Monty Python Britain: “Please don’t rape the women”, Migrants Asked

One thing might be said of the United Kingdom’s new policy of providing detailed instructions to newly arrived migrants asking them very nicely not to rape or sexually assault any women that they might encounter in the country: that the spirit of Monty Python is not dead.

What other way is there to look upon this development other than as comedic farce? There is a section in the document which reads as follows: “You are expected never to use threat, force or pressure to make someone have sex with you." Another line reads “you are expected to never try to have sex with someone who is asleep, drunk, or unable to consent clearly”.

The document goes on to ask migrants nicely not to wolf-whistle at women in the streets, make sexual comments to them or take videos of them without their consent.

There are occasions when pointing out the obvious seems almost redundant, but since the obvious has apparently not occurred to His Majesty’s government, here it is: if it is necessary to inform people coming into the country that rape is a bad thing and not generally permitted in the United Kingdom, then that necessity is an explicit concession that the policy of admitting such people is a risk to women, and indeed children, since the migrants are also asked nicely not to have sex with people under the age of 16.

A Briefing and an Admission

The welcome briefing is also an admission: if it is necessary to inform migrants that these things are not generally considered cricket, then it must follow that up until now a great many migrants have been behaving as if they were entirely unaware. If the British government is now asking migrants directly not to pose a threat to women, what other conclusion can be drawn other than that the threat to women has heretofore been very real?

To the average person, this is all very obvious. Yet to the lanyard class of human resource manager ladies now running much of British public policy, it all seems very sensible: the migrants are being a little sexually forward with the ladies? Oh, well, perhaps a sensitivity class will help.

For years, anybody who suggested that importing very large numbers of people from societies with profoundly different attitudes toward women might conceivably import some of those attitudes along with them was treated as a crank, a racist or – worst of all in modern Britain – somebody being terribly unhelpful, especially if the remarks were uttered in “polite” company.

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Culture Is More Than Decoration

Culture, the voters were assured, was basically decorative. It consists of food, music, colorful clothing and occasionally a nice street festival. The idea that culture might also encompass attitudes toward women, sex, family, violence, religion, homosexuality, authority or the rights of children was dismissed as the sort of thing said by people who had not attended the correct university – either of them.

Now, rather wonderfully, the government has produced a leaflet explaining to migrants that they must not rape anybody.

But rather than ask the politically awkward question – namely whether Britain should be admitting people whose understanding of these matters is sufficiently deficient that they require remedial instruction upon arrival – the state has instead reached for the modern bureaucrat’s universal solvent: training.

This is how Britain now deals with practically everything.

The Absurdity of Britain's "Lanyard Class"

One imagines the meeting at which this particular initiative was conceived. Serious people around a table. Lanyards everywhere. Somebody from safeguarding. Somebody from community engagement. Somebody from inclusion. Somebody who has never in her – and it will have been a “her” – life encountered a social problem which could not, in theory, be cured by a PowerPoint presentation.

“What if”, somebody ventures, with the solemnity of Oppenheimer pondering the atom bomb, “we simply tell them not to rape women?”

Nods around the room. Notes are taken. Nobody asks why such an instruction might be necessary in the first place.

And that is because asking the question would lead somewhere dangerous.

It might lead to the conclusion that not every culture has identical attitudes toward women. It might even lead to the idea that immigration policy should take account of whether the people being admitted are likely to adapt comfortably to the social norms of the country admitting them.

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There is also something wonderfully backward about where the burden is being placed: imagine applying this principle anywhere else.

Suppose a zoo announced that it was introducing several dozen wolves into a public park, but reassured local parents that each wolf had been given a leaflet explaining that biting children was frowned upon. One suspects the public response might not be gratitude for the quality of the educational material.

Old Messages Redundant

There is more irony: for decades, Western institutions have gravely intoned that women should never be told to modify their behavior in response to the threat of male violence. Quite right too, in principle. Women should be able to walk where they please, dress as they please and live their lives without being told that avoiding assault is principally their responsibility. Such has been agreed by all polite right-thinking people for years now.

Yet when immigration enters the conversation, that clarity suddenly disappears into fog.

The authorities become strangely reluctant to identify any cultural dimension to sexual offending and even more reluctant to entertain the possibility that immigration policy itself might have consequences for women’s safety.

Hence this document.

It is not really an immigration policy. It is an artifact of a governing class which has spent so long denying that cultural differences matter that, when forced to confront one, can only do so through the language of workplace induction.

Welcome to Britain.

Here is your accommodation.

Here is information about public services.

Here is an explanation of the weather.

And, before you go, one final thing: please do not rape the women.

Monty Python, had they written it, might have decided the joke was too obvious.