The British Pakistanis who spoke out against grooming gangs
Ethnic-minority Britons are as furious about this scandal as everyone else.

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With Britain’s grooming gangs thrust back into the spotlight in recent weeks, there has been fierce discussion about who must take responsibility for this scandal. Of course, ultimate responsibility lies with the depraved perpetrators themselves. And children’s services, police officers, local councillors and politicians must shoulder a huge portion of the blame for allowing the abuse to go on for so long. But others have accused leading figures from Britain’s Pakistani Muslim communities of being insufficiently concerned about, and perhaps even complicit in, these crimes, which were committed almost exclusively by Pakistani Muslim men. Some have even argued that the reason the current Labour government is reluctant to hold a full-scale national inquiry into the grooming gangs is because prime minister Keir Starmer fears upsetting his ethnic-minority voters.
How fair is all this?
A recent poll found that support for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs is widespread and mainstream, with around three in four members of the British public being in favour of one. Labour’s current plans for five local inquiries and a three-month audit into ‘cultural and societal drivers’ behind the crimes will no doubt fall well short of what the public wants.
Interestingly, non-white Brits are slightly more likely to support a national inquiry into grooming gangs than white Brits (75 per cent versus 73 per cent), and less likely to oppose one (10 per cent versus 15 per cent). Ethnic-minority Britons want to punish the perpetrators more harshly, too. While 29 per cent of the white population support the death penalty for those found guilty of raping a child as part of a grooming gang, this rises to 37 per cent for their non-white counterparts. So there is little evidence to suggest that Labour would suffer a mass exodus of ethnic-minority voters if it were to commit to a proper inquiry.
It is also inaccurate to suggest that Pakistani Muslim figures have remained uniformly silent over grooming gangs. Pakistani-born Tazeen Ahmad, an award-winning investigative reporter who sadly passed away in 2019, did important work in exposing the gangs early on. In 2013, she made a documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches that investigated Britain’s ‘sex gangs’ and their exploitative grooming methods. The documentary, which focussed on a grooming gang in Telford, won Royal Television Society and Asian Media awards, as well as receiving a BAFTA nomination.
Then there was Nazir Afzal. When he became chief prosecutor for the north-west of England in 2011, one of his first acts was to overturn the previous Crown Prosecution Service decision not to pursue the members of the Rochdale grooming gang. This case ended in the conviction of 42 British Pakistani men for the exploitation of 47 underage girls. Given Afzal is the son of Pakistani migrants and a practising Muslim, it was all the more impactful when he criticised ‘white professionals’ oversensitivity to political correctness and fear of appearing racist’, which he believes helped the abusers evade justice.
It wasn’t just lone individuals looking for the truth, either. One organisation that deserves special credit is the Muslim Women’s Network UK, led by life peer Shaista Gohir. In September 2013, it published a report called ‘Unheard Voices’, which investigated cases of grooming-gang activity within Pakistani Muslim communities. The report, which was an unfunded and voluntary endeavour, identified cultural codes of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ that were being exploited to coerce, intimidate and silence victims. It revealed the complex grooming ‘hierarchies’ that were at play in some cases, and it documented physical abuse such as rape, severe beatings and burning victims with cigarettes.
Since the re-emergence of the grooming-gangs debate in the UK, one of the most robust interventions has been made by Kishwer Falkner, a first-generation migrant from Pakistan and current head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Falkner wrote for The Times at the weekend about the need to investigate why ‘Pakistanis, or a subset of Pakistani men, are so overrepresented in the gang-rape outrages’. She specifically refers to the baradari clan system, which ‘encourages a closing of ranks’. This resulted in some Pakistani communities operating as tight-knit, secretive networks that covered up grooming-gang rape and exploitation.
Another notable intervention came from Adnan Hussain, the independent MP for Blackburn. Hussain was one of the successful candidates endorsed by the identitarian Muslim Vote organisation for his stance on Gaza. So he is hardly a Faragist. He has called for an inquiry into grooming gangs to determine how so many institutions ‘allowed these heinous crimes against vulnerable children to go on for so long and so widely’.
Raising awareness of the grooming-gangs scandal has been an uphill battle from the start. Those within Britain’s Pakistani Muslim communities who have shed light on these heinous crimes deserve credit for their courage, too.
Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.
Picture by: Getty.
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