Another tranche of grooming gang rapists operating in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, have been convicted at Leeds Crown Court.
Banaris Hussain, 36, of William Street, Crosland Moor, Huddersfield, was found guilty of one count of rape; Umar Zaman, 31, of William Street, Crosland Moor , was found guilty of two counts of rape; and Samuel Fikru, 31, of HMP Armley, was found guilty of two counts of rape, according to an official police statement.
Three other men from Huddersfield aged 38, 32, and 32, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were found guilty of one count of attempted rape, one count of rape; and four counts of rape and one count of rape of a girl under 13, respectively.
Detective Chief Inspector Richard McNamara, of Kirklees District Safeguarding Unit, said the men were responsible for “depraved and heinous crimes”, having “purposely and repeatedly targeted and abused three vulnerable young girls for their own sexual gratification.”
Their young victims were aged 12 to 16.
Grooming gangs have targeted thousands of vulnerable girls and young women, mostly from white working-class backgrounds, over several decades — but police, prosecutors, and local government resisted investigating them and were sometimes actively hostile to victims and their families for many years. Critics have claimed this reluctance to protect the girls being abused was due to the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the abusers, leading them to fear they would be accused of racism for intervening.
A 2013 study by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection division of the National Crime Agency (NCA) found that 75 per cent of recorded “Type 1” group abuse in Britain is carried out by “Asian” men — which in the British vernacular generally refers to people with roots in South Asia rather than the Far East.
A more recent study by the Quilliam counter-extremism organisation, founded by Islamist revolutionary turned left-liberal commentator Maajid Newaz, was even more upfront about the issue, revealing that some 84 per cent of grooming gang abusers are Muslim men of Pakistani origin.
When the enormous scale of grooming gang abuse in the United Kingdom and the endemic failures of state authorities to act on it first came into the public eye, it began to receive some prominence in the national debate — with discussion focusing mainly on whether or not it was appropriate to address the racial, religious, and cultural context of the issue.
But, while politicians and media talking heads generally concluded that yes, people should be able to address uncomfortable elements of the grooming gang problem without being accused of racism, they never seemed to progress from the discussion about whether to have the discussion to the discussion itself.
Now, while police and prosecutors are slowly working through a backlog of cases they had previously turned a blind eye to, some of which date all the way back to the 1980s, the issue of grooming gangs has been returned to the shadows, with media coverage generally relegated to the local press and obscure regional sub-sections of the BBC News website.
The courts have also resisted treating any of the groomers’ crimes as racially aggravated — even in the case of a groomer who was on record as having abused a female rail employee by saying “White women are good for only one thing – for people like me to f*** and use as trash.”
Sikh and Hindu community leaders have also complained that their communities are targeted by the mostly Muslim groomers — and have asked the media to stop referring to the gangs as “Asian” — with police failing to act due to “political correctness”.
A victim of one of the most infamous grooming networks in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, who was “beaten, tortured and raped over 100 times” by groomers recalled being “called a ‘white slag’ and ‘white c***’ as they beat me” in an article for the left-wing Independent, saying 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’.”
She further warned that “Like terrorists, they firmly believe that the crimes they carry out are justified by their religious beliefs” and that is “something that central Government really needs to understand in order to prevent more grooming gang crime in the future.”
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