Those gathered at the scene of the crimes slammed the government’s open door refugee policy, enacted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in September. Women held up signs reading, “Mrs Merkel – Where are you?” and “Thank you [Cologne Mayor] Mrs. Reker. Arm Cologne.”
The mass attack on women occurred while festivities were in full swing, with the noise of revelers apparently distracting many during the incidents. Up to 1,000 men could be suspects in what the authorities called a “crime of a whole new dimension.”
To quell the New Year’s disturbance in the city, authorities eventually deployed more than 200 officers, involving 143 local policemen in addition to 70 federal officers. So far fewer than a dozen arrests have been made.
Tuesday’s rally to protect women’s rights came after Mayor Henriette Reker held a crisis meeting with Chief of Police, Wolfgang Albers, and head of federal police, Wolfgang Wurm, where she urged women to adopt a “code of conduct.”
“It is important to prevent such incidents from ever happening again,” Reker said according to RP Online.
The code includes advice to maintain a distance of an arm’s length from strangers, not to walk alone at night, to conjugate with a team of friends, to ask bystanders for help and to inform the authorities of an assault.
“We need to prevent confusion about what constitutes happy behavior and what is utterly separate from openness, especially in sexual behavior,” she said, promising to beef up security at mass events.
The mayor also revealed that the same kind of New Year’s chaos in Cologne has also happened elsewhere in Germany.
“We have heard by now that they [the attacks] have occurred in other cities. This of course is not comforting to us.”
Assaults on women have also taken place in Stuttgart where two 18-year-old women had reportedly been sexually abused and robbed by a group of over a dozen men on New Year’s Eve.