British Muslim community outrage at sex abuse report
Print Edition
MEMBERS of Britain’s Pakistani community reacted with outrage yesterday amid reports that officials failed to act on sex abuse cases because of concerns about racism in the northern English town of Rotherham.
Muhbeen Hussain, founder of Rotherham Muslim Youth Group, told the Daily Mirror that Muslims are disgusted that justice was not done — leading to some 1,400 children being sexually exploited over a 16-year period, mostly by Pakistani men.
“Race, religion or political correctness should never provide a cloak of invisibility to such grotesque crimes.”
Report author Alexis Jay cited appalling acts of violence between 1997 and 2013 in the town of some 250,000. Charities that deal with abused children have expressed shock not just at the number of victims and by the apparent reluctance of authorities to address the question that people of Pakistani heritage were involved for fear they would be labeled racists.
Barnardo’s, a charity that works with vulnerable children, unilaterally condemned the abuse that left so many to suffer for so long.
“No one should ever be frightened to act decisively because of fear of being seen as racist or politically incorrect,” said Barnardo’s chief executive, Javed Khan.
Britain’s Labour Party called for the resignation of the police commissioner in the town, a member of its own ranks, after the report found that “collective failures,” led to inaction.
But Jay said Rotherham is not the only place in Britain struggling with this issue. She told the BBC that “demand for this kind of sexual activity with children is on the increase and that is validated across not just the UK but Europe and worldwide.
“We can’t say that Rotherham is any better or worse than other places because the information simply doesn’t exist at a national level to tell us that,” she said.
The report concluded in a damning account of “collective failures” by authorities to prevent victims as young as 11 from being beaten, raped and trafficked over a 16-year period.
The independent report came after a series of convictions of sexual predators in the region and ground-breaking reports in the Times of London.
The report described rapes by multiple perpetrators, mainly from Britain’s Pakistani community, and how children were trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated.
"There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone,” Jay said. “Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators,” she added.
Police “regarded many child victims with contempt,” Jay said, adding that many of the children were known to child protection agencies.
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