It’s a miracle. All over the world, conservatives and curtain-twitching bigots have taken up the cause of fighting violence against women. From Donald Trump, vowing to protect white Americans from “rapist” Mexican migrants, to European far-right groups that are mustering against the supposed Muslim threat to “their” wives and daughters, conservatives are rebranding themselves as the defenders of women and girls. But who will defend us from them?
The idea that Western men must shelter “their” women from a terrifying mass of foreign masculinity has been around for a very long time. It was used to justify the murder of black men in the US from the slave era onwards, even as black women were abused in their millions by white landowners. It is used to excuse state surveillance and militarised policing around the world, and by the new right to rationalise its bigotry. Following the mass sexual assault of women at the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne, groups such as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – a neo-fascist group currently polling at around 15 per cent in Germany – have taken up the old banner of chaperoning white womanhood.
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