I wanted an open Europe, a friendly one. One that I can gladly live in and one in which we are both safe in. I am sorry. For us both I am so incredibly sorry. You, you aren’t safe here, because we live in a racist society. I, I am not safe here, because we live in a sexist society. But what truly makes me feel sorry, are the circumstances by which the sexist and boundary-crossing acts that were inflicted on me, make it so that you are beset by increasing and more aggressive racism. I promise you, I will scream. I will not allow it, that this continues happening. I will not stand by idly and watch as racists and concerned citizens call you a problem. You are not the problem. You are not a problem at all. You most often are a wonderful human being, who deserves to be free and safe like everyone else.4

Germany was not the only country where such things occurred. In the summer of 2015 a young female activist working with the ‘No Borders’ movement at the Ventimiglia crossing-point between Italy and France was gang-raped by a group of Sudanese migrants. Her fellow ‘No borders’ activists persuaded her to keep the attack quiet in order not to damage their cause. When the woman did finally admit to the attack, they accused her of reporting her own rape out of ‘spite’.5

Through all of this, in Germany as in the rest of Europe, it was often left to local authorities to try to find answers to the challenges that had come their way. They not only had to find available facilities but also to come up with suitable policies. A mayor in Tübingen addressed the problem of an upsurge of rapes of women and children in local swimming pools by appealing for more migrants to become swimming-pool attendants. As he wrote on Facebook, ‘Our municipality has embraced a great prevention and integration measure. We have a Syrian lifeguard who can make known in Arabic and with authority what behaviour is allowed and what is not.’6 The public also had to find answers to the problem that their politicians had presented them with – and in the certain knowledge that even were the policy to suddenly change, the effect on society was irreversible.