ROTHERHAM: THE PERFECT STORM - PART SEVEN

CASEY REPORT (PART TWO)

Back in 2014, a Yorkshire town made international headlines for all the wrong reasons. Rotherham in South Yorkshire is a name that is now synonymous with a crime that has sullied Britain’s name all over the world - organised gang rape. Throughout the UK, groups of men prey upon girls, usually from dysfunctional or chaotic backgrounds, rape them, and then force them into prostitution. For years, police did nothing to tackle these crimes, partly because, in the vast majority of cases, the victims were young white girls, and the rapists were Muslim immigrants or their descendants. The police did wish not to inflame “community tensions,” so the crimes went unpunished for decades. 

Nevertheless, the Jay Report of 2014 revealed that more than 1,400 girls had fallen victim to rape gangs in Rotherham over the previous decade. A year later, I undertook a mammoth task: to find out how many white English girls had been similarly abused through the preceding five years. I wrote a lengthy report, which I will post here.

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The Rochdale case prompted international commentary about race relations in the north of England. Nazir Afzal called it “the elephant in the room” and Mohammed Shafiq, of the Ramadhan Foundation, claimed that some in the Muslim community think of white girls as worthless and accused authorities of being “obsessed with racism” and thus failed to investigate as they should.

The prominent journalist Melanie Philips wrote at the time that the Rochdale case had been a direct result of the “witch-hunt against Islamophobia” . Philips wrote “the authorities had evidence this was going on as long ago as 1991”. She went on: “The police maintain doggedly that this has nothing to do with race. What a red herring. Of course it doesn’t! This is about religion and culture – an unwesternised Islamic culture which holds that non-Muslims are trash and women are worthless. And so white girls are worthless trash. Which is itself of course a race issue.”

Referring to a report in The Times, Philips pointed out that in 1991, nine girls from three homes in Bradford fell victim to pimps who collected them from their home each evening, took them to be used for sex in houses, flats and guest houses, then returned them to the care of residential staff in the early hours of the morning. The local authority ordered an inquiry but did not reveal that the men were all of Pakistani heritage. In 2006, a specialist child protection team was formed in Manchester because the city, according to its former children’s services director, had clear evidence of “targeted sexual exploitation of girls in children’s homes”. It was a stark admission, but again the shared ethnicity of most of the men was not identified.’

Former Labour MP Ann Cryer said at the time: “This is an absolute scandal. They [authorities] were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness.” Several police officers agreed with Cryer, including retired Detective Inspector Merial Buglass of Greater Manchester Police, who said “They didn’t want to class the abuse as Asian on white girls. They didn’t want to cause a fuss. I took the view that this wasn’t about racism, it was about child abuse – but political correctness and cultural sensitivities were important to management”.

Mick Gradwell, a former detective superintendent, said that the targeted abuse of young white girls had been known about for decades, but police feared being labelled “institutionally racist”. “How many young girls have been abused and raped because of the reluctance of the authorities to say exactly what is happening? ” he asked. Mr Gradwell said that he had encountered abuse of white girls by “Asian” men as far back as the 1970s: “When I joined in 1979 one of my first tasks was to police around a Blackburn nightclub where one of the issues was Asian men cruising around in BMWs and Mercs trying to pick up young drunken girls. The main pressure police have is being called institutionally racist if they highlight a crime trend like this. There’s a fantastic reluctance to be absolutely straight because some people may take such offence”.

In May 2012, a second sex abuse gang was investigated in Rochdale and nine men of “Asian and Afro-Caribbean backgrounds” were arrested and bailed.

An independent report in to child sexual exploitation in Rochdale was published in 2013. The report recounts several cases of young girls sexually exploited, mostly by “Asian” men. This paper also condemns council processes and culture with regard to abused children and states: “What may be described as the culture within the organisation also appears to negatively impact on ways of working and good practice; Targeted Services are not experienced as a ‘team’ and feel fragmented to those involved. Differing parts of Targeted Services do not appear to understand each other’s roles and remit and there are interface/communications issues between them which are detrimental to practice.”

The Council replied that it was “determined to never repeat the mistakes of the past”. Somewhat worryingly, it also states that “we believe raising awareness of child sexual exploitation is as important as tackling the crime itself”. This establishes once again that simple enforcement of the criminal law is not seen as an entirely effective option. Councils appear to be settling for the easier option of committees and focus groups, rather than face adversity in court and tough questions in public.

