Wilful denial over Britain’s sex grooming gangs
by Melanie Phillips:
When 20 men were convicted at the end of last week on charges of more than 120 child sex offences including rape, inciting child prostitution and abducting a child, the Home Secretary Sajid Javid tweeted:
“These sick Asian paedophiles are finally facing justice. I want to commend the bravery of the victims. For too long, they were ignored. Not on my watch. There will be no no-go areas.”
He was immediately accused of racism for mentioning the ethnicity of these criminals. In fact, virtually all its members had a very specific ethnic and religious identity as men of Pakistani Muslim origin (the ringleader was said to have converted to Sikhism five years ago).
No matter. The Labour MP David Lammy said: “It does no service to the victims of this evil to pin the blame on any one group.” But those who maintain that the ethnic and/or religious identity of these criminals is irrelevant couldn’t be more wrong.
For this was but the latest in a series of criminal trials of men involved not just in sex offences but in a particular, and particularly odious, pattern of criminal activity which has claimed several thousand victims over a period over the past two decades.
This involves targeting specifically white girls, mainly young teenagers or pre-teens from the wrong side of the tracks, and luring them into situations where they are plied with drugs or alcohol and then raped, pimped, prostituted and treated as dehumanised sexual objects often by multiple men over several hours at a time.
This systematic abuse and violaton of so many young girls over such a long period of time was first exposed by my Times colleague Andrew Norfolk in 2011. Astoundingly, it had been ignored for years by police and welfare officials who had looked the other way. Some, particularly the police, dismissed these girls as white trash; the main reason, though, for ignoring what was happening was that these officials were frightened of being accused of racism if they did anything about it.
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