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🇩🇪🔴 “They tried to penetrate every opening of our bodies.” German woman Claudia Vosen and her daughter suffered a mass sexual assault at the hands of Arabs during the Cologne New Year’s Eve attacks of 2015/16. After the harrowing sexual assaults, Vosen faced a new hell from co-workers who called her racist. She is speaking out now, a decade later, to EMMA magazine. She said when migrants finished sexually assaulting them over the course of a half-hour, the women were “spat out.” Vosen filed a complaint that night; she was one of 627 women who did so just in one city, Cologne. What followed, she said, was almost as damaging as the attack. “When I arrived at work in January and told everyone what had happened to me, they said: ‘You’re crazy. They really messed me up. What are you saying… that’s not true. Otherwise we would have heard or read something. You have something against foreigners,’” said Vosen. “Everything was swept under the rug. That was the worst part. It was denied, covered up.” Vosen’s daughter also suffered. On the schoolyard, her daughter heard, “Just be glad you weren’t raped.” Vosen’s daughter began avoiding groups of young men who appeared Arab. “Young women don’t defend themselves the way we used to,” says the mother. “They no longer dare to laugh in the face of a group of boys who cause them problems. They answer cautiously. They are afraid.” “New Year’s Eve opened my eyes,” said Claudia Vosen. “For me, there is a before and an after.” She also stated that afterwards, the demonstrations were not against the mass sexual assaults and rapes but instead focused on “racism.” She said these protesters did not act out of solidarity with the victims but with the migrants. “Instead of simply saying who the perpetrators are, whether right or left. We weren’t allowed to say back then: ‘Those were Arabs.’ All that remained was: people with a foreign appearance,” she said. Nationwide, 1,200 women filed reports of sexual violence that fateful night. Estimates indicated the number of men involved at more than 2,000. Cologne Police President Wolfgang Albers initially called the night “largely peaceful.” Days later, he admitted, as reported by the BBC, that a “very large number of sexual assaults” had been committed by groups of young men “largely of North African or Arab appearance.” An internal federal police report revealed that women ran a “gauntlet” through masses of heavily intoxicated foreign men “that words cannot describe.” The report labeled the scene as “chaotic and shameful.” North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Ralf Jäger later told a state parliamentary committee that the perpetrators were “almost exclusively” people with a migration background. “All signs point to these being North Africans and people from the Arab world,” he said, adding that asylum seekers who had arrived just months earlier were among the suspects. Of 153 suspects identified in Cologne for offenses that night, about two-thirds were from Morocco or Algeria; roughly 44% were asylum seekers and another 12% were believed to be in Germany illegally. However, actual convictions were almost non-existent due to the chaos and the lack of footage, which means hundreds of women went without justice. Follow: @RMXnews