I’m afraid there is a Pakistani problem, and we must root it out
by Kishwer Falkner, Sunday Times:
The home secretary’s announcement seems designed to deflect criticism rather than get to the heart of the grooming scandal.
For two weeks the government said no to calls for a public inquiry into the grooming scandal. Now it is trying to deflect criticism by setting out its “next steps”. They are not enough.
What Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is promising is better data, a limited general audit (the multitasked Baroness Casey of Blackstock has been asked to defer her social care review to prioritise this), five local inquiries (out of a possible 50), a review of “cold” cases plus a few other technical measures. All this, she tells us, will uncover the truth and provide justice where things have gone wrong.
Truth, Cooper implies, has been in short supply in the past two decades while children have been raped and abused, and “despite all the inquiries, no one listened and nothing was done”. She doesn’t seem very curious as to why, which is what a wider statutory inquiry should try to answer.
Maybe she would be more curious if she experienced my deep shame every time the “Asian” grooming scandals are mentioned. I’m a first-generation female migrant from Pakistan who naturalised as a British citizen. I’m a secular Muslim and I’ve grown up, lived and worked in Muslim-majority countries, so I am well versed in the cultural and religious mores of those countries.
It is obvious that there are regressive attitudes towards women, especially non-Muslim white girls, in parts of the south Asian diaspora in the UK. But why does it appear that Pakistanis, or a subset of Pakistani men, are so overrepresented in the gang rape outrages? Is it the clash between the respectability demanded by their community and the temptations of the night-time economy in a sexualised western culture? What about the role of sometimes dysfunctional marriages with spouses from Pakistan, still accounting for half of all male Pakistani marriages? Or the baradari clan system that encourages a closing of ranks?
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