The real (carefully hidden) war against women

In October last year a Yazidi former sex slave Nadia Murad was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. 

Did you notice? I missed it. And there is a reason why I did so. The media, which has talked so very much about #metoo and rape culture and worried about businessmen going to parties where waitresses wore short skirts, made very little play with it. 

Yet people wonder why trust in the press is so low.

Poor Nadia Murad was 21 when she was kidnapped by ISIS, alongside about three thousand other Yazidi women and girls, and repeatedly gang raped. 

It is reminiscent of the gang rapes that now take place frequently across Western Europe, including in Great Britain. According to journalist Pelle Neroth Taylor, 42 out of 43 of those convicted in Sweden for gang rape in 2016-2017 had foreign backgrounds: 32 were born abroad and 10 were born in Sweden of foreign parents. I wonder what the figures for other European countries are. 

The press barely mentions this either.

But the American press did have time to spill gallons of ink about white Catholic boys in red hats smirking in a racist manner at a non-white Vietnam era veteran. And about a 'racist, homophobic' attack on a black actor which, the police decided, he staged himself. 

The British press, meanwhile, writes very circumspectly about one Muslim gang after another convicted of raping young girls in provincial cities. 

In Douglas Murray's phrase, journalists see their role as negotiating between their readers and the truth.