The cases of rape and abuse perpetrated by authorities go a long way back and have been/are being most often reported for what they are: the abuse from a person in a condition of superior power. Is this a biased view? Perhaps. But in most cases it is correct. The case of Daniel Holtzclaw, is the most recent example.
NOTE: Like all inmates D.H.’s file was publicly available on the Department of Corrections’ website, so that the public (including his victims) could be informed on where he was incarcerated and if he ever was released – which with a 236 years sentence would have been unlikely, but you can never be too prudent. Unfortunately his page went missing, reportedly “to protect his safety”. I guess his safety is way more valuable that that of dozens of poor and black women who have endured his blackmailing and sexual assaults.
Now, the common mistake of the lefties who would slam the gates of their countries open for refugees (for full disclosure, I’m one of them. I just don’t make the same mistake as them, I probably make a million others) is to think that refugee=good person.
The leftist newspapers of Europe struggled to report the news of the Cologne attacks, resulting often partial and biased. As much as some Australian newspapers are treating the Nauru rape of a five year old boy as the perfect casus belli to shift attention to the poor conditions of migrants on Nauru, rather than the real problem: there is at least one rapist on the island (the reported cases are numerous, so I presume there’s more than one).
What I mean is that the media finds it hard to handle news that shed a bad light on a group of people that they side with. Why?
My take is that journalist and editors know that the average reader is fairly uneducated and probably reads the title of the article and skim reads the actual piece. So they have to catch your attention and make sure you get their point within your attention span.
There is something inherently wrong in associating anyone in a condition of weakness, namely a refugee, as a fundamentally good person. Since the cavemen poverty (lack of resources, survival instincts, etc…) has driven people to horrible acts, and on top of that there is the statistical incidence of pedophiles/rapists/sadists/murderers.
So it’s statistically impossible to think that in a huge number of people there aren’t some bad ones. If you add anger, frustration and lack of perspectives into the equation you have a pedophile on Nauru island and a sex-hungry mob in Cologne.
What hasn’t worked in these two cases (and many others around the world, since the beginning of refugee camps) is the system. Intercepting boats, registering people and locking them up is a rough approximation of what identification and protection should be.
So, as much as the right is ready to see refugees sent back to their countries (or Nauru, Mr Turnbull) and the left is embarrassingly addressing only one part of the problem, it’s the whole system that should change. Because, let’s face it, it’s a lot more expensive in terms of resources, visibility and ultimately votes, to clean up a mess than to get things right the first time around.
A better identification system, less time spent in camps and overall better conditions for refugees could start to improve the situation. Rapists will always be rapists, but in a system where the division is not between them (the refugees) and the others (the police) but rather between good and evil rapists would be more easily identified and, eventually, expelled.
The year I never said no 