BRITISH Home Secretary Suella Braverman seems to have achieved quite a feat — that of being a non-white person with overtly racist views. Speaking on a recent television interview about the government’s plans to tackle child sexual abuse, she said “vulnerable, white English girls” were being preyed upon by “gangs of British-Pakistani men”. When the presenter referred to a Home Office report of 2020 which found that group-based sex offenders were predominantly white, Ms Braverman doubled down on her contention, saying “British-Pakistani males hold cultural values at odds with British values”. Her remarks, in the wake of the Tory government’s avowed aim to get tough on child sexual exploitation, have been roundly criticised. Political commentators decried them as “inflammatory” and a trigger for “race wars”; some accused her of indulging in ‘dog whistle’ politics in the name of no-tolerance for ‘political correctness’. Indeed, the home secretary’s words must be music to the ears of the most vile racists in the UK and elsewhere, resuscitating as they do the trope of the violent and sexually out of control black man.

The 2020 report referred to above said that while the perpetrators in a number of high-profile cases of child sexual abuse by gangs have mainly involved men of Pakistani ethnicity, there are “significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending”. Among these cases was the horrific one in which more than 1,400 children were sexually exploited in the town of Rotherham over a period of 16 years; seven Pakistani-British men in that instance were convicted of a series of sexual offences against young girls. Interestingly, a 2015 report that also examined the Rotherham case found there were victims of “Pakistani-heritage” who did not necessarily report being sexually abused as they feared “it would affect their future marriage prospects”. Looking at crime through an ethnic lens distorts the picture. It also shifts the focus from the crime and demonises an entire community. As UK’s former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal posted, “Suella Braverman knows that 84pc of child sex offenders are white British, but chooses to focus on those that are not”. Indeed, 13 men appeared in a UK courtroom on Tuesday charged with more than 50 child grooming sex offences. None of them are non-white. Ms Braverman’s views have everything to do with xenophobia, not fact.

Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2023