9/11 has 2,977 names; the later wars have none

The names that are remembered and the ones never counted

There is an asymmetry that repeats itself every anniversary: the names of the 9/11 victims are read aloud one by one, while the count of civilians killed in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya since 2001 has no list, no ceremony, and hardly any agreed figure. That disproportion between the grief that is televised and the grief filed away in a paragraph is the starting point of a debate that has been open for months and touches on an uncomfortable subject: sensual violence against women in contexts where reporting it does not exist.

The question that frames everything —why cases of sensual assaults on Muslim women barely come to light— admits answers ranging from the sociological data to ideological suspicion. And almost none of them are comfortable.

What is known about the rapes that go unreported

The first block of arguments is structural. In several Muslim-majority countries, legislation and judicial practice turn reporting into a risk for the victim herself: it is argued that a woman's testimony carries less evidentiary weight and that, in certain circumstances, reporting an assault can lead to an accusation of adultery. If the legal framework punishes those who report, silence is not a choice: it is the only rational way out.

On top of that comes family control. Some describe a system in which the assaulted woman is marked, and the response of those around her may be punishment, not protection. So-called honor killing appears in the material as a real threat, not as a cliché. With that picture, the official statistics do not measure violence: they measure how many dare to speak.

The community factor that does protect

There is a second line of analysis, less sarracena and more sociological, that points to network density. Closed communities control, but they also cover. A woman living within a group with strong ties is more watched and, at the same time, more protected against outside aggressors. The same mechanism that limits her freedom reduces her exposure on the street.

From there it jumps to the most repeated argument in the conversation: clothing. Some hold that covering up works as a practical deterrent and that a woman who does not do it carries a label of availability. Others respond that this is victim-blaming wrapped in cultural packaging. And a third group introduces a nuance that breaks everyone's comfort: if the veil protects, banning it leaves some women singled out and others not. The full discussion, with the specific examples cited, calls for an analysis that does not fit here.

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Why violence against Western women is more visible

The hypothesis that gains weight in the final stretch is that of the contempt component. Several analyses agree that when the assault is committed by someone from one group against someone from another, it is not only sensual crime at work: the logic of punishing those considered inferior or enemies also operates. The woman from one's own group falls outside that calculation; the one from outside does not.

This fits a pattern that repeats itself in the accounts: in group assaults, the victims selected are those who do not belong to the aggressors' community. It is not a thesis proven with data —no one has published a study here with a sample and methodology— but it is the explanation with the most consensus among those who have trinc the case.

The problem of measuring what is not counted

Here lies the knot. Without reports there is no record. Without records there is no public policy. Without public policy, silence reproduces itself. Any comparison between the violence suffered by a European woman and that suffered by a woman in a country where reporting destroys her is, at bottom, a comparison between two different counting systems, not between two different realities.

How many assaults never make it onto any paper? Nobody knows. And that ignorance, which should be the starting point of any serious debate, is too often used as the closing argument.