The Left will call me racist: Campaigner predicted her own downfall

Sarah Champion made forceful comments about the issue on Radio 4’s Today programme the day before her article appeared in The Sun. Below is a transcript of the interview.

SARAH CHAMPION I think what we need to acknowledge and be very upfront about is all of the towns [Rochdale, Rotherham, Aylesbury etc] where these [grooming] cases have gone on – the majority of the perpetrators have been British Pakistani.

Now, one of the things, that, for example, was on the news last night, there was picture of 18 of the people [who] were convicted [in Newcastle], [and] there was no comment that 17 of those were clearly Asian men.

And it just pains me that this is going on time and time again, and the Government aren’t researching what is going on. Are these cultural issues? Is there some sort of message going out within the community?

We have got now hundreds of men, Pakistani men, who’ve been convicted of this crime. Why are we not commissioning research to see what’s going on, and how we need to change what’s going on so it never happens again?’

INTERVIEWER Do we need the research? We know what’s going on...

CHAMPION We don’t know WHY it’s going on though and unless… and what I’m all about is prevention. So it’s all great hand-wringing after it’s happened but WHY has it happened. How do we prevent it

because lives are being absolutely destroyed because of this, and also I have to say, within my own constituency. I really… I didn’t sleep last night [before] coming on talking about this, because every time I talk about it the level of Islamophobia increases, so everybody wants this sorted.

INTERVIEWER Will you yourself be attacked?

CHAMPION Absolutely – and from both sides. The Far Right will attack me for not doing enough; the Floppy Left will have a go at me for being a racist.

But this isn’t racist – it’s child protection and we need to be grown-up and deal with it.

There are many types of child abuse and many types of child sexual exploitation but... the prosecutions and convictions we get, are predominantly Pakistani men, and therefore we have to address this.

You know if [it] was people from a particular town [who] were [committing] this crime across the country... If it was

people from, I don’t know, a motorbike gang that [was] doing this, we would recognise this as an indicator and we would deal with it. But we’re just not dealing with it.

I genuinely think it’s because people are more afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse.

In Rotherham, I’ve met frontline social workers who, when – we’re talking ten years ago now – they were trying to report this crime were sent on race relations courses. They were told they were going to [face] disciplinary action if they didn’t remove the fact they were identifying the person as a Pakistani male. This is still going on in our towns now. I know it’s still going on, but we’re still not addressing it.

INTERVIEWER And who is the ‘they’ that are not addressing it specifically?

CHAMPION I would say, from the cases that I’ve been involved, that the sort of senior managers tend to be on top of this. They go on the training courses.

In councils, police forces, the frontline staff know exactly what’s going on, but it seems to be the middle management [who] are more concerned... to be seen as politically correct and doing the right thing than they are about addressing what is a very unpleasant crime.

INTERVIEWER So we’re not just talking about social services then?

CHAMPION No, literally it’s across the board. I mean the victims and survivors tend to present in, say the NHS, [to] GPs, to social workers to children’s services, to the police forces. And sadly we keep on getting examples, we get examples of brilliant people [trying to alert the authorities], of where these people are being turned away or where the race element isn’t being addressed.

INTERVIEWER It’s not quite true to say that their ethnicity hasn’t been mentioned in news reports. Your description [of] the ten o’clock news last night might be accurate, but we certainly refer to it on this programme.

CHAMPION Good. And we need to keep on referring to this, because if we don’t refer to it, it goes underground and that’s why we have a Islamophobic, Far Right response to it. Because, basically, we are making it a race issue by not just seeing it as paedophiles [who] happen to have this background and dealing with why they are coming from that community.