Oxford, city of my birth and education.
Oxford, city of dreaming spires. And now, Oxford, city of sexual grooming and gang rape of girls as young as 11. I recognised the Nanford Guest House in the newspaper because I used to cycle past it every day. It's just down the road from the running track where Roger Bannister ran the first four-minute mile in 1954. Yet behind this smart whitewashed facade young teenagers were plied with alcohol and drugs and sold by their abusers to p unters for sex at £600 a time. If this sort of thing can happen on the Iffley Road, it can happen on a street near you.
On Tuesday seven men were convicted of 43 charges of rape, child prostitution, trafficking and procuring a backstreet abortion. They have been told to expect lengthy prison sentences.
All but one are of Asian origin. There are obvious parallels with the grooming cases from Rochdale and Rotherham last year, as well as the sentencing last Friday of seven men for operating a child prostitution ring in Shropshire. This is bound to prompt the question of whether there is something about the cultural background of Asian Muslims, especially those from Pakistan, that results in their disproportionate representation in the grooming and prostitution of young white girls.
We can expect the