"Have you read Sarah Vine's piece in the Daily Mail this week?"

"The one that begins by acknowledging that even writing about the subject feels taboo? Yes. Her starting point is two horrific deaths within weeks of each other: Jamey Carney in Killarney and Elisabeth-Jane Ross in Athens, both allegedly killed by men they had encountered through migrant or refugee circles. Vine places these deaths alongside a series of other cases involving asylum seekers or recent migrants accused or convicted of serious violence against women."

"And that is where the argument has to be made carefully. Individual crimes do not establish that migrants as a group are unusually violent."

"Of course not. Most migrants are not criminals, let alone sexual predators, and nothing is gained by pretending otherwise. But the opposite error is equally serious: deciding in advance that immigration status, demographic composition and cultural background can never be relevant to patterns of offending. Whether they are relevant is an empirical question, and it should be possible to investigate it without either demonising entire populations or suppressing uncomfortable evidence."

Vine points to several disturbing British cases. They include the murder of Rhiannon Whyte, who was stabbed repeatedly by a Sudanese asylum seeker living at the hotel where she worked; the murder and dismemberment of Lorraine Cox by an Iraqi Kurdish asylum seeker; the Clapham corrosive-substance attack committed by an Afghan asylum seeker with a previous sexual-offence conviction; and a number of recent sexual-assault cases in which asylum seekers or recent arrivals have been accused or convicted.

Behind these contemporary cases sits the still-raw memory of Cologne on New Year's Eve 2015–16, when large numbers of women reported sexual assaults and other offences committed by groups of men, many described by German authorities as being of North African or Arab background. Cologne did not prove that migrants generally were dangerous. What it did demonstrate was that cultural background, demographic concentration, policing and attitudes towards women could not simply be declared irrelevant before the evidence was examined.

"That is Vine's real point, isn't it?"

"Yes. The issue is not whether migration inevitably produces violence against women. It plainly does not. The question is whether particular migration flows can import or concentrate social attitudes substantially different from those prevailing in liberal Western societies, and whether governments have been sufficiently willing to investigate the consequences."

This matters because recent asylum and irregular migration into Europe and Britain has been disproportionately male. Exact proportions vary according to the category of entrant and the period being measured, so claims about percentages should be tied to current official statistics rather than treated as timeless facts. But the demographic imbalance itself is not seriously controversial. Large migration movements dominated by younger men raise different policy questions from migration streams consisting primarily of families.

Culture also deserves serious examination, although here too precision is essential. Countries differ substantially in women's legal equality, female workforce participation, acceptance of sexual autonomy, attitudes towards homosexuality, expectations concerning dress and behaviour, and tolerance of violence within intimate relationships. None of this tells us what any particular migrant believes. Individuals routinely reject the values prevalent in their countries of origin. Nevertheless, population-level differences in social attitudes are measurable phenomena, and governments routinely take cultural differences seriously in areas ranging from education to public health. It would be peculiar to insist that attitudes towards women constitute the one cultural variable that can never matter.

The legitimate policy question, therefore, is whether differences in attitudes towards women, combined with the demographic composition and scale of particular migration flows, affect either the incidence or character of offending. That question should be answered with reliable demographic and crime data. Where possible, governments should publish sufficiently detailed statistics concerning nationality, immigration status, age, sex and relevant offence categories. Such data should be interpreted carefully, taking account of age structure, socioeconomic circumstances, reporting rates and other confounding factors. But refusing to collect or discuss the information is not a scientific answer.

"The political problem is that even asking the question has often been treated as morally suspect."

"And Britain has already experienced the consequences of institutional reluctance to confront culturally sensitive offending."

The grooming-gang scandals remain the obvious warning. Subsequent investigations have revealed repeated failures by police, councils and other institutions to protect vulnerable girls. There were multiple causes, including bureaucratic incompetence and failures of child protection, and it would be simplistic to reduce the entire scandal to ethnicity. Nevertheless, official anxiety about racial tensions and community relations featured in the history of the controversy. That experience should have taught authorities that protecting vulnerable people must take precedence over protecting institutions from politically uncomfortable discussions.

There is a particularly bitter element in several of the cases Vine discusses. Some victims were themselves sympathetic towards migrants or involved in humanitarian causes. Carney reportedly met the man accused of killing her after encountering him in a political setting, while Ross had reportedly undertaken humanitarian work involving refugees. Whyte was working at accommodation housing asylum seekers.

There is no justification for blaming these liberal women for what happened to them. Their generosity or political beliefs did not make them responsible for crimes committed against them. Vine's point is instead an uncomfortable one about trust. Compassion towards strangers is admirable, but compassion cannot require the suspension of ordinary judgments about personal safety. Nor should governments encourage citizens to regard reasonable caution as prejudice.

"So what would a safety-first immigration policy actually involve?"

"Start with information rather than slogans."

Governments should publish reliable offending data capable of testing claims made by both supporters and critics of immigration. Serious violent and sexual offending by non-citizens should have prompt immigration consequences wherever domestic and international law permits. Screening should be improved where reliable criminal or security information is available. Authorities operating asylum accommodation should recognise that staff and surrounding communities may face particular safeguarding issues and respond accordingly.

None of this requires collective suspicion of migrants. Indeed, distinguishing individuals is precisely the point. A peaceful Syrian engineer, an Iranian dissident, an Afghan interpreter who worked alongside Western forces and a violent offender who has destroyed his identification documents cannot sensibly be treated as morally interchangeable merely because all might appear somewhere within immigration statistics.

Nor is culture the same thing as race. Cultural practices and beliefs are learned and therefore open to criticism, rejection and change. Liberal societies themselves developed their contemporary attitudes towards women through centuries of argument and reform. It is not racist to maintain that equality before the law, sexual consent and the physical autonomy of women are non-negotiable principles for everyone living within such a society.

The crucial distinction is between judging an individual because of his origins and investigating whether population-level patterns exist. The first can become prejudice. The second is an ordinary function of social science and public policy.

Sarah Vine's column is provocative because it enters territory that much of respectable politics has approached nervously. But the appropriate response is neither to declare migrants collectively guilty nor to declare cultural explanations collectively forbidden. It is to examine the evidence.

Every murder or rape is first an individual crime with an individual perpetrator and victim. A collection of horrifying cases, by itself, cannot establish comparative crime rates. But cases can raise questions that properly designed statistics should answer. If the statistics show no migration-related effect after relevant variables are controlled, critics of immigration should accept that result. If they show significant differences associated with particular populations or migration categories, governments and immigration advocates should be equally willing to confront that finding.

That is what an intellectually serious debate requires.

Women should not become collateral damage in an argument in which one side exaggerates every migrant crime and the other fears that acknowledging any pattern will strengthen its political opponents. Public safety is more important than either ideological project.

Vine describes the subject as a taboo. Perhaps the most useful way of breaking that taboo is not with sweeping accusations but with better evidence, transparent statistics and an insistence upon the same behavioural standards for everyone. Most migrants will have nothing to fear from such an approach. Those who come peacefully to build lives in Western countries have as much interest as anybody else in seeing violent offenders identified and punished.

A mature immigration debate should therefore be capable of holding two propositions simultaneously: migrants are individuals who must not be condemned collectively for crimes committed by others, and migration policy may nevertheless have consequences for crime and women's safety that governments have a duty to measure and address.

Neither proposition cancels the other.

And no woman should have to pay the price for our refusal to discuss both.

https://www.dailymail.com/columnists/article-16025607/SARAH-VINE-Western-women-murdered-migrants-misogynist.html