ADVENTURES IN OLD EUROPE:

Girls Terrorized in France's Macho High-Rise Ghettos (Catherine Bremer, 2/28/03, Reuters)

A short bus ride from Paris, a world capital of romance, teen-age girls trapped in soulless, Soviet-style housing complexes are too scared to wear skirts and balk at the idea of dating.

Imprisoned behind yellowed curtains that hang limply at windows, they stay indoors to avoid the jeers, bullying and the ominous risk of rape that lurks in dingy stairwells where gangs of boys of mostly North African origin hang out.

"It's everywhere, all the time. Beatings, rapes, the lot. The worst is the names they call you, especially if you're dressed in a girly way which makes you a slut," says Amel, 21.

Home to many immigrants from the Maghreb, such suburbs have seen a rise in radical Islam that has turned attitudes toward women even harsher. Pressure is mounting for Muslim women to wear veils and forced marriages that snatch girls from college and a career are now commonplace. [...]

Long criticized for creating ghettos of jobless immigrants in a nation where equality was a founding principle, the state housing projects thrown up around France's cities from the 1960s have always provided a breeding ground for violence and crime.

Known in French as "cites," the high-rise estates, crumbling citadels of poverty turned in on themselves, provide would-be gangsters with a maze of shady basements where drug trafficking, dealing in guns and intra-gang fights are rife.

This is an early glimpse of Europe's future, because they won't assimilate these immigrants and they'll eventually be outnumbered by them. Unless, of course, the French and Germans decide to handle it the same way they did their "Jewish problem".

MORE:
The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris (Theodore Dalrymple, Autumn 2002, City Journal)

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 28, 2003 8:24 PM