Pakistani Muslims in Birmingham have told ITV News their community is not to blame for the child sex grooming epidemic, saying the crimes are caused by conditions in British society.
“It is our responsibility? It is not!” declares one man, clearly indignant.
“The crimes are committed in this country; these grooming crimes are not committed in Pakistan. They are committed in this society, and it is the conditions of this society that are encouraging people to commit crimes like that,” he asserts confidently.
While it is true that conditions in Pakistan are different to conditions in Britain — insofar as Pakistani Muslims are 98 per cent of the population in the South Asian country, rather than only a significant minority, as they are in Britain — some of the same issues can be observed with respect to the exploitation of non-Muslim girls.
For example, the National Catholic Reporter recently exposed how Pakistani Christians have been “abducted, raped, and forced to marry their rapists” before being forced to convert to Islam — making their marriages legal under Pakistani law.
Reports from earlier in 2017 have highlighted how Hindu girls have been subjected to similar ordeals, and police have “refused to intervene”.
The ITV report highlights a letter written in September by leading members of the Sikh, Hindu, and Pakistani Christian diaspora in Britain in support of Sarah Champion MP, who was forced to resign from the shadow government by Jeremy Corbyn for writing that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”.
The letter notes that the grooming of young and very often underage girls by “men of largely Pakistani Muslim heritage” has also “plagued our communities”, and insists that “smearing those speaking an inconvenient truth” is unacceptable.
“[W]e cannot ignore the race of the perpetrators, neither can we ignore the fact that the victims of sexual grooming gangs are almost always non-Muslim.”
One Pakistani Muslim woman interviewed during the report — less confrontational than the man quoted above — suggests that “targeting” the Pakistani Muslim community is unhelpful, “because you’re isolating that community even more”.
She adds: “We need to know how wide is this problem, actually. We need facts and figures.”
ITV highlights statistics which show that so-called Type 1 Abusers — men who operate in groups to target vulnerable children — are 75 per cent Asian, 17 per cent white, 5 per cent black, and 3 per cent Arab.
However, the first part of the report notes that they do not target white girls exclusively, and that many South Asian girls, including a very small minority of Muslims, are among the victims.
Many feel unable to come forward because of fears they will be shunned or bring their parents into disrepute for having lost their “honour”, with one young Sikh tearfully recounting how she was sent out of the country when her parents found out what had happened to her.
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