Pakistani child sex abuse is an open secret
by Hina Husain, UnHerd:
The first time Rahim* was raped by a family member, he was six years old. In the early Nineties, three of Rahim’s uncles immigrated from Pakistan to the small town in Southern Ontario, Canada where Rahim’s family lived. He was five years old at the time; his elder sisters were nine and 14, and his baby brother was a new-born. The sexual abuse started almost immediately. Rahim says he was raped by one of his uncles “extremely frequently” for five years: two to three times a week, every week. His sisters weren’t spared either.
When he was eight, Rahim told one of his sisters that he had seen their uncle naked on numerous occasions. Both of them realised that they, along with their other sister, were being sexually abused after their daily Quran class with him. “Each day he’d pick who gets to leave and who gets to stay,” Rahim says. “I got the worst of it.”
In the liberal West, just implying that Pakistani communities have high rates of child sexual abuse (CSA) can result in accusations of bigotry. The subject is even more unmentionable in Pakistan itself. The nation has one of the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the world: over half a million children are raped there every year. (That is a conservative estimate.) According to recent reports, children are most at risk from the age of six, with nine being the most common age to be raped.
As the grooming gang scandals erupting in the UK have shown, this permissive attitude towards CSA seems to be spreading. A new documentary by GBNews attempts to uncover why the abuse scandal in Rotherham — in which more than 1,500 underage, often impoverished, white girls were groomed and raped by gangs of Pakistani men — was allowed to go on for decades without the authorities intervening. One obvious reason is that these authorities were afraid of being seen as “racist” for focusing the investigation on the predominantly Pakistani men who are running these rings. But it’s equally important to recognise that these crimes were covered up by the Pakistani community itself, which allowed abusers to continue with impunity. The documentary shows how Pakistani-British policemen and Rotherham city counsellors either tried to suppress reports about the scandal, or deny it was happening at all.
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