Reflecting on the Cologne attacks one month on

Early on Lara Prendergast noted that,

…the headlines have been conspicuous by their absence. So far this year, the main 'feminist' topic covered by Guardian comment writers is Chris Gayle's cricket sexism row, which involves the sportsman chatting up a female journalist. There is not one mention of the Cologne attacks, aside from in news reports. Why is that? Is it because they are not deemed important? Perhaps we don't care about vicious attacks against German frauen? Or is it because the details of the story – that the men appear to have been of "Arab or North African origin" who did not seem to speak German or English, and that there is a possibility they are some of the 1.1 million migrants to have entered Germany last year – make it too controversial to touch?

To be fair feminists have responded. Laurie Penny wrote an excellent article damning the attacks and imploring feminists not to allow bigots to usurp the agenda. Closer to home Amy Gray pointed out that when it comes to sexual assault women's words fail to carry the weight of truth (which explains why even now this is part of the problem on the Left with accepting the cultural backgrounds of the assailants). More recently, the Australian Muslim feminist writer, Randa Abdel-Fattah has challenged the racism and hypocrisy she sees masquerading as concern for women's rights.

However, one of the distinguishing features of this commentary is the crafting of an equivalence between privatised sexual and domestic violence in the West and what occurred on the streets of Cologne not exactly in broad daylight, but certainly in public.

To be sure the former is utterly abhorrent, and I share the feminist fight to eradicate men's violence against women, but to say that intimate partner violence (or isolated instances of sexual assault in public), is the same as a group of up to 1,000 men – what, in fact, amounts to a small army - publicly assaulting and even raping women in a co-ordinated manner is to make a false equivalence.

These are two very different kinds of violence - one is individual, hidden and shameful and the other collective, open and shameless. To be sure, both are about men's power over women, but that's where the similarity ends.

What has been lacking in the extant commentary is the willingness to distinguish between these different forms of violence and to address the unprecedented nature of the Cologne attacks in the West and, beyond this, what they signify.

There is also the thorny matter of culture, which is that things are altogether different in conservative Muslim countries and especially in those in which fundamentalism prevails. Women are not, even tacitly, the equals of men. In most Middle-Eastern and North-African countries women are categorically subordinate to men and this is sanctioned in law, religion and culture. The accusation of 'racism' from which feminists recoil risks erroneously aligning race with culture or, more specifically, with religion. In western culture rape is no more prevalent in one racial group than another, with the notable exception of Indigenous communities; what we see here, then, is not a racial but a cultural difference. This difference is evident in the atypical nature of the crime itself.

Indeed, we may see the police force's complete inability to handle the situation as evidence of a 'completely new dimension of crime'. What has emerged in the ensuing weeks is that similar assaults also took place in Sweden at the large music festival, 'We are Sthlm'. Here too the police were unprepared (and stand accused of covering it up for fear of stirring racial hatred).

Director of events at Stockholm City Council, Roger Ticoalu made the observation,'It was a modus operandi that we had never seen before: large groups of young men who surround girls and molest them.' As journalist Ivar Arpi said, 'The German police made a similar point: they are used to handling drunks. But gangs of young men encircling and then groping women at large public gatherings: who has ever heard of such a thing?'

Wehave never seen this kind of mob violence before, but who is 'we'? Non-western feminists certainly have and they've been talking about it for some time. Take the razer-sharp commentary of Algerian sociologist Marieme Hélie Lucas after the Cologne attacks. She documents analogous assaults against Arab women by large groups of men in Tunis, Algiers, and Tahir Square during the Arab Spring.

'We' of course heard about Tahir Square because a Western woman, CBS reporter Lara Logan, was herself surrounded, stripped, assaulted and digitally raped while covering the fall of Hosni Mubarak. Sometime later it transpired that a Dutch journalist had also suffered the same fate. This phenomenon was also documented in the award-winning Egyptian film 678 in 2010.