Britain’s Grooming Gangs: Part 1
by Denis MacEoin, Gatestone Institute:
On July 24, 2018, Britain’s Home Secretary, conservative MP Sajid Javid, issued orders for research into the ethnic origins of the country’s many sexual grooming gangs that had involved large numbers of loosely-termed “Asian men”, who, over many years, had taken vulnerable young white British girls to use or pass on for sexual purposes. Most of the men have, Javid has stated been of Pakistani extraction, which makes the Home Secretary’s intervention significant. Javid’s father came, as did many other Pakistani immigrants, from Punjab, and with only £1 to his name. He became a bus driver, then a clothing store owner. Yet his five sons have all become fully integrated Britons, with successful careers in business, politics and the public sector. They are all models of second-generation immigrant achievement, miles away from the men in the gangs. Reporting on the Javid family, The Times wrote:
“Javid’s appointment as the first non-white person — and the first with a Muslim background — to hold one of Britain’s great offices of state is the culmination of a six-decade family journey.”
Given the great potential for controversy over identifying ethnicity as a factor in serious crimes, Javid showed courage in taking this move only months after his appointment in April to lead the Home Office. Criticism came quickly from the Labour Party. “Jeremy Corbyn denied there was any ‘problem’ with Pakistani men and abuse, saying: ‘The problem is the crime that’s committed against women from any community.” His combined political and ethnic experience will have shown Javid, based on previous Home Office bans and academic reports, that any such investigation might be used by the far right to attack Pakistanis and Muslims.
Crossing party lines, Javid made his commitment to investigate the ethnic origins in a letter to Sarah Champion, the Labour Member of Parliament for Rotherham, the first city to experience grooming gangs on a large scale, and the site of the UK’s largest ever child sexual abuse scandal. Just under a year before, Champion had come under fire for daring to draw public attention to the problem of the preponderance of Pakistanis in the gangs.
First elected to parliament in 2012, Champion, in 2015, served as the Shadow Minister for Preventing Abuse. She was awarded the post in recognition of her work on child sexual exploitation, notably by chairing a cross-party inquiry into child sexual exploitation. The inquiry was done in conjunction with the children’s charity Barnardo’s, which published a report in April 2014. Unfortunately, Champion had to resign briefly in 2016, when a number of MPs stood down in an attempt to remove Jeremy Corbyn. She was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities in October 2016, a role for which she was well suited. In November, she launched a National Action Plan (Dare2Care) to prevent child abuse and violence in teenage relationships.
Then things went wrong. She remains an MP, but was forced to resign her shadow cabinet post nearly a year later, on August 16, 2017, after a major controversy. During an interview with BBC Radio 4, on August 10, she said, about a major grooming gang which had just been convicted in Newcastle upon Tyne:
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