserve being slain at his altar eighteen months later. A 46-year old Parisian interviewed after the November 2015 Paris attacks inadvertently summed up the learning curve her society was on. In an unfortunate use of the word ‘just’ she said, ‘Every Parisian has been touched by these attacks. Before it was just the Jews, the writers or the cartoonists.’1

If this was all terrible for Europe’s view of itself and its future, it still had worse to discover. The terrorist attacks may have presented the public with the clearest reason for growing concern. But other equally and in some ways even more basic worries emerged over something that was perhaps even more unmentionable. Almost everybody could recognise a terrorist attack when it occurred, even though they might quibble over the causes. But alongside the growing security concerns that everyone began to agree needed addressing, another subject arose that nobody wanted to discuss and everybody was terrified of addressing.

Throughout the 2000s the question of sex attacks on local women by gangs of immigrants had been an open secret. It was something that nobody wanted to speak or hear about. There was something so base, and so rank somehow, in even mentioning it. Even to imply that dark-skinned men had a penchant for abusing white women seemed to so clearly originate from some odious, racist text that it appeared impossible firstly to even imagine that it might be happening, and secondly that it should be discussed. British officials were so terrified about even mentioning such crimes that every single arm of the state failed to respond over the course of years. When the same phenomena occurred on the continent, precisely the same concerns and problems were encountered.