Oxford

Dr Taj Hargey is an imam in the English city of Oxford. Following revelations of organised child sex abuse by Muslim gangs there, Dr Hargey wrote a striking article in the Daily Mail in which he argued that “political correctness” had prevented British authorities from facing up to harsh realities regarding the religion of the abusers.

Dr Hargey wrote:

The fact is that the vicious activities of the Oxford ring are bound up with religion and race: religion, because all the perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim; and race, because they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases.

Indeed, one of the victims who bravely gave evidence in court told a newspaper afterwards that ‘the men exclusively wanted white girls to abuse’.

In all these incidents, the abusers were Muslim men, and their targets were under-age white girls.

Moreover, reputable studies show that around 26 per cent of those involved in grooming and exploitation rings are Muslims, which is around five times higher than the proportion of Muslims in the adult male population.

To pretend that this is not an issue for the Islamic community is to fall into a state of ideological denial.

But then part of the reason this scandal happened at all is precisely because of such politically correct thinking. All the agencies of the state, including the police, the social services and the care system, seemed eager to ignore the sickening exploitation that was happening before their eyes.

Terrified of accusations of racism, desperate not to undermine the official creed of cultural diversity, they took no action against obvious abuse.

In the misguided orthodoxy that now prevails in many mosques, including several of those in Oxford, men are unfortunately taught that women are second-class citizens, little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority.

That is why we see this growing, reprehensible fashion for segregation at Islamic events on university campuses, with female Muslim students pushed to the back of lecture halls.

There was a telling incident in the trial when it was revealed that one of the thugs heated up some metal to brand a girl, as if she were a cow. ‘Now, if you have sex with someone else, he’ll know that you belong to me,’ said this criminal, highlighting an attitude where women are seen as nothing more than personal property.

Dr Hargey wrote the article following the conviction of seven men, including two sets of brothers, who were jailed for life for a range of sexual offences against underage girls in Oxford. Details of the case were particularly shocking and included the “sale” of girls as young as 11 to several men.

Abuses included:

• A forced back-street abortion
• Girls covered in burns from stubbed out cigarettes on their bodies
• Girls urinated on
• Torture with knives, meat cleavers, and baseball bats
• Threatened with a gun
• Girls subjected to biting and suffocating

Again, media commentators pointed to the national scale of this problem, and the over-representation of Muslim men in organised child sex gangs. Allison Pearson wrote in the Telegraph that the rapists had learned the lessons of multiculturalism, cultural sensitivity, and the paralysing fear among public authorities of being labelled racist, and were actively using this to distract from their crimes.

She wrote:

In a particularly warped twist, the pimp will teach his victim that her parents are racist towards Asians, which is why they disapprove of their relationship – absolutely nothing, of course, to do with him being a violent, controlling thug. Gang members have grown wise to the wimpy ways of Western society. They exploit the fact that police, newly trained in “cultural sensitivity”, are terrified of being accused of racism. So the pimps operate with impunity until, years later, the slave girls find the courage to testify in court against their masters.

We all know what happens next, don’t we? Leaders of the Pakistani Muslim community – essentially a Victorian society that has landed like Doctor Who’s Tardis on a liberal, permissive planet it despises – are at pains to deny that the grooming gang’s behaviour has anything to do with ethnic origin or contemptible attitudes towards women.

Emma, a rape victim from Rotherham, told a reporter in 2015 “It was always the same. If the perpetrators played the race card, then the police, the social services, they melted away. It meant [the men] grew arrogant. They acted with complete impunity. They believed they were above any law. When I was with them, they openly boasted they would never be arrested, and girls I help now tell me the men who sexually exploit them boast the same thing today.” She recounted a story where police approached her while she was in the company of her abusers. The police asked her for her name, age, and address, which she provided. Her alleged abuser then told the police to “piss off” or he would make a racial harassment claim against them. They left.

Playing ‘the race card’ is a ploy that has probably been repeated across the country, including, no doubt, in Oxford.

