Colours of abuse

“If the world is The Word
Then metaphor is a midwife”.
From The Vah Vah
Chronicles of Bachchoo

Now Jack has ventured where the political angels of Britain fear to tread. I speak of Jack Straw, former home secretary in the Labour government and member of Parliament for the northern industrial (or ex-industrial and substantially unemployed) constituency of Blackburn which contains a large population of Muslim voters. Jack

appeared on TV and, uniquely for a national politician, spoke out about gangs of men of Pakistani origin who have for years now preyed upon vulnerable young white girls, raping them, controlling them and subjecting them to prostitution in the cities in which their immigrant communities live.
He chose his words carefully, beginning with a clear statement that most sex offenders in British jails were indeed white or not ethnically Asian but that statistic ought not to induce a delicacy about investigating and preventing the abuse of very vulnerable white women, some as young as 12, who are subjected by British men of Pakistani descent to sexual degradation.
He was speaking in the wake of a trial in which Abid Saddique and Mohammed Liaqat were jailed by Nottingham Crown Court for the rape, sexual abuse and abduction of girls aged between 12 and 18.
The story behind these convictions is ugly. These men and their associates cruised the streets of Derby in BMWs and a Range Rover (which apparently Saddique referred to as the “Rape Rover”), picking up young white girls with the lure of inviting them to a wild party. They targeted poor and vulnerable girls who lived in the care of the state, teenagers without the protection of families who may have at some point in their lives been involved in petty crime.
They would pick them up with offers of a good time, take them to hotel rooms, parks or one or other safe house, ply them with alcohol and cocaine and then, typically, gang rape them and rent them out to other men.
The Derby case is, regretfully, not an isolated incident. The police and researchers who have access to crime statistics have not spoken about it before, but Jack’s blatant statement has forced the debate. Since 1997 there have been 17 prosecutions, 14 of them in the last three years involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by men of Pakistani origin.
On this evidence, Jack’s conclusions are unavoidable. The cases involved victims from 13 northern cities; 56 men were convicted of rape, child abduction, indecent assault and sex with a child. Three of the 56 were white, 50 were Muslim and of Pakistani origin. A great number of them, as were Saddique and Liaqat, are married by arrangement to women brought from Pakistan for the marriage.
The police issued an official statement saying that their continuing investigations indicated that these 56 convictions were a very small proportion of a “tidal wave” of such gang activity in Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Midlands.
Jack’s outspokenness brought the expected accusations of “racism”, “stereotyping” and of being unhelpful to community relations. Jack himself, dependent to a large degree on the ethnic vote in his constituency, has not been this candid before. He told the BBC that his reason for speaking out now was that he was aware that it was a specific problem in the Pakistani community whose restrictive sexual traditions were imposed on young men who were “fizzing and popping with testosterone”.
He went on to say, “They want some outlet for that, but Pakistani-heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically. So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, who they think are easy meat”. His remarks have caused a national investigation to be launched by the Home Office’s oddly named Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) into this particular criminal phenomenon.
There has been, since the ’70s and the birth of a general awareness that the immigrant populations of Britain have to be assimilated into British life and progress, a sensitivity about exposing or debating the issue of “ethnic crime”.
In the late ’70s and ’80s the crime of street “mugging” was seen by the newspapers as an epidemic. Only the very determined Right-wing papers, in the face of silence from any official police source, were willing to characterise this crime as exclusively carried out by young black men of Caribbean origin. The ethnicity of “mugging” was a blatant fact and a public secret, kept in the interest of race relations.
Similarly, there is now a sensitivity about Jack’s intervention. He was careful not to fudge the issue by calling it an “Asian” phenomenon. He pointedly excluded Sikhs, Hindus and Chinese from his characterisation and narrowed it down to Muslim men of Pakistani origin. His observation of young men “fizzing” with testosterone is probably applicable to most males of that age anywhere and everywhere. What makes the gangs who perpetrate this crime different is that they are reared in a strict tradition and in very self-enclosed communities in which the idea of “impurity” and “immorality” of the ways of the host civilisation and its young women is rife.
In an extreme case, the young Islamicist men who were plotting to plant bombs in the centre of London and were caught and convicted of the conspiracy were about to target — not military installations, the British Parliament, the American embassy or other accomplices and shelters of the Great Satan — but nightclubs in Haymarket. This was, they said when apprehended, because white women who were “slags” and “slappers” went dancing and drinking there and deserved the fate their bombs would mete out.
The Muslim community is not blind to this poisonous brew of bigotry. Muhammad Saddiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, an influential Muslim youth organisation, says, “These people think that white girls have fewer morals and are less valuable than our girls”.
It is also true that the same communities are extremely protective of their own women. If a Muslim girl were regarded and treated in this way, there would be bloodshed in the community.
Jack has been nimble and quick and has opened up a necessary debate. The debate will, under these circumstances and with the national enquiry being launched by Ceop, go further than the predictable objections from the spokespeople of “race” whose attempts to caution or silence the Jacks can only serve to protect outrageous abuse.