Imtotallytrustworthy

That under similar circumstances, we would all be just the same as them, just as flawed as them, just as human as them.

I work with kids who are spoiled, rude, bigoted, selfish, greedy, lazy, combative, contrarian, smelly, and a whole bunch of other negative traits. In other words:

I WORK WITH TEENAGERS

Not "muslims", not "niggers", not "terrorists", just teenagers. They are just like any other kid you'd meet on the street. Give them too much and they'll want more, scold them too much and they'll resent you, try and find an inbetween and go fucking insane because taking care of children is a really hard job no matter if you are a parent or a teacher or a welfare worker. I don't see people asking the government to put their children on a plane to Kabul because they can't appreciate how good they've got it, yet so many people seem to think that because refugees aren't angels they deserve to die in a ditch thousands of miles away.

There are some really, really hard choices that need to be made when it comes to how we should handle this refugee crisis. Choices that will lead to suffering no matter what we do. Choices that will hurt us to make, choices that might break us if we make them. But dehumanizing the people those choices will affect the most will not make it any easier. It will just make us monsters.

Correlation does not equal causation. Sexual crime has increased because of more progressive legislation on what constitutes a sexual crime, and violent crime is actually going down.

At the risk of sounding like a heartless bastard: The paycheck.

I used to work in elderly care, but the paycheck for this job was just so much bigger in comparison that I switched. I know that sounds cynical, but that's just how it is. Very few people would want to take this job if the wages were the same as a comparable job in elderly care. So the government throws a shitton of money at anyone who's willing to open a refugee home just so that they'll get the manpower necessary. (They also do it because wasting money is easier than having to make hard decisions)

I'd love to say that I took this job because I really care about the kids and I want to help them, but that just wouldn't be true. I do care about them, don't get me wrong, but this job can be very thankless and stressful. That's not to say that there aren't wonderful moments here and there, but overall it is a grating experience. Even with the paychecks we have a big problem with staff often leaving due to overwork, which of course stresses the kids out because they're constantly losing familiar faces. That makes work harder for the rest of us. And the hours. Don't even get me started on the hours. No, if the paycheck wasn't what it is, I'd be back in elderly care.

Gang of refugees raping women thanks to government intervention? No. Gangs of refugees sexually harassing and molesting women without the police investigating it out of fears of stoking xenophobic fires? Sadly, yes.

It's not an epidemic of rape, as some would have you believe, but it is a systematic failure of the government to instill Swedish values on sexual liberation and women's rights with people who come here. Integration is always more difficult with adults, because they are very set in their ways and often conservative, and so it's vitally important to prioritize sexual education. This is not always accomplished, and when it is it does not always have intended results.

That the police has declined to both investigate and reveal that this happens, and in the case of the now infamous We Are Sthlm festival happens on a large and organized scale, is, I'll be honest, fucking terrifying. I don't think there was anyone who wasn't horrified by this news. Gender rights is one of the things Sweden is most proud of, and to see them violated not only by the people we thought we were saving from death, but ignored by the people we thought protected us, is as close as you can come to shatter a country's self-image. It was irresponsible, it was disgusting, it is a great source of shame.

I know several women, of them including my wife, who have been subjected to sexual harassment on the street in the middle of the day by dark-skinned people who didn't speak the language. So for me to say that it's all wrong, that this is not an issue and that Sweden is just as safe now for women as it was before the crisis, well that just wouldn't be true. But it is a top priority to inform and educate on these issues, and it does work to discourage this kind of behaviour.

Too many to count, it often feels like. I'll give you an example.

I have a co-worker who is kurdish, and he told me that kurds never praise failure. In Sweden if you're playing a game of football and you try to shoot on goal but miss, everyone will praise you for doing your best and push you to try harder. Kurds on the other hand might berate you for failing. He said this in the context of how confusing it must be for some of the kids to fail at something and still be praised for the effort. It doesn't make sense to them.

But by far the biggest cultural barrier is how our cultures different in how we view adulthood. Their cultures almost always consider adulthood to be somewhere in the early teens, whereas we, quite rightly, believe it's somewhere between 18 and 21. So when they come here and are treated as the kids they are, they get super confused. When we boss them around and give them rules, they get frustrated. They think they are adults and we are treating them as kids, when really they are just kids.

There's also the matter of honor. Western and Middle-eastern ideas of honor are incredibly different from one another. In the West, honor is something you earn. You start as a tabula rasa and gradually gain more and more as you perform respectable feats and carry yourself well. In the Middle-east, honor is something you have from the beginning, like a big tank of gas, and whenever you do something dishonorable that tank is emptied. This also becomes difficult when dealing with refugees. They expect you to immediately treat them with respect, while you feel that they haven't done a thing to earn it. If this discrepancy isn't adressed it can cause conflict.