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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

I would say it is both a mostly symbolic movement and a collection of real personal stories that most people know a victim that is either have a friend or friend to a friend.

Lets imagine we had a movement like metoo here in Europe talking about violence from immigrants. You would get thousands of personal stories documenting people being robbed, beaten, threatened, raped or target of other forms of crime. The people behind the movement would highlight the over representation that those immigrants have in the crime statistics, and the crimes would be very concrete. What would the conclusions be drawn about the initiative by the broader society? I predict that the difference between conservatives and liberals would be a mirror image of the same difference conservatives and liberals has over metoo.

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I would be very surprised if these situations would be mirrors of one another. The way MeToo played out in my social media, I never saw friend A sharing an experience that friend-of-friend B posted. Rather, friend A shared their direct experience. Re-shared stories would have no doubt caused an inflated sense of actual prevalence... but that's simply not what I observed.

I have many friends that reported their own direct experiences with sexual harassment and assault. I would actually be pretty shocked if anything like that number had directly experienced violence from immigrants.

Interesting. I have the opposite experience with no friends talking about sexual harassment but several who are victim of crimes committed by immigrants.

It make some sense however given that data here in Sweden. 6% of people are victim of either sexual assault or harassment and around 6% of people are victim of either assault or robbery. Sexual assault has mostly female victims and assault and robbery has mostly male victims.

And the blame towards immigrants shows up clear in the data. Immigrants in Sweden are 400% over represented for assault and robbery and almost 500% in regard to sexual assault. For those cities which has a very high proportion of immigrants this translate to directly to a lot of people being victims of crime committed by immigrants.

The data is what the data is. We can discuss different interpretation of it, but the general point is that movement like MeToo is not about informing the public about crime statistics. It is a symbol by one political side about an issue they find important, which they highlight through the use of mass reports of personal experiences. The right could do the exact same thing, and I remember a few times they tried and failed to do so.

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