When he first arrived in Europe, Abdu Osman Kelifa, a Muslim asylum seeker from the Horn of Africa, was shocked to see women in skimpy clothes drinking alcohol and kissing in public. Back home, he said, only prostitutes do that, and in locally made movies, couples “only hug but never kiss”.
Confused, Mr. Kelifa volunteered to take part in a pioneering and, in some quarters, controversial programme that seeks to prevent sexual and other violence by helping male immigrants from societies that are largely segregated or in which women show neither flesh nor public affection to adapt to more open European societies.
Fearful of stigmatising migrants as potential rapists and playing into the hands of anti-immigrant politicians, most European countries have avoided addressing the question of whether men arriving from more conservative societies might get the wrong idea once they move to places where it can seem as if anything goes.
But, with more than one million asylum seekers arriving in Europe this year, an increasing number of politicians and also some migrant activists now favour offering coaching in European sexual norms and social codes.
Mr. Kelifa, 33, attended the education programme at an asylum centre in this town near the western Norwegian city of Stavanger. Like similar courses now under way in the village of Lunde and elsewhere in Norway, it was voluntary and was organised around weekly group discussions of rape and other violence.
The goal is that participants will “at least know the difference between right and wrong”, said Nina Machibya, the Sandnes centre’s manager.
A course manual sets out a simple rule that all asylum seekers need to learn and follow: “To force someone into sex is not permitted in Norway, even when you are married to that person.”
It skirts the issue of religious differences, noting that while Norway has long been largely Christian, it is “not religion that sets the laws” and that, whatever a person’s faith, “the rules and laws nevertheless have to be followed”.
In Denmark, lawmakers are pushing to have such sex education included in mandatory language classes for refugees. The German region of Bavaria, the main entry point to Germany for asylum seekers, is already experimenting with such classes at a shelter for teenage migrants in the town of Passau.
Norway, however, has been leading the way. Its immigration department mandated that such programmes be offered nationwide in 2013 and hired a non-profit foundation, Alternative to Violence, to train refugee centre workers in how to organise and conduct classes on sexual and other forms of violence. The government provided funding for two years to pay for interpreters for the classes and is now reviewing the results and whether to extend its support.
“The biggest danger for everyone is silence,” said Per Isdal, a clinical psychologist in Stavanger who works with the foundation, which developed the programme Kelifa attended in Sandnes.
Many refugees “come from cultures that are not gender equal and where women are the property of men”, Mr. Isdal said. “We have to help them adapt to their new culture.”
The first such programme to teach immigrants about local norms and how to avoid misreading social signals was initiated in Stavanger, the centre of Norway’s oil industry and a magnet for migrants, after a series of rapes from 2009 to 2011.
Henry Ove Berg, who was Stavanger’s police chief during the spike in rape cases, said he supported providing migrants sex education because “people from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a miniskirt, only in a burqa”. When they get to Norway, he added, “something happens in their heads”.
He said, “there was a link but not a very clear link” between the rape cases and the city’s immigrant community. According to the state broadcaster, NRK, which reviewed court documents, only three of 20 men found guilty in those cases were native Norwegians, the rest immigrants.
The claim that refugees and immigrants in general are prone to commit rape has become a main rallying cry of anti-migrant activists across Europe, with each case of sexual violence by a newcomer presented as evidence of an imported scourge.
Hege Storhaug, a former Norwegian journalist who runs Human Rights Service, an organisation fiercely critical of Islam, has seized on the issue to rally public opposition to refugees, asserting on her group’s website that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany had opened the way to an “epidemic of rape” with her welcoming approach to migrants.
Norway, as most European countries, does not break down crime statistics by ethnicity or religion. A 2011 report by Norway’s state statistical bureau noted that “immigrants are overrepresented in the crime statistics”, but suggested that this was not due to cultural differences but because many of the immigrants were young men.