科隆案揭示移民性别失衡危险
There were so many of them: weary young men, some barely teenagers, trekking across Europe to reach the promised German land. I remember wondering a few months back, during the peak of the Syrian migration wave, why the women had been left behind.
有太多这样的人：疲惫的年轻男子穿过欧洲大陆抵达了福地德国，其中有的还只是青少年。我还记得，几个月前，在叙利亚移民浪潮达到顶峰的时候，我曾想过为什么女性被留下了。
There were reasons men sought refuge first: the arduous journeys, the pressing need for work before applying for family reunification and, above all, escape from recruitment by the army or militias. It is not unusual in war for parents to send their boys away.
男性先寻求庇护有许多原因：艰苦的旅途、在申请家庭团聚前找到工作的迫切需要，以及最重要的原因——逃脱军队或者民兵组织的征召。父母在战争中把儿子送走很平常。
Yet the impact of this gender imbalance was a largely overlooked aspect of the migration crisis. In Angela Merkel’s remarkable drive to show compassion for a people the world had tried so hard to ignore, some risks were understated. It seemed insensitive and politically disadvantageous, in the face of opposition to the migration surge, for supporters of the German chancellor’s humanitarian policy to dwell on the consequences.
然而，在移民危机中，性别失衡的影响基本上被忽视了。安格拉默克尔(Angela Merkel)向世界刻意忽视的一个民族展现同情的非凡之举中，一些风险被低估了。对德国总理的人道主义政策的支持者而言，面对反对移民潮的声音，过多地考虑后果似乎不近人情，在政治上也是不利的。
After the ghastly New Year’s Eve in Cologne, however, questions that should have been raised and vigorously debated in public are finally being voiced. The details of that night are murky but we know enough — and the scale of the attacks is shocking. The number of complaints filed by women has been gathering pace, 40 per cent of them related to sex attacks.
然而，跨年夜科隆发生可怕事件之后，早应提出并在公众中进行积极讨论的问题最终被表达出来了。有关那个夜晚的细节很模糊，但我们知道的已经足够，袭击的规模令人震惊。由女性提出的申诉不断增加，其中40%都和性侵犯有关。
How many asylum seekers, whether from Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq, were involved has yet to be established. But they may have been recruited by north African gangs responsible for many robberies in the city in recent years.
有多少寻求庇护者参与其中还未确定，无论他们是来自叙利亚、阿富汗还是伊拉克。但他们可能被近年在科隆市内制造多起抢劫案的北非犯罪团体招募了。
Scholars who have studied mass migration of young men and discovered a correlation with a rise of crime and attacks on women are unsurprised by this turn of events.
一些研究年轻男性大规模迁移的学者对这一变故并不感到惊讶，他们已经发现这种迁移现象与犯罪及对女性袭击增多有关联。
Much has been made of the demeaning attitude towards women that some of Europe’s newest Muslim migrants may have grown up with. But Valerie Hudson, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University who has researched migrant issues in Asia, says the sex ratio is far more important than different interpretations of female modesty.
有关欧洲最新的这批穆斯林移民可能从小就耳濡目染养成对女性的轻蔑态度，已经有很多论述。但研究亚洲移民问题的德克萨斯农工大学(Texas A&M University)政治科学教授瓦莱丽欠德森(Valerie Hudson)表示，性别比例比对女性得体举止的不同理解重要得多。
“The literature I’ve contributed to shows a pattern: the higher the sex ratio, the higher the crime rate and crimes against women,” she tells me. “When you get a surplus of young men in a society — and they are marginalised, disadvantaged, and they live together and socialise together — you have the beginnings of collective activity in which they take what society has denied them. And they are, collectively, willing to take risks.”
“我撰写的文章表明了一种模式：性别比例越高，犯罪率越高，针对女性的犯罪越多，”她告诉我，“当社会中的男性过剩，而且他们被边缘化、处于弱势、在一起生活和交往，你就会看到他们开始通过集体行动去获取社会拒绝给予他们的东西。而且作为一个集体，他们愿意承担风险。”
Such fears about sex ratios in cases of mass migration extend beyond the immediate consequences. Many young male migrants are minors, which facilitates their asylum applications but could have a longer lasting impact on the sex ratio in the host country.
对大规模移民中性别比例的担忧不止表现在即时影响方面。许多年轻的男性移民是未成年人，这有利于他们申请庇护，但可能会对接受国的性别比例造成更持久的影响。
Andrea Den Boer, an expert on gender imbalance in Asian internal migration from the UK’s University of Kent, says there are already measures preventing asylum seekers who arrive as unaccompanied minors from bringing their families over at a later stage — which in turn further inflates the proportion of young men in the population. Some work has been done on the potential long-term impact in Sweden but there are no official statistics on the ages of the refugees to Germany. Ms Den Boer’s rough estimate is that 72 per cent of refugees last year were male, but no one knows how many were young adults. “Nobody has thought about the sex-ratio implications,” she says.
研究亚洲内部移民性别失衡问题的专家、英国肯特大学(University of Kent)的安德烈娅笠婶尔(Andrea Den Boer)表示，目前有一些措施防止无人陪伴的未成年申请庇护者在之后将整个家庭带来接受国，此举将进一步使年轻男性在人口中的比例上升。在瑞典，人们已经对这个问题的潜在长期影响展开了一些研究，但德国还没有难民年龄的官方统计数字。登博尔的粗略估计是，去年有72%的难民是男性，但没人知道其中有多少是年轻的成年人。“没人考虑过性别比例的影响，”她说。
The one country that has taken gender into account is Canada, where the government said last year that it would take only Syrian women, children and families. The policy was probably prompted by concerns over terrorism — and it drew its share of critics who warned that young men faced the greatest risk in Syria.
有一个国家已经将性别纳入考虑，就是加拿大，去年该国政府表示将只接收叙利亚女性、儿童和家庭。这项政策很可能是因为对恐怖主义的担忧而出台的，但这项政策也有批评者，他们警告称年轻男性在叙利亚面临的风险最大。
There are no easy answers to the mass migration dilemma, particularly where horrific crimes are being perpetrated on an innocent population as in Syria. But taking into account the long-term implications for the host society should be an integral part of any policy. As Prof Hudson says: “A normal sex ratio is a public good.”
对于大规模移民带来的两难困境，没有简单的答案，尤其是在恐怖罪行正被加诸在无辜人们身上的地方，如叙利亚。但对接受国来说，将长期影响纳入考虑应该是任何政策不可或缺的一部分。就如赫德森教授所说的：“正常的性别比例将造福大众。”
