Currently right up top on Delfi.ee is one of their short and lazy rewrites of an article in the Mail Online. The article, with patchy references to news appearing in the German press and letters written to the local authorities by “women’s rights activists”, insinuates that German refugee camps are “rife with rape and child abuse”.

This is complete and utter nonsense. It’s an image created by a tabloid in the UK, the declared purpose of which is to stir up feelings of any kind to sell its circulation.

Most of the reports the Mail Online is likely referring to (as it doesn’t provide us with its sources) appeared two days ago and have since been looked into by various German papers quite superior in quality to both the Mail Online and Delfi.ee.

Picking up an incendiary article in a British tabloid and running it alongside news coming from sources such as news agencies, ERR and the more serious Estonian papers is more than questionable.

Even beyond that, this particular blunder shows beautifully how an anonymous and faceless news portal like Delfi.ee can screw with the less inquisitive minds in the population.

If they had any kind of backbone and professional ethic, if they actually had the basic journalistic courage to stand for the junk they publish (which, at least, the Mail Online does have), perhaps they’d look into the facts behind what they’re about to run, and the effect it might have.

Let’s keep it in Germany for the time being. According to the latest numbers of the German migration authorities, roughly 245,000 refugees arrived in the country between January and August 2015.

Putting people arriving by the tens of thousands up in various makeshift shelters comes with considerable problems. One problem that apparently the German authorities had underestimated is the difficulty of creating separate spaces for women and children.

This doesn’t automatically mean that all of them get manhandled and raped. But it does mean that all the everyday intimacy both sexes depend on is simply inexistent. There are no separate showers, no separate restrooms, and so on, which is the main source of concern on the part of the women’s rights organisations quoted by the Mail Online.

Rape, as recorded in the refugee camps by the authorities (and we are in Germany, after all, so don’t imagine the untrammelled insanity of ten thousand people awash on a small Greek island), is not high, but low.

The camp the articles talk about, in the German town of Gießen, has had four confirmed incidents of rape this year, all committed by one and the same man. This is a lone record among all of the camps in Germany.

Overall, the German authorities say that they know about “a number in the lowest double-digits” of rape accusations, of which only the four quoted above have been confirmed.

For the sake of not downplaying things all too much, let’s assume we’re talking about 14 cases. At 245,000 refugees this year, that’s an incidence of 5.7 rape cases per 100,000 people. The number of cases per 100,000 is how the incidence of rape is commonly measured in a population.

The incidence of rape in Germany overall per 100,000 people is 9.1.

Look it up for the United States, you get 27.3.

For Estonia, it’s 10.5 per 100,000 in 2013 (the most recent available number).

Sweden’s at 69+ per 100,000, which is not because of immigration, but because they have a very different legal situation where plenty of things are considered rape other countries wouldn’t classify that way.

The Estonian rewrite on Delfi.ee of the Mail Online’s article has accumulated 212 mostly anonymous comments. At the time of writing, it’s been online for just over three hours. Don’t go check, the garbage you get to read there isn’t worth a second of your lifetime.

Every single one of these comments; every single thought in the wrong direction this careless and brainless news update has caused and will cause; every enraged white male and female now reaching for torches and pitchforks — all for nothing.

And all to blame on the featherbrained staff of Delfi.ee.