Rape victim: I lied to shield migrants who attacked me
A POLITICIAN in Germany has admitted that she lied to police about the racial background of three men who raped her in case it triggered reprisals against refugees.
Selin Goren, who is the national spokesman of the Left-wing youth movement Solid, was attacked by three men back in January in Mannheim where she works as a refugee activist.
The 24-year-old was ambushed late at night in a playground where she said she was choked and forced to perform a sex act on her attackers.
After the assault she went straight to the police – but did not tell them the ethnicity of the men, or that they were speaking Arabic and Farsi. Miss Goren, aware of the backlash that migrants suffered after the events in Cologne on New Year’s Eve – when hundreds of women were sexually assaulted and robbed by marauding gangs of immigrant youths – merely said she was robbed and claimed her attackers spoke German.
Now she has told Germany’s Spiegel magazine why she lied. The day after her initial police interview at the end of January, she returned to the station in order to tell investigating officers the real story.
She said a friend had talked her into going back to the police because another woman had been raped in the area, an accusation later retracted by the alleged victim. Miss Goren, who has visited refugee camps in Iraq where she was shocked at the squalor of the conditions people are living in, said she did not want to stoke ‘more hatred against migrants’.
To help her cope with the effects of the attack, she has written an open letter to a fictional refugee and posted it on Facebook. It reads in part: ‘I am really sorry that your sexist and linecrossing treatment of me could help fuel aggressive racism.
‘I’m going to scream. I will not stand by and watch, and it can happen that racists and concerned citizens name you as the problem. You’re not the problem. You’re usually a wonderful human being who deserves as much as any other to be safe and free.’
She added: ‘I will not stand by and watch and let it happen that racists and concerned citizens name you as the problem.’
Miss Goren now admits that people should never ‘twist the truth’ about these matters – even if they believe it is politically expedient to do so.
A group called Gesa: Active Together Against Sexual Violence which operates in the German city of Kassel says that sexual assaults by male migrants have increased.
A spokesman for the group said: ‘The perpetrators often come from cultures with a different image of women. They are alone and looking to banish their humiliation of flight with confirmation of their masculinity. This is neither to apologise for nor to accept their actions – it is how it is.’
‘Did not want to stoke more hatred’