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EmailBritain’s Grooming Gangs: Part 1
- As far back as 2013, Britain’s Attorney General stated in the House of Lords that 27 police forces were then investigating no fewer than 54 alleged gangs involved in child sexual grooming.
- Last year, Shahid Javed Burki, a former Pakistani finance minister and vice-president of the World Bank, spoke out about the treatment of women in his country, arguing that the low status given to women has had serious social, demographic, educational, and financial effects.
- This problem is, in some measure, reflected in the UK, where Muslim women (mainly of Pakistani origin) face limitations on their participation in the workplace, in higher education, and even knowledge of the English language — matters examined by Dame Louise Casey in her 2016 government review into opportunity and integration.
- Bringing Pakistani attitudes into the UK, often within segregated communities, only serves to perpetuate the belief that women are intrinsically the inferiors of men in all respects.
Part 2:
- As often cruelty to women happens not only behind closed doors, but in the public square, we can only guess how this display affects both women and men. Sons see how their mothers are treated; this too doubtless informs their behaviour.
- It is important not to assume that the members of British grooming gangs consider themselves jihadis entitled to capture non-Muslim girls. They do not even appear at all pious. But knowledge of such practices is likely to have some impact on Muslims coming from countries where some form of slavery or indentured servitude still exists.
- Sadly, in the case of Britain’s grooming gangs, religious ideology does not play a role in forbidding child sexual grooming. It is important to examine just how crucial a factor this seems to have been in community silence about them.
Part 3:
- This reformist activity in the migrant community needs to be encouraged and backed by government resources.
- “On one level, most imams in the UK are simply using their puritanical sermons to promote the wearing of the hijab and even the burka among their female adherents. But the dire result can be the brutish misogyny we see in the Oxford sex ring.” — Taj Hargey, imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation.
- There are decent Muslims everywhere who work hard to counter all the anti-social and criminal activities in which so many of their co-religionists engage and the theological positions through which they try to justify what they do. But terrorist attacks, anti-Semitic hate speech, and sexual harassment of young white women are real crimes committed by a different kind of Muslim and must be addressed as such.
- “Women in some communities are facing a double onslaught of gender inequality, combined with religious, cultural and social barriers preventing them from accessing even their basic rights as British residents. And violence against women remains all too prevalent….” — Dame Louise Casey, The Casey Review, 2016.