In response to questions for this report, Joanna Simons, Chief Executive of Oxfordshire County Council said: “Oxfordshire County Council takes the issue of child sexual exploitation extremely seriously and we have taken significant and wide-ranging action to address this in Oxfordshire as part of our work dealing with the Bullfinch trial [the trial described above] in May 2013.”

Ms Simons provided information as to Oxfordshire County Council’s plans to prevent future child sex abuse of the kind highlighted in this report.

They were:

• Establishing the Kingfisher unit with police, social workers and health staff to spot potential warning signs, identify and support young people who may be victims of child sexual exploitation
• Providing child protection training for staff working with children. The training now includes a designated section on spotting the signs of, and responding to, child sexual exploitation. This training has been delivered to more than 7,500 multi-agency staff in Oxfordshire, including all frontline staff working with children.
• Developing a new child sexual exploitation screening tool. This screening tool, which has been developed in line with best practice, is used to assess the likelihood and risk level of a young person being subjected to sexual exploitation.
• Oxfordshire County Council working directly with young people to raise awareness of the risks and warnings signs of sexual exploitation. A drama workshop about sexual exploitation called Chelsea’s Choice has been seen by around 24,000 secondary school children in Oxfordshire, accompanied by a letter and leaflet for parents. Two further plays – one for children aged 15+ and one for primary school children – will be rolled out from September 2014.
• Allocating an additional £1.4m to fund the recruitment of a further 21 dedicated child protection social workers, plus increasing the budget for children’s social care by almost £20m in real terms between 2006/7 and 2013/14.
• Lobbying at a national level for changes to improve the process for victims of child sexual exploitation, including better protection for witnesses, and proactively sharing what we have learnt in Oxfordshire.
This is very welcome, and indeed admirable work. It is also to Oxfordshire’s credit that they have said they are “working with mosques” on this issue; suggesting they are not ignoring the ethnic and religious background of many of the abusers.

Birmingham

The story is similar in the city of Birmingham – as was exposed in late 2014. Dr Jill Jesson was asked by Birmingham City Council to look in to child prostitution in that city in 1990. Dr Jesson reported to the authority that “Asian” cab drivers were heavily involved in the sexual abuse, but was ordered by a steering group to remove all reference to ethnicity. A meeting to discuss her report was cancelled, and all copies of the report were destroyed.

Dr Jesson told the Birmingham Mail “I was told to reveal what I saw. I did – and some people didn’t like it. There was a link between the sexual abuse of the girls and private hire drivers in the city. I thought at the time I did the work that there was an issue with race. Most of the girls were white. I was asked to take this link out, to erase it.”

She continued:

“Every time a news item has come on about sexual grooming of young girls and girls in care, and the link, too, between private hire drivers, I have thought ‘I told them about that in 1991 but they didn’t want to acknowledge it’. I think the problem has got worse and worse over time.”

“It wasn’t called grooming then, it was called prostitution,” Dr Jesson said. “The girls were all aged between 13 and 17 and were all under the care of Birmingham City Council social services.

“When the work was completed and the report was finished, as far as I was concerned my report was going to be discussed by staff in social services in order to do something.

“The report was meant to be presented at a seminar to discuss the council’s policy around protecting these girls. It was all about establishing if the policy fitted the problem, so to speak.

“But the report was shelved, buried, it was never made public. I was shocked to be told that copies of the report were to be destroyed and that nothing further was to be said. Clearly, there was something in this report that someone in the department was worried about.”

Dr Jesson was also critical of recording methods and said she had not been helped by the fact that social services had inadequate recording methods: “That was a big problem and my report was also critical of the council’s policy around tackling the problem.”

Peter Hay, Strategic Director for People at Birmingham City Council responded and said: “This is a matter which was discussed in full and in public over twenty years ago.

“In 1991 Jill Jesson was asked to undertake a research report on the prostitution of young people in the care system. This was done using government HIV grant money. At the end of the review a decision was made to not pursue further grant funding. More significantly in 1991 the Department decided not to publish the report for reasons which are not clear.

“In December 1995, the Director published the report in full. (Social Services Committee 13/12/95). Jill has confirmed to me that the report we found in the archived minute is the full report.”

Also in 2014, an official West Midlands Police report showed that 75% of on-street sexual abuse offenders were “Asian” , while 82% of the victims were white and aged between 14-16.

NEXT - PART EIGHT: EXPOSED, GROOMED FOR SEX