Dani Garavelli: Sex abuse evidence we can’t ignore

IT’S DISGUSTING the way Nick Griffin and his cohorts are using the systematic abuse of up to 50 vulnerable girls in Rochdale to oil their hate campaign.

To take the behaviour of a handful of paedophiles and use it to undermine an entire ethnicity is not only intellectually and morally bankrupt, it’s dangerous, as the plight of two Asian barristers forced to withdraw from the case after being targeted by extremists on the steps of Liverpool Crown Court demonstrates.

Still, the wilful blindness of those who insist race is irrelevant to the offences just plays into their hands. The more those on the left ignore mounting evidence that the street grooming of children for sex is being carried out predominantly by Pakistani men on white girls, the easier it becomes for the intolerant to foment Islamophobia in already divided towns.

The facts about the Rochdale case are as follows: last week, nine men, eight of them Pakistani, the other from Afghanistan, were jailed for a total of 77 years. They had plied girls as young as 13, all from “chaotic, council estate backgrounds” with alcohol in exchange for sex, passing them around their friends and relatives.

If this problem had been confined to the one location, then it could be dismissed as an aberration; but similar cases have been surfacing across the north of England over the last decade. In 2007, for example, two Pakistani men were jailed after targeting two 14-year-old girls in care, plying them with drink and drugs and having sex with them before handing them on to brothers, cousins and friends. And in 2010, eight Pakistani men were convicted of similar offences on underage girls in Rotherham. Indeed, researchers have identified 17 court prosecutions since 1997, 14 of them in the past three years, involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16. They resulted in the conviction of 56 men, three of whom were white and 50 Asian (the majority of Pakistani ethnicity).

Faced with statistics like this it is perverse to go on pretending there’s no racial aspect to these crimes. While it may be true there are more white sex offenders in British jails than Asian ones, ignoring the emergence of a new pattern of offending in a particular section of the community will only encourage it to become more entrenched.

Of course, recognising a cultural problem is one thing, discovering what causes it is another.

Some – including historian David Starkey and Rochdale MP Paul Danczuk – have implied the problem lies in the Pakistani view of vulnerable white girls as “easy meat”. Danczuk says he has, on occasion, come close to throwing Pakistani men out of his surgeries after they spoke in a derogatory fashion about white women. But then white commentator Peter Oborne expressed similarly misogynistic views on Question Time last week when he asked: “What does it tell us about what’s happened to our society that we have 12-year-old girls, 13-year-old girls, who are happy to give up their affection and their beauty to men in exchange for a packet of crisps?”

The most pernicious racial aspect of the Rochdale case is that the authorities’ fear of being branded bigots allowed it to go on for so long. During the trial it emerged allegations of abuse had surfaced as long ago as 2002 and that a complaint by one girl had been investigated and dropped in 2008. You would think by now we’d be alert to the danger of allowing cultural sensitivities to cloud our judgment on child protection issues. Wasn’t it a deference to the clergy, particularly in Ireland, which allowed Catholic priests to carry on abusing for so long? Yet an apparent fear of offending the Muslim community led to the girl’s claim being ignored or disbelieved.

Those who claim too great a focus on the men’s ethnic background will distort the debate over street grooming do have a point. Race is, after all, far from the only issue raised by the Rochdale case. More pressing, perhaps, is the way society is failing to protect its most vulnerable. Almost all the girls involved were known to social services and one was in care, and yet they were all allowed to wander the streets, where, desperate for love and attention, they fell prey to the defendants.

In the wake of the trial, the deputy commissioner for children has been asked to speed up her review on how to protect children in care from sexual exploitation. The question of why Pakistani men should be disproportionately involved in street grooming, however, is still to be addressed. Thankfully some mainstream figures are beginning to speak out. Last week, Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, urged the police and councils not to be frightened to address the issue, while pointing out the vast majority of Pakistanis would be as pleased as everyone else to see the men convicted. The more leaders from the Muslim community dissociate themselves from the offending, the less room there is for people like Nick Griffin to falsely portray it as a cultural norm.

We are all so used to walking on eggshells, racially speaking. Unfortunately, our desire to celebrate diversity has led us to reserve judgment on all sorts of practices from arranged marriages to genital mutilation. But when our endorsement of the multicultural ideal encourages us to turn a blind eye to honour killings or child abuse then it’s time to think again. Just as no culture should be persecuted, no culture should be beyond reproach.