World

UK government and ‘British Pakistani men’ at loggerheads over child sexual abuse

By saying that “almost all” members of ‘grooming gangs’ – a British euphemism for paedophile gangs, were British Pakistani men whose attitudes were incompatible with British values–British Home Secretary Suella Braverman has stirred up a hornets’ nest.

Braverman told Sky News that some British Pakistanis were running child abuse networks and that authorities and civil society were turning a blind eye out of political correctness. “(We see) a practice whereby vulnerable white English girls – sometimes in care, sometimes in challenging circumstances – being pursued, raped, drugged, and harmed by gangs of British Pakistani men, who work in child abuse rings or networks”.

Despite coming under scathing criticism from the Left parties and British Muslims, the government intends to frame new laws over “the culture of silence around British Pakistani male gangs involved in such crimes”.

The British government has set up a specialist task force under the police, plans to bring in tougher sentencing, establish a new hotline and use data analytics to identify and catch perpetrators who have been involved in the horrific crimes that have scarred thousands of white British girls for lifetime.

Understandably, the Conservative Party government has been attacked for its choice of words. The British media has panned the government for being offensive and racist. Defending the government, Sunak told the media that perpetrators of sexual abuse of girls “were ignored was due to cultural sensitivity and political correctness”.

British society is divided on the issue of whether British Pakistani men should be singled out for cases of sexual assaults on girls as young as 11 that have rocked cities like Newcastle, Keighley, Rotherham, Rochdale, Peterborough, Aylesbury, Oxford and Bristol. The issue of girl child abuse has been going on since at least 1997 but has been kept hush hush by the British due to political correctness, pressure from Left and for fears of being labeled racist, or Islamophobic.

In most cases, the men convicted of exploiting under-age girls were found to be Pakistani Muslim men besides two Africans. Cases of exploitation differ from place to place and victim to victim but most involved trapping underage white girls for rape and prostitution by supplying them with cigarettes, drugs and money.

Despite attempts to brush off the racial identities of the perpetrators as white men or camouflaged under the term ‘Asian men’, the issue has kept simmering under the surface. Recently British channel GB News released a documentary, ‘Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame‘, in which it spoke with girls who had been repeatedly abused and charity workers who relentlessly worked to support the abused children.

The documentary unearthed what was already known – ethnic identity protected the abusers from law.

The documentary also highlighted how the media, care workers, policemen, counsellors and the entire British system collapsed against the might of political correctness and let down the exploited children to protect the abusers.

Recently, a review of the Prevent Report by the British government pointed out the fact that religious hate has been exported by Pakistan’s religious clerics to the UK through ideas like blasphemy laws. Rigid interpretations of Islam are seeping into the British Muslim society, bringing disharmony into an otherwise assimilating liberal British culture.

In an unrelated news, The Guardian published an investigative report about how the Pakistani army perpetrated a genocide on Bangladeshi women during the 1971 war of Liberation. At one point, the report says: “Official estimates put the number of Bengali women raped at between 200,000 and 400,000, though even those numbers are considered conservative by some… Though ethnic rape was feature of Partition years earlier, what Bengali women experienced was one of the first recorded examples of rape being used as a “consciously applied weapon of war” in the 20th century. But despite its shocking scale, little remains known about it outside the region…”

British society is in immense churn as it debates boat landings, its failed policy of cultural assimilation, the riots in Leicester as well as how young British girls were denied justice just because it could become a political issue. The latest is how families of British schoolboys are going into hiding for fear of being attacked over blasphemy and how a teacher has been in hiding due to threats to his life from Islamist radicals.

Also read: Leicester Muslims cry Islamophobia after police investigation of riots gathers pace

Rahul Kumar

Rahul Kumar writes on international issues and is a keen watcher of South Asia, environment, urban development and NGOs.

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