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Comment by alpsgolden | Hacker News Reader

A key question here is what has changed to make these attacks more prevalent. One possibility is it is related to immigration and changing demographics. The area with the most acid attacks by far, Newham ( http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/acid-attack-capital-bri... ) is also very immigrant heavy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Newham#Demog... ). In this NPR article, the example is of a guy with a white/British name attacking someone of middle eastern heritage -- but I know from experience on news coverage in my own region that NPR cannot be trusted on racial issues to select anecdotes that match the real patterns of behavior. Do any of the Brits here have any more insight on how immigration and changing demographics might be related to these attacks?

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Honestly, I used to live in Tower Hamlets, another "immigrant heavy" area for three years, and never felt remotely threatened.

Neither have the demographics in these areas "changed" much. The east end of London has had a large immigrant population since the 1970s and arguably since the 1700s when the Huguenots arrived from Northern France.

The most danger I was ever in was when they discovered an unexploded WWII bomb next to my flat ("The parties we've had in here, if it was going to go, it would have by now").

Acid attacks are so incredibly rare (350 last year) that any increase at all in them is going to represent a large statistical increase. If I had to hazard a guess as to why acid attacks were on the increase, it's because carrying a knife carries with it the chance of losing your own life as well and a life prison sentence if you kill someone. It's also (marginally) easier to argue that you're carrying a corrosive substance innocently than if you're found with a gun/knife. You are still 70x more likely to be involved in a knife attack than an acid attack.

Asking why immigration and changing demographics has caused this presupposes there being a racial motive at all. Explicitly asking for evidence which supports your theory suggests you've already made up your mind.

I live in Tower Hamlets and witnessed an acid attack a few weeks ago, the attacker was white and the victims were white. I don't feel unsafe here either.

The US political alt-right narrative doesn't translate well to the UK, there were many news stories about the acid attacks and the TL:DR; was that these attacks used to be directed towards women in conservative muslim immigrant communities but these days it's just a convenient weapon for gang activities and jealous or vindictive lovers - immigrant or not.

Why it is a convenient weapon? Cheap to buy and readily available, easy to carry around in a bottle and completely legal(I think that part is changing).

Some Immigrant neighbourhoods being poor is nothing new, and poor neighbourhoods suffering from criminal activities is again nothing original. Again, these neighbourhoods are not new and the immigrants hadn't moved there recently. So it doesn't look like some kind of immigrant critical mass was reached and they start throwing acid.

So no, you hadn't uncover a mystery or spoken the words that nobody dares to.

My guess would be that someone used acid for their criminal activities and had positive(from offender POV) results and it spread out as MOW.

A lot of the UK is "immigrant-heavy" (I've lived in Leicester and Boston, both of which fit that bill). Seems highly unlikely to be a causal link unless you can show a pattern across many areas.

Seems highly likely to me this is a result of improved and increased pressure over knife crime, pushing criminals into new methods, alongside increased exposure to the idea of acid attacks from news.

it could be that these immigrant areas are host to immigrants because they are poor areas. immigrants coming in with no connections or history in that country, and who probably came from a less wealthy country, would naturally take up residence in a poor area. and in a poor area, crime is higher. including acid attack crimes.

True. But I think it is the rise in acid attacks that is intriguing. Indeed, a rise in crime in general, and it is correlated, moderately, with Muslim % of population.

Something that is prevalent in the Middle East is now also prevalent in the place where large numbers of people from the Middle East have come to.

Something tells me its not a coincidence.

> Something tells me its not a coincidence.

Yes, that something being racial prejudice. Sad to see this attitude rife on HN.

Pretending that cultural differences don't exist on this planet is just plain silly. It's sad to see this level of virtue signalling on HN.

>Jumping to conclusions that fit your anti-immigrant racial prejudice, pretending that it’s actually about “cultural differences”, complaining about “virtue signalling”. It’s like playing a game of alt-right bingo here.

You forgot to call me a "Nazi" and "bigot" and "facist" and all the other things you ANTIFA folks call those who have different opinions than yourselves.

Ah, shoehorning “antifa” into the conversation (with vague insinuations that anti-fascism is somehow a bad thing), that’s another one.

How many more alt-right talking points can you squeeze out? Your reaction is so amusingly predictable, it’s sad to see someone so programmed to dullness.

Would you please not create accounts to engage in political flamewar here, regardless of how bad another commenter may be behaving? I've banned this one. As the site guidelines explain (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), the way to deal with egregious comments is not to feed them by responding in kind, but to flag them. In particularly bad cases you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We value that sort of heads-up from users, because HN's firehose is much too large for us to see everything that goes on here.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is seriously not ok here. This is explained in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

No one is pretending that cultural differences don't exist. They're just not statistically connected in any way to these acid attacks.

"The global pattern is very much males attacking young women and girls, relating to rejected sexual advances or marriage proposals or dowry-related attacks," he says.

But most of the attacks in the U.K. are random and are often connected to robberies or gang violence. Many of the perpetrators are in their teens."

I don't follow how we can lay the responsibility for this increase in attacks at the feet of people from the Middle East coming to the UK if the motives are so different. The method is the same but the motivation is fundamentally different.

Perhaps the simpler explanation -- that it's a method of assault that is easier to get away with, has lighter sentences if caught and is not illegal to carry the weapon -- is more likely.

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