IT is not yet easy to talk about the Cologne New Year's Eve sex attacks. Or perhaps it is only straightforward for those who are happy to take a bunch of half-confirmed facts and conjectures and build them into a story about Europe being swamped by refugees whose values are violently at odds with our own, or to declare that foreigners are raping and molesting “our women”. Perhaps it’s only easy for those in Europe who misguidedly see misogyny and gender violence as attributes of cultures foreign to our own.

Several days on from the attacks, we are still struggling over not only how to interpret them, but the very basic facts of what happened. The only people who seem clear are those who have appropriated the situation for their own anti-immigrant causes, and, perhaps, those who experienced it. Reporting and debate around the events seem to have followed the usual pattern of response following a terrorist attack, though much delayed, since it took around five days for the story to properly surface into the global media. A news story emerged, but it was rather vague. Large numbers of women, we learned, had been assaulted and harassed in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. There was conjecture around whether the events had been co-ordinated. Tales of similar assault in other cities – Hamburg, Stuttgart – started came to light. Cologne's police chief talked of the perpetrators having an appearance “of North African or Arab origin”. But in the absence of any group volunteering to take the blame, and with the police seemingly unable to trace the culprits, we are still, at time of writing, left hanging.

Was this, as some have proposed, an attack on European values? Or a surfacing of a rape culture endemic across global society?

Carnival nights are often a blur. You only have to look at the viral photograph from Manchester city centre, strewn with inebriated bodies, to know how bad what we deem a normal New Year’s Eve can be. But what happened in Cologne was, by all accounts, disturbingly beyond that, particularly for the 121 women who came forward to file criminal complaints, many of sexual offences, including two accounts of rape. It was, said German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, "a completely new dimension of organised criminality”. Women reported being surrounded by rings of men, who groped and mugged them. For them it was a terrifying night unlike any other.

We all interpret events through our own cultural prisms, and we don’t need many facts to form conclusions. When I first read about Cologne, I couldn’t help thinking of Tahrir Square, where on one single day more than 80 women were subjected to mob sexual assaults, harassment or rape. When the story developed further, I thought of the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal, where authorities were ultimately blamed for casting a blind eye due to “institutionalised political correctness”. Yet with Cologne, we still don’t know who did it. We possibly may never know what precise demographic group these men came from, or even if they were all connected and the events co-ordinated. That is not, however, stopping a great many people from blaming refugees, or Muslims, or foreigners.

Even if we did know that the perpetrators were refugees, we should surely still be pausing to ask whether the actions of a few should inform policy towards the many. Do we accept the argument that these men are coming from countries in which women are more subordinate, and that therefore by embracing them we import sexual violence? And even if we did, is that reason to send them "home" or keep them out? Should we not, rather, let law take its course?

It seems to me that we have far too much emotional investment in the idea that the perpetrators were foreigners. All many people seem to want to know is who did it, racially speaking – perhaps in order to comfort themselves that gender violence is something that belongs to other people, other nations. I’m not saying that other cultures are not more oppressive towards women than our own: some are. But we also have a home-grown problem of rape and assault. As one anti-violence activist in Cologne put it: "Because refugees are now a burning topic, the media all of a sudden report about these events, but what nobody wants to admit is that these things happen all the time. I'm sorry to break this to you, but German-born men also harass and rape.”

In the days following the Cologne attacks, there was undoubtedly too much silence. That the story took so long to emerge and was not covered by many major media outlets, is a sad indictment on how the victims of sexual assault are treated in our culture. Still more troubling is the notion that such news might have been repressed because of heightened sensitivity around the refugee situation.

Yet, given the current atmosphere, the anti-immigrant rallies and the 222 attacks on refugee hostels reported in Die Zeit last year, surely that seems right. Of course we need to talk about it and debate. Of course, we need the story to come out, but accurately, slowly, sensibly, and without whipping up a fury of blame and retaliation. And that is why it is so very hard to talk about this. We need to fill the silence with truth and understanding, not speculative noise.