Authorities must face the shameful truth... they are mired in misogyny
JuST when you thought you had heard the most horrendous stories of the terror unleashed on thousands of girls by Rochdale grooming gangs, more episodes emerge, complete with more heartbreaking details.
An aborted foetus was taken from a 13year-old grooming victim by police without her or her parents’ consent to be tested for DNA, then left forgotten in a freezer at a police station. A child was arrested and bailed to live with a man who had previously been arrested himself on suspicion of child sex offences – and then she was named as a ‘co-conspirator’ in her abusers’ trial.
Another victim, whose story was published in a landmark review yesterday, told police that her tormentors had kept her in a cage and made her act like a dog or baby. No action was taken against the men.
In all of these cases, the cruelty and abuse was facilitated by the failings of Greater Manchester Police.
How could this bonfire of childhood and innocence have been allowed to go on by officers paid – by us – to protect the weak from evil?
The first reason is what I term ‘Islamophilia’, as opposed to the ‘Islamophobia’ we hear so much about. Islamophilia is the habit of giving certain groups of Muslims what is effectively a free pass for behaviour that would rightly be reviled if carried out by others. In Rochdale the police were clearly worried about being labelled racists, but it is a widespread phenomenon. We’ve also seen it in the soft-touch policing of the almost-weekly hate marches in London, in which ‘jihad’ and ‘death to Jews’ are openly called for, and in which what look like Isis flags and placards supporting ‘Muslim armies’ flutter. After one of these, the Met’s crack Koran squad po-facedly announced that ‘jihad’ has ‘a number of meanings’, so that’s all right then.
Meanwhile virtue- signalling women fill their social media feeds in support of Hamas and its stated aim to ‘free Palestine’ – cheering on an all-male, racial-supremacist terror group that uses rape as a weapon. Yet the same women would scream blue murder if a white bus driver called them ‘love’.
Most of all, however, the effect of Islamophilia has been evident for years in the way various police forces in some northern towns and cities turned a blind eye to the systemic rape, torture and trafficking of hundreds of female children by certain groups of Muslim men. Clearly not all the grooming gangs in Britain have been Muslim. Indeed, one Home Office report found grooming gangs were ‘most commonly white’. In the case of Rochdale, however, as well as in other conurbations such as Telford and Oldham, people referred to ‘Asian’ grooming gangs. But the gangs there were not composed of Chinese Buddhists or Indian Hindus.
NO:in these cases they were grooming gangs composed of Muslim men – and millions of decent British Muslims revile them. These gangs benefited from the craven Islamophilia that has swamped so many of our institutions, from the police to our universities and our state broadcaster.
Yet there is a second, more pernicious, reason the abusers have got away with it for so long. They’ve also benefited from the systemic misogyny of the police, which is industrial in its scale.
Compare the kid-glove treatment of angry Islamists at marches with the heavy-handed policing doled out to uppity women during the vigil for Sarah Everard, who was raped and murdered by a white policeman in 2021. Miss Everard’s killer was jokingly known as ‘The Rapist’ by his colleagues on the force.
The police were happy to overlook the grooming gangs’ medieval misogyny because they – like the gangs themselves – regarded these poor, unfortunate women as second-class citizens, not even worthy of the most basic care and protection.
Yesterday, the great British Muslim lawyer Nazir Azfal – a former chief crown prosecutor who specialises in cases involving violence against women and the sexual exploitation of children – put it robustly: ‘In Rochdale, ethnicity was an issue but not THE issue. THE issue when it comes to rape and sexual offences is that authorities refused to listen to victims, to women & girls. Misogyny is the reason why offenders offend & why those with responsibility to safeguard, failed to do so.’
He was absolutely right. Has anything changed? Maggie Oliver, a heroic former detective for Greater Manchester Police who turned whistleblower and who campaigns against child sex abuse, believes not. She said yesterday that the ‘ failures that happened then are still happening now’.
She told how a female officer working in the unit set up in 2021 to investigate childsexual exploitation came to her only three weeks ago and said that it was business as usual, with around 300 victims being fobbed off – and 96 men who are considered a risk to children still not prosecuted.
until the police are forced to face the awful truth – that they are blinded by Islamophilia and mired in misogyny – we will never have a force fit for purpose.
They need to remember that their job is simple – to protect the vulnerable from the vile, no matter their class, colour or creed.