It’s time to tell the truth about grooming gangs

ne of the many benefits of having a Home Secretary who has made the bumpy journey from Pakistani bus-driver’s son to high office is that it’s hard for his opponents to call him racist. That doesn’t stop them trying. Sajid Javid was swiftly accused of “sowing division” last week when he tweeted following the conviction of 16 men in Huddersfield for the rape and sexual abuse of 15 girls during a seven-year reign of terror. “These sick Asian paedophiles are finally facing justice. I want to commend the bravery of the victims. For too long they were ignored. Not on my watch. There will be no no-go areas.”

Labour MP David Lammy hit back. “Sajid Javid has brought a great office of state into disrepute,” he huffed, “Whatever the underlying motives of the offenders involved in paedophilia, it is an abhorrent crime that affects all communities. It does no service to the victims of this evil to pin the blame on any one group.”

Dr Zubaida Haque, the deputy director of the Runnymede Trust, a race-equality think tank, agreed. He claimed that Mr Javid’s tweet was “a complete disservice” to the survivors of sexual abuse. “Research has shown that child sexual abuse happens in all groups, areas and all communities… If we racialise the perpetrators not only do we do a disservice to survivors who are not white, we ignore other perpetrators who are not Asian.”

See what they’re doing there? By labelling these heinous attacks on young girls “paedophilia” they’re able to claim that, statistically, more white men than Asian men are convicted paedophiles. Perfectly true. But I don’t believe for one minute that the thousands of men in barbarian grooming gangs across the UK are paedophiles. They are mainly men of Pakistani origin who pick on the group that is easiest to control and have sex with. Their prey are not the small children targeted by paedophiles. Yes, they tend to be young girls (one poor mite was just 11 years of age in the Huddersfield case), but mostly they are teenagers who have passed puberty. Their youth is only of interest to these thugs in so far as it makes them more likely to be virgins (valuable on the open, pimping market) and highly vulnerable.

I’m so glad that Mr Javid is speaking out boldly on a topic that social workers, police, councillors and government ministers turned a blind eye to for years. Their tacit collusion with the predators (to challenge them would have been both politically incorrect and culturally insensitive) is a stain on our nation. Honestly, it makes me angrier than almost any other crime I can think of.

The fact is that the Huddersfield men jailed for a total of 200 years were all from the same community. As were the guilty men in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, where 1,000 girls are said to have been raped. To deny this crime has a strong racist and misogynistic motive, and that that racism is directed against poor white females, not “Asian” males, is to continue to avoid the root of the problem.

Dr Haque is correct when he says that child sexual abuse “happens in all groups, areas and all communities”. But we are not talking here about stepfathers molesting their stepdaughters or a teacher having sex with an under-age pupil. I’m afraid the facts are as plain as they are unpalatable: certain male members of one community still steeped in notions of female chastity, honour and shame, somehow feel that its OK to help themselves to the vulnerable girls in the majority community, which prizes neither chastity nor honour and is, to all intents and purposes, shameless.

Sexual purity is highly valued in the South Asian community because it makes a girl more marriageable. The patriarchal system maintains its power by controlling the bodies of its girls. The clash of the two cultures has, to say the least, been problematic. More than 11,000 allegations of so-called honour crime were recorded by UK police forces between 2010 and 2014. One Pakistani academic estimates there are more than five honour-related incidents in the UK every single day.

Young men raised in such a community might well grow up to have a disrespectful attitude to British girls. One woman, a survivor of a Rotherham grooming gang, put it like this: “As a teenager, I was taken to various houses and flats above takeaways in the north of England, to be beaten, tortured and raped over 100 times. They made it clear that because I was a non-muslim, and not a virgin, and because I didn’t dress ‘modestly’, that they believed I deserved to be ‘punished’.” The woman described a terrifying process she called “othering” in which she was contrasted with good girls (Muslims).

So let’s hear no more from David Lammy and his pious prating ilk about the evils of pinning the blame on one group. Victims know exactly who targeted them and why. Don’t they deserve some cultural sensitivity too?

Grooming gangs are not the same as paedophile rings and they demand a wholly different response. Last year, the Swedish government declared that “sexual violence is being used as a tactic of terrorism”.

At least Mr Javid has ordered an inquiry into the ethnic origin of grooming gangs and shows a willingness to say the previously unsayable. Survivors say the only way to stem the flow of gangs is to teach Muslim boys about consent and respect for women. What better teacher than the Home Secretary son of a Pakistani bus

driver?

‘To challenge these predators is seen as un-pc and culturally insensitive’