The depressing truth, now reported from all over Ireland, is that hundreds of trafficked women are being used as prostitutes, in virtually every small town, and upwards. It is almost inconceivable that the men who are availing of their sexual services are unaware that the women are acting under compulsion, so there can be no question of them either granting or withholding consent; which, both legally and morally, makes the deeds that the men perform either rape or sexual assault.

Simply, a very large number of men will do almost anything for sex, regardless of what it means for the women concerned. And far from this being a feminist argument, it is a contradiction of one of the core tenets of feminism. Men are not merely profoundly different from women; they are also profoundly worse. They are driven by sexual and violent desires of which women cannot even dream.

So the word "equality" has no meaning when it comes to comparing the two sexes, any more than it does when comparing gazelles and crocodiles.

The following case in London is so shocking that much of it has been under-reported in the British press, as it will be here. Nine teenage boys abducted and gang-raped a 14-year-old girl for "insulting" (ie, "dissing") their gang leader. The rapes were both oral and otherwise, and were so monstrous that the court in London lifted the ban on the naming of the worst of the underage gang-members, of whom the leader was an O'Neil "Hitman" Denton, aged 16. Other teenagers included Weiled Ibrahim, Yusuf Raymond, Jayden Ryan, Alexander Vanderpuije. The youngest assailant was 13 years of age.

These boys, feral and deadly, are mostly from immigrant stock -- Caribbean, Ethiopian, Moroccan -- and almost all without a strong father figure in their lives. Such gang membership is based upon a boastfully predatory attitude towards young women. For example, some 10 or more teenage males of another gang recently videoed their sexual assault of a 19-year-old girl, with a mental age of seven, whom they then covered with caustic soda to destroy the forensic evidence of their rape. She has 55pc burns and is disfigured for life. Another gang videoed themselves raping a young mother in front of her children, and then posted the footage on YouTube.

Around one in 15 of all rapes in London -- about a hundred a year -- are by gangs of three or more; but other girls are so scared of the community power of their assailants that they do not report the rapes. The majority of the victims -- 60pc -- are white. The majority of the assailants are of immigrant stock: 40pc Afro-Caribbean, and 13pc from the Indian sub-continent. Moreover, four times as many Afro-Caribbeans are sex-offenders as their demographic profile would have suggested.

Needless to say, the Metropolitan Police claim that it is not a race issue: but you can be sure that if 60pc of the victims were black and 63pc of the rapists white, we probably would see the "R" word writ large everywhere.

To be sure, it's not just an isolated question of young male misbehaviour: the boys concerned usually come from families who live at a truly staggering level of moral dysfunctionality.

The mother of one of these rapists told journalists that her son had only drunk and smoked cannabis. He never touched the girl, she then complained, on his behalf. "He's pissed off just because she didn't even give him a blow-job."

Why, the heartless hussy!

So, here we find a refutation of just about every liberal piety accumulated since the 1960s. As in: Immigrants are generally law-abiding. Muslims invariably have higher family values. Fathers are irrelevant and unnecessary. Mothers are adequate moral guardians for teenage boys. Et cetera, et cetera.

But we needn't go to London to learn such things: recent events in the East Wall, or any of the estates in Dublin, are a reminder of the feral savagery of young males. And though young men of African origin do seem more inclined to form violent gangs, and to commit sex crimes, the real issue is not race, but sex.

Males can be a violent, dangerous, terrible species, and usually only become decent and outwardly civilised through the intense process of socialising in the patriarchal family.

But even then, as dozens of Irish towns are now discovering, many men will depart from the accepted norms of society to have secret sex with girls whom they know to be, effectively, slaves. Yet still they do it.

For there is a carnal beast inside so many men which only the rarest of women manage to equal.

To be sure, women can be evil and scheming and malicious. But they are seldom violent or sexually predatory, as are so many men. So it requires an ideological dementia of quite communistic proportions for feminists to have declared "equality" between the sexes, even as they simultaneously complained bitterly about male behaviour.

But then of course, Marx poured his greatest scorn on the ideologically non-compliant working classes, which he dismissively termed "the lumpen proletariat". And feminism has its disagreeably non-conformist sexual lumpen proletariat also: more commonly known as, "men".

kmyers@independent.ie

- Kevin Myers