4
EARLIER this month, in a report highlighting the “staggering extent” of the victimisation of young people across the world, Unicef noted that serious sexual violence is experienced by about one in 10 girls. It put the level at an unbelievably appalling 70pc in certain African countries. Such statistics raise uncomfortable questions about human nature, and more specifically about cultures that permit such atrocities. African states, though, are by no means exclusive in this respect.
Unicef also cites sexual victimisation in richer countries, with large numbers of girls reporting harassment or exposure to pornography. What has been going on in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham, in England, goes well beyond that.
A report by Prof Alexis Jay last month offered a “conservative estimate” of 1,400 victims between 1997 and 2013. The girls, some of them aged as young as 11, were native English. The perpetrators were men of Pakistani origin, most of them tracing their antecedents to Mirpur in Azad Kashmir.
The general pattern of abuse entailed mostly young men befriending the girls in arcades and other such places, offering affection and gifts, and subsequently subjecting them to unspeakable levels of sexual abuse, including gang rape and trafficking.
Much of the child sex abuse within Pakistani communities in the UK is unreported.
Jay’s report points out how local figures of authority generally turned a blind eye to what was going on. This has been described as political correctness gone mad, the implication being that there was a reluctance to pursue the perpetrators on account of their ethnic origin, as such actions might be dubbed racist.
This may well be a part of the context, but in all likelihood a small part, given that the English police often enough exhibit the opposite tendency.
It has also been claimed that local elected officials were concerned about the loss of votes that alienating the Pakistani-origin community might entail. Rotherham, however, has been a Labour stronghold since the Second World War, and voters of Pakistani origin comprise about 3pc of the population.
Instances have been cited, meanwhile, of police accosting adult men with a girl in what could euphemistically be described as compromising circumstances, and choosing to haul up the 12-year-old victim for being inebriated while ignoring indications of what is called statutory rape under English law.
The picture that has emerged in Rotherham in the view of some exemplifies the consequences of multiculturalism, and it is not surprising that on the fringes of society in South Yorkshire and elsewhere it has fed into the racist mythologies of neo-Nazi organisations.
As some commentators, including The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, have pointed out, though, the failure to pursue the perpetrators in Rotherham in itself points to racist presumptions, including that unconscionable exploitation of pubescent girls is par for the course in some communities.
Many others have focused on the fact that the victims were working-class girls, most of them either effectively without families or belonging to dysfunctional families, who tended to be looked upon by figures of authority as “young prostitutes” making a “lifestyle choice” — notwithstanding evidence of threats, coercion, violence and torture.
In a recent article in The New York Times, Sarfraz Manzoor notes: “The Pakistanis who raped and pimped got away with it because they targeted a community even more marginal and vulnerable than theirs, a community with less voice and less muscle: white working-class girls.”
Manzoor also dwells on the immigration trends of the 1950s and 1960s, and the segregated communities they spawned. “An enlightening breeze of modernity needs to blow through those pockets of England that remain forever Pakistan,” he argues. It would be difficult to disagree.
Meanwhile, Nazir Afzal, the British Crown Prosecution Service official who oversees child abuse cases in England and Wales, says between 80pc and 90pc of child sex offenders in his jurisdiction are British white males. He notes that the preponderance of Asian males in the night-time economy in parts of Britain contributes to their prominence in after-dark crimes of opportunity.
At the same time, Jay’s report chimes with independent evidence that a great deal of child sex abuse within the Pakistani and certain other ethnic communities in Britain goes largely unreported, not least on account of notions of ‘shame’ and ‘honour’. The appalling crimes of Rotherham, though, are not exactly an aberration. The same pattern was highlighted in Rochdale a couple of years ago, and instances of it have since emerged elsewhere.
Misogyny isn’t any means be a Pakistani or Muslim prerogative. But its implications in the reported circumstances are heinous beyond belief. Although criminality of this nature is a minority occupation, the knowledge that it permeates societies at a lower, sometimes subliminal, level nonetheless substantiates the case for “an enlightening breeze of modernity” and for notions of morality divorced from medieval impulses.
Published in Dawn, September 24th, 2014
