Calling them ‘Asian’ grooming gangs is obscuring the truth
The Casey report is right to refer to ‘Pakistani’ men as overrepresented in these crimes.
One of the many refreshing things about Louise Casey’s 197-page national audit into grooming gangs is that it does not shirk from uncomfortable questions about the ethnicity of many of the perpetrators. The report, published earlier this week, refers to men of ‘Pakistani’ origin being overrepresented in grooming gangs a total of 28 times. Here Casey is simply relaying what has been clear to most people for years, yet has nevertheless been obscured by the authorities, the media and academia.
The report includes a chapter titled ‘Denial’, which highlights how the truth about these crimes has continually been obfuscated. Sadly, if the BBC’s coverage of Casey’s report is anything to go by, then this obfuscation and deflection are only going to continue. This week, in an article setting out the ‘key takeaways’ from the report, the word ‘Pakistani’ was not mentioned once. The state broadcaster referred instead to ‘Asians’, until it was later updated to ‘Asian and Pakistani’ following criticism online.
The BBC is not alone in this, of course. When dismissing calls for a national inquiry as a ‘far-right bandwagon’ earlier this year, UK prime minister Keir Starmer boasted that he had, as a former director of public prosecutions, ‘brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang’.
It is not nitpicking to object to this terminology. As I have previously argued on spiked, the term ‘Asian’ in relation to grooming gangs is a deliberate fudge. It is a devious euphemism deployed by progressives and cowards to avoid saying ‘Pakistani’ or ‘Muslim’. The word ‘Asian’ may technically be accurate, but it implies that there could well be gangs of Chinese, Japanese or Sikh paedophiles responsible for these heinous crimes across up to 50 towns and cities in the UK. Strictly speaking, it would also be true to talk about ‘homo sapien grooming gangs’, but it wouldn’t exactly help us in identifying the perpetrators or understanding their crimes.
To be clear, the grooming-gangs scandal involves a small minority of Pakistani-heritage men, who do not represent all law-abiding Pakistanis by any means. However, there is undoubtedly an overrepresentation of Pakistani men specifically. Take Rotherham, which provides a fairly accurate sample of the national trend. By 2018, the National Crime Agency identified 110 suspects, 80 per cent of whom were Pakistani. Telegraph columnist Sam Ashworth-Hayes put this into perspective. ‘It’s plausible’, he wrote, ‘that one in 16 Pakistani men [in Rotherham] who were aged 15 or over in 2011 have since been arrested’ for grooming offences. Pretending that all Asian-heritage people are just as likely to commit these crimes helps no one.
Another reason the term ‘Asian’ is so problematic is that it also describes a sizeable portion of the rape gangs’ victims. Indeed, Casey’s report calls for further investigation into ‘concerns that Sikh and Hindu children had been targeted’. Back in 2013, the BBC produced a documentary on this very subject. In some of the cases it highlighted, Muslim men were reported to be wearing Sikh symbols and pretending to be Sikhs to entrap the girls. Regrettably, a small section of the Sikh community has responded to this with vigilante action, such as in Leicester in 2013. Some Sikh groups continue to organise family workshops in gurdwaras to warn about the dangers of grooming gangs.
A few years ago, I was involved in a campaign for more accuracy in the reporting on grooming gangs. The campaign succeeded in making changes to IPSO’s Editors’ Codebook, which advises on best practice for UK newspaper editors. Casey’s report also acknowledges representations made by the charity I work for, the Network of Sikh Organisations, in her own plea for more specific language.
If we are to finally have a reckoning with the grooming-gangs scandal, let’s be sure to use the right language. It is all too telling that even now, after Casey’s report and with a national inquiry on the horizon, that the establishment is still resorting to euphemisms and refusing to speak frankly about these horrific crimes.
Hardeep Singh is a writer based in London. Follow him on X: @singhtwo2