Doctors in the UK are overlooking suspected instances of domestic abuse involving “Asian” communities for fear of being labelled racist, a report has claimed.
General Practitioners (GPs) in the UK are said to be overlooking what they suspect to be instances of domestic abuse within so-called “Asian” households or communities, for fear their probing may be labelled as racist.
This is one of the main claims made by The Centre for Social Justice, which published a report on Monday examining the issues of domestic and “honour abuse” in the UK, which it says can involve women being forced to abort a child for being a girl, undergo a forced marriage, or find themselves the victim of some other form of social coercion.
According to the report, those from within what the report calls “closed communities” are particularly at risk of such “honour abuse”, a term which the organisation wants to see phased out of all government documents for, allegedly, the fear it legitimises suffering faced by victims.
The group also wants medical professionals to do more to tackle the issue — which the organisation claims affects more people every year than “prostate cancer, breast cancer and dementia combined” — with doctors currently avoiding intervening to help victims in many cases for fear of being racist.
“I could see the GP didn’t want to go there. He wasn’t Asian, he didn’t know my context,” the organisation reports one victim of such abuse as saying regarding their experience with a GP.
“He wanted me out of there as quickly as possible,” they continued. “He just wrote a prescription [for medication to treat depression] without asking me anything about my home life.”
The report also warns that many “by and for” services for such closed communities are currently not up to snuff, with victims of abuse from “South Asian” communities even being afraid to go to the police because “they are bound to be South Asian too, and then will side with the family and the perpetrator.”
The notion that at least some medical professionals have not been probing what could be cases of domestic abuse for fear they could be labelled as being racist is not without precedent. There have been other instances of officials and authorities in the UK acting improperly for fear of being tarred as a bigot.
Many of these examples involve so-called “Asian” grooming gangs — the vast majority of which are related almost exclusively to Muslims from Pakistan — with police officers frequently looking the other way regarding the abuse and rape of children in the hopes of not stoking racial tensions, it has been repeatedly asserted.
In one more egregious example of this, a key witness and whistleblower in the now-infamous Rotherham grooming gang scandal claimed that police tried to dissuade her from passing on key evidence.
During meetings with authorities, youth worker Jayne Senior MBE claimed that officers told her that she was just “being racist” and was “rocking the multicultural boat” by coming forward.
Senior also alleged that victims of abuse were treated in an “absolutely abhorrent” at a misconduct hearing for one police officer allegedly involved in the scandal, though he was ultimately found not to have committed any wrongdoing and was cleared by the panel of all accusations.
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