Tell the truth on race to stamp out Asian child sex gangs, demands MP

VULNERABLE girls are still at the mercy of Asian grooming gangs because people are too afraid of being branded racist to speak out, MPs and campaigners warned last night.

They said a conspiracy of silence surrounded the issue – despite a string of high-profile trials involving ‘predominantly Pakistani’ men.

One MP said sex gangs were operating in British cities right now, but political correctness meant officials were too scared to confront them.

Former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald demanded the abuse of white girls by Asian gangs be recognised as a ‘profoundly racist crime’.

The warnings came after it emerged on Wednesday that a grooming gang including Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian men had been convicted of almost 100 crimes. The gang, which exploited white girls for sex in Newcastle, was at least the seventh case in recent years.

In several scandals, police and social services were criticised for not intervening as they feared being called racist.

Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham – where more than 1,400 girls were exploited between 1997 and 2013 – said: ‘This is still going on in our towns now, I know it’s still going on but we’re still not addressing it.

‘Because of political correctness or fear of being racist, or whatever, we haven’t addressed this and we need to address this now.’ Amid calls for an inquiry into the scandal:

Ministers were urged to research the pattern of abuse in order to stop it;

Figures revealed a 49 per cent increase in sex-grooming crimes in England while sexual exploitation of children has risen by 56 per cent;

It was claimed grooming gangs in the North may have gone to each other’s depraved gatherings;

The National Crime Agency said childtrafficking was on the rise;

It emerged that a policeman had been sacked for allowing a paedophile – who may have abused ‘hundreds’ of victims – to slip through the net.

Abuse has been exposed in towns and cities including Rochdale, Rotherham and Oxford. In Newcastle, where 17 men and one woman were convicted of child sex exploitation crimes, police identified up to 108 victims – some as young as 13.

However, there are fears that is just the tip of the iceberg.

The National Crime Agency revealed yesterday there were 300 active investigations into humantrafficking and modern slavery – with cases in every large town and city, and some understood to involve girls being groomed for sex and passed around by men.

Grooming crimes rose from 652 to 971 last year, figures obtained by the NSPCC showed, with child sex exploitation cases up from 347 to 541. Labour women’s spokesman Miss Champion said there was a failure to acknowledge most offenders were British-Pakistani.

She told Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘We’ve got now hundreds of men, Pakistani men, who have

‘Political correctness rears its ugly head’ ‘They believe white women are like meat’

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? 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, this is child protection and we need to be grownup about this and deal with it.

‘If it was people from a particular town that was doing this crime across the country, if it was people from a motorbike gang doing this, we’d recognise that as an indicator and we’d deal with it – but we’re just not dealing with it.’

Asked why, the MP said: ‘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. I know in Rotherham I’ve met frontline social workers who, when – we’re talking ten years ago – they were trying to report this crime, were sent on race-relations courses, they were told they were going to have disciplinary action if they didn’t remove the fact they were identifying the person as a Pakistani male.’ Former detective Maggie Oliver, who helped expose the Rochdale grooming ring, said the country was now ‘reaping the consequences’ of being slow to react.

She said: ‘We have an epidemic of this kind of abuse and my belief is that it has escalated to this scale because those protective agencies chose not to address this particular kind of sexual crime because of the ethnicity of the perpetrators and the victims.’

Lord Macdonald, former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, admitted there had been a reluctance to tackle the abuse of white girls by Asian sex gangs.

But the Lib Dem peer said the scandals were a ‘wake-up call’ and it needed to be recognised as ‘a profoundly racist crime’. He told the BBC: ‘There’s obviously a serious issue about the way young women are regarded in these cases – regarded as trash, regarded as available for sex, and this seems to be a recurring theme.’

Former justice minister Mike Penning urged the Attorney General to review the cases and con- sider them racially aggravated. ‘Some of them freely admitted that their attitude to these girls was based on race,’ the Tory MP told the Daily Telegraph.

And Dr Taj Hargey, from the Muslim Education Centre of Oxford, said: ‘Why are we beating around the bush? The common factors is these Muslims believe white women are like meat. The common dominator is they are mostly or exclusively Muslim. How are we going to tackle the problem if we are scared of the problem?’

A legal source said grooming gangs in the North were suspected of being in contact with each other, adding: ‘There are too many similarities in the modus operandi of all the people involved. They were all targeting young white girls and getting them to parties using

drugs and booze. It was exactly the same with the gangs in Rotherham and Rochdale.

‘I believe they must have been in touch with each other via mobile phone or online. Some of these men may even have travelled up from Yorkshire to attend sex parties on Tyneside.’

Marilyn Hawes, founder of charity Enough Abuse UK, said: ‘Political correctness and the fear of being racist rears its ugly head and it shouldn’t. You have to face reality as it is.’

Northumbria Police Chief Constable Steve Ashman said men from a range of communities had been convicted. The child-abuse inquiry is also due to probe the street-grooming pattern.