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Denmark apes Norway’s refugee sex training

The Local Norway
The Local Norway - [email protected]
Denmark apes Norway’s refugee sex training
As part of the education, foreigners would be told that a woman's clothing is not an invitation to sex. Photo: Colourbox

A sex training programme for refugees pioneered in Norway could now be launched in Denmark.

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Norwegian refugee business Hero Norge began running sex classes for new refugees after a series of assaults carried out by residents of one of their reception centres.  
 
Now the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party (DF), backed by the Social Democrats and the Social Liberals (Radikale), wants to include sex education as part of Danish language course, aiming to combat what it claims is a disproportionate number of rapes carried out by immigrants and their children.
 
“If they’ve done something in Norway that works, we should just copy it,” Danish People’s Party spokesman Peter Skaarup told Metroxpress. 
 
Along with DF, the Social Democrats, the Social Liberals and the Conservatives support introducing sex education as part of Danish language courses. 
 
Linda Hagen, who runs 34 asylum centres for Hero Norge, told The Local that the programme had been introduced after a string of sexual offences committed by refugees near one of its centres. 
 
“We had some problems in Stavanger because some of the refugees had sexually violent episodes with Norwegian girls in the centre of the town,” she said. “So the police, the immigration department and Hero Norge launched a project to teach refugees about Norwegian behaviour.” 
 
Hagen explained that men from sexually conservative countries often struggled to understand how to interpret the behaviour of young Norwegian women. 
 
“It’s difficult if you come from a country where women never go out,” she said. “When you see a girl with a short skirt dancing at a party late in the evening, what kind of message will it give you?
 
"It’s important to tell them that this kind of behaviour or clothing doesn’t mean that your'e allowed to go the whole way. If a girl says ‘no’, it’s a ‘no’.” 
 
Since Hero Norge began the courses, they have been taken over by the Norwegian charity Alternative to Violence, which gives counselling to men who are violent towards women. 
 
Asylum centre residents are given a voluntary five-hour course aimed at preventing sexual assaults. 
 
Between 2013 and 2014, 34.5 percent of all individuals convicted of rape in Denmark were immigrants or their descendants despite those groups only accounting for roughly 12 percent of Denmark’s total population. 

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