My cousins, the Rotherham abusers
A brave and very personal denunciation by a British Pakistani of those in his community who defend grooming gangs
Their crimes are a stain that can never be scrubbed away
THEY raped countless girls, some as young as 11. They forced others into prostitution and lived the high life on the proceeds. And, in ordinary looking houses, on ordinary-looking streets in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, they shared vulnerable youngsters between them, indulging their depravity with a sickening arrogance.
It is a charge sheet that any decent person will find horrifying and abhorrent. But, to me, these disgusting crimes carry an all-too-personal significance. Because the men of whom I speak are, in fact, my second cousins.
Arshid Hussain, 40, along with his brothers Basharat, 39, and Bannaras, 36, were this week convicted of grooming and sexually exploiting young girls in their hometown of Rotherham. Yesterday, Arshid, the ringleader, was jailed for 35 years, while Basharat and Bannaras got 25 and 19 years respectively, for 50 offences against 14 girls, including multiple rapes and indecent assaults, abduction and false imprisonment.
The shame on my family is unspeakable. But the mortification is not merely limited to my clan. For the crimes of the Hussain brothers represent a stain on the Pakistani community that can never truly be scrubbed away. Because today a small, but significant, minority of Pakistani men think in precisely the same warped way the Hussain brothers did: that white women are fair game; that they are entitled to satisfy their desires in whatever way they see fit.
What’s more, they believe, it is they who are victims of a racist witch-hunt — despite the fact that Pakistani gangs were allowed to rape their way around Rotherham for so long because, in part, politically correct officials were terrified of being accused of racism.
Needless to say, the gap between this mindset and my own is vast. As chief executive of the moderate Ramadhan Foundation, I investigate paedophile gangs and work to raise awareness of the blight of sexual grooming in an attempt to root out the negative attitudes among that minority of Pakistanis which lead to these dreadful crimes.
And yet, somehow, three boys from our family, with a similar upbringing to my own, ended up committing these vile crimes. How could this have happened?
The answer doesn’t just lie in inept officials, paralysed with fear in case they’re accused of racism. And it’s not only down to the corrupt police officers of Rotherham, who turned a blind eye to the crimes — often, it seems, in return for sexual use of the Hussains’ victims.
The root cause lies in the British Pakistani community itself. The sad truth is that for years some British Pakistanis have deliberately buried their heads in the sand about these predatory grooming gangs.
More than this, they see any of us who try to tackle this problem as siding with the white ‘enemy’.
I have been the subject of death threats from Pakistani associates of the grooming gangs. Receiving abuse and threats on social media from anonymous Pakistani critics is a frighteningly regular occurrence.
But the fact is that while I did not know what my second cousins were doing, others in our community certainly did — and yet they saw fit to sweep it under the carpet, rather than helping the victims.
Enough is enough. The time has come for British Pakistanis to admit we have a problem.
But even after the full horror of the Hussains’ crimes has been exposed, the silence from some within the Pakistani community is deafening.
It’s this passive complicity from their own communities that, in part, fuelled the Hussains’ belief that they were untouchable. One victim told the court Arshid Hussain ‘thought he was invincible’. And so he and his brothers would drive around Rotherham in their sports cars with gold wheels, attracting the attention of naïve young girls.
The lives of these young girls would be utterly destroyed once they had fallen into the Hussains’ clutches.
Arshid was said to have fathered up to 18 children with his victims — but did not even know the children’s names. Many more girls got pregnant by him and had abortions. No wonder Arshid has been dubbed ‘the man who stole childhoods’.
So it was with some revulsion that I read yesterday that Arshid, who has been paraplegic since 2005, when he was shot in the abdomen, was recently seeking to start a new family with the help of IVF.
Whether he was seeking the expensive treatment on the NHS was not revealed in court, but there can surely be few candidates as unfit for fatherhood as he.
While I grew up in a different town to the Hussains (I am from Rochdale, Lancs, while they lived 60 miles away) our lives were very similar. My father was a mill worker who came to England in the Sixties, while my mother was a housewife.
Their father was a respectable businessman who was involved in the car trade. The Hussain boys’ mother is my first cousin on my father’s side.
The only times I can recall meeting Arshid and his brothers were at family weddings and funerals.
What were they like? You may be disconcerted to hear that they were entirely unremarkable. They paid respect where it was due and did nothing to suggest that they were anything other than responsible members of the Pakistani community.
But here’s my point. They weren’t ‘lone groomers’; misfits on the outskirts of our group. They were at its heart.
And like all the other Pakistani grooming gangs I have investigated in the past nine years, they lived a double life — one tacitly supported by those close to them.
By day, gangs like these played the parts of fathers, husbands, sons. They were accepted among Pakistanis as one of the community. By night, they were something else entirely.
Part of the problem of grooming gangs is related to the tightly knit nature of the Pakistani community. It is a strongly held dictum that men should not have extramarital sex. For not only would such behaviour be quickly uncovered via the local grapevine, it would also offend their own twisted code of honour.
And so these men turn to outsiders, vulnerable Western girls, whom they regard as more easily available because of greater social freedom, seeing white girls as ‘easy’. But this exploitation ignores the fact that preying on white girls runs completely counter to the tenets of our Muslim faith, which requires believers to treat all women with respect.
I fervently believe that we Pakistanis will not conquer any of this through silence or by shouting racism at every turn. We must expose our own failings.
As part of my work at the Ramadhan Foundation, I hold workshops with young Pakistanis, confronting these painful issues. We discuss the types of people more likely to be victims of grooming, the falsehoods people hide behind to justify grooming and the impact these crimes have on the wider standing of the British Pakistani community. It is not easy, but we are making some progress.
Again and again, I come up against an ever-increasing victim mentality from fellow Pakistanis. It is not the grooming gangs who should be condemned. No, they say, it is people like me who are the real problem. Any admission of our own people being guilty is, they claim, surrendering to the far-Right hate mobs.
I have even been accused of ‘doing the work of the BNP’ by handing them ammunition with which to attack the Muslim people of Britain.
Even our elected representatives refuse to face up to reality. Zafar Ali, the councillor for Keighley Central, responded to the jailing of 12 Bradford men of Pakistani origin who had gang-raped a 13-year-old girl, by saying many in the Pakistani community still believe ‘it takes two to tango’ and this child ‘may have played her part’.
As a father of four daughters — aged 12,
11, six and four months — and a Pakistani — I find this sort of attitude utterly offensive. Rather than condemning the vile abusers, a prominent Pakistani leader throws mud at the victim.
But such backward attitudes persist stubbornly among my countrymen. The anonymous Pakistanis who target me on Twitter delight in telling me that victims of grooming gangs are nothing but ‘worthless slags’ who were ‘asking for it’.
I’ve also lost count of the number of times fellow Pakistanis have accused me of being racist. Why don’t I fight white people who abuse children, rather than turning against my own? Why should we Pakistanis apologise for this abuse when the white community doesn’t?
This kind of argument turns my stomach. It is deluded, seeking an excuse for wrongdoing rather than facing reality, as if it is some kind of sick competition. Any examination of my work would show that I seek to expose groomers and abusers from all backgrounds.
Anyway, it is a depressing fact that Pakistani men are hugely over-represented when it comes to cases of street-gang sexual grooming.
From 2009 to 2011, out of 77 convictions for grooming, rape and other predatory sex crimes in the UK, no fewer than 67 involved Pakistani men.
Unlike many of the Pakistani community’s leaders, I will not pretend that these facts don’t exist. Not least because the vast majority of law-abiding Pakistanis are appalled by the grooming gangs. It is this honourable majority who are being misrepresented by their leaders. For me, the turning point came back in 2007 when I was asked to participate in a radio discussion about an Asian grooming gang in Lancashire.
As part of the panel discussion, I met two women whose daughters had been preyed on.
When they discovered their daughters were being targeted, their first port of call was the local Pakistani community centre. When they begged for help, the door was, quite literally, slammed in their face. I went home that night and looked at my sleeping daughter, who was two at the time.
‘It could be her,’ I thought to myself. ‘What can it have been like for those women to see their daughters preyed on?’ To me, there is no distinction between a white girl and my own Asian daughter.
It is true, though, that some Pakistanis have not spoken out because of fear, rather than ignorance. They are worried about suffering recriminations from these crimes.
Indeed, just last year an 81-yearold grandfather, Muhsin Ahmed, was beaten to death as he walked to the mosque. The man who killed him, Dale Jones, accused him of being a ‘groomer’, despite the fact he was completely innocent.
But while these fears are all too real, there is no excuse for remaining silent.
There is, however, a glimmer of hope. Through my meetings with the Ramadhan Foundation, it has become clear that there is a generational gap within the community. Outdated attitudes are slowly being overturned among the young.
Some of the language they use can be arresting. The anger they feel about these abusers dragging the Pakistani reputation through the mud is a powerful weapon.
A typical crop of reactions would include castration, ‘ locking them up and throwing away the key’ and — in one memorable instance from a meeting earlier this month — ‘hang them by the b****!’
So most Pakistanis in this country do feel strongly that things need to change. The task is for us to make that happen, to conquer the outspoken poisonous minority among us.
Some positive steps have been taken. Last year, on one Friday, more than 125 imams delivered a sermon against child exploitation and grooming.
In Rotherham in September 2014, thousands of Pakistanis joined British Muslim Youth to protest against the grooming gangs. We Pakistanis need to do more things like this. For we are not the victims. We have a solemn duty, as human beings, to do everything in our power to protect children.
My Pakistani critics, however, are showing no sign of backing off. They continue to wish me misery and death. But nothing they say can compare to the text message I received on Wednesday night after I had spoken out on television to condemn my criminal relatives.
It was from one of their victims and read simply: ‘Thanks so much for what you are doing. Keep it up!’
For her, and everyone else who has suffered at the hands of my people, I will do precisely that.
Pakistanis have a duty to protect all children