The author of a major report on child rape grooming gangs in England has warned that many are still in denial about the role that ethnicity and religion play in the ongoing mass sexual exploitation of mostly young white working-class girls by predominantly Pakistani Muslim men.
While stating the fact that Pakistani Muslims are significantly overrepresented in the group sexual exploitation of young girls in Britain was once cast as akin to a conspiracy theory, a review last year from Baroness Louise Case forced the left-wing Labour Party government to not only launch a national review but also to finally admit that there was “clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men” among grooming gang child rapists.
However, speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales on Sunday, Dame Casey said that little has improved since she first became involved in the issue, when she led an investigation into the Labour-majority council in the grooming hotspot of Rotherham in 2015, and that political correctness still stands in the way of justice and protecting further victims.
“I was very disappointed, to put it mildly, I was really upset that in the intermediate 10 years (since Rotherham), not enough had changed,” she said, according to the Daily Mail.
“Victims still weren’t believed, people didn’t gather the right evidence, everybody was still squeamish over looking at both religion and ethnicity of perpetrators.”
“I felt there was a sense of denial and I felt possibly, personally, that I had let those victims down… That is never, ever going to happen again.”
Although consecutive governments, including former Conservative governments, attempted to downplay the issue of race and religion in the rape and sexual abuse of thousands of young girls across the country, victims have consistently maintained that they were specifically targeted.
One Rotherham grooming gang survivor wrote in 2018 that her abusers “made it clear that because I was a non-Muslim, and not a virgin, and because I didn’t dress ‘modestly’, that they believed I deserved to be ‘punished’.”
She said that as a teenager, she was passed around by the gang from house to house, and was raped over 100 times. “I was called a ‘white slag’ and ‘white c***’ as they beat me… They said I had to ‘obey’ or be beaten,” the survivor said.
Her account backs up a 2017 report from the former Quilliam think tank, which estimated that 84 per cent of grooming gang offenders were of “South Asian” descent, a British euphemism for those from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
The report, authored by two Pakistani researchers, found that working-class white girls were often viewed as “easy targets” and “fair game” by grooming gangs, while Muslim girls should be “protected”.
Nevertheless, local authorities frequently ignored such abuse for fear of being called racist or stoking local ethnic tensions.
In her review, Baroness Casey revealed that in one child’s file, an official had manually blanked out the word “Pakistani” with Tipex [Whiteout].
“I think you’ve got sort of do-gooders that don’t really want this to be found because, you know, ‘Oh, God, then all the racists are going to be more racist’,” she said.