Even to mention the fact in 2015 that most of the recent arrivals into Europe seemed to be young men was to court opprobrium. To question whether all these individuals might have brought modern views about women with them was unmentionable (precisely, as in Britain) because it seemed to speak to some base, racist smear. The fear of falling into a racial cliché or suffering accusations of racism prevented authorities and the European public from admitting to a problem that had spread across the continent. And the more refugees a country took in, the greater that problem became.

Even in 2014 in Germany the number of sexual assaults against women and boys was growing. These included the rape of a 20-year-old German woman in Munich by a 30-year-old Somali asylum seeker, the rape of a 55-year-old woman in Dresden by a 30-year-old Moroccan, the attempted rape of a 21-year-old German woman in Munich by a 25-year-old Senegalese asylum seeker, the rape of a 17-year-old girl in Straubing by a 21-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker, the rape of a 21-year-old German woman near Stuttgart by two Afghan asylum seekers, and the rape of a 25-year-old German woman in Stralsund by a 28-year-old Eritrean asylum seeker. While these and many other cases made it to court, many others of course did not.

Alongside the growth in cases of rapes of Germans came the increase in the number of rapes and sexual assaults in refugee shelters. During 2015 the German government was so short of accommodation to house the migrants that it was initially unable to provide segregated shelters for women. A number of women’s rights groups wrote to the regional Parliament in Hesse telling it that the consequences of these shelter arrangements were ‘numerous rapes and sexual assaults. We are also receiving an increasing number of reports of forced prostitution. It must be stressed: these are not isolated cases.’ In the weeks that followed, rapes were recorded in refugee shelters across Bavaria. And as in Britain a decade before, the authorities were so worried about the implications of the facts that in a number of cases they were found to have deliberately covered them up. In Detmold, where an asylum seeker raped a 13-year-old Muslim girl, the local police remained silent about the assault. An investigation by Westfalen-Blatt claimed that local police were routinely covering up sex assaults involving migrants in case it gave ammunition to criticisms of the government’s open-door policies. Nevertheless, rapes of children were recorded in numerous cities including at a facility in Bremen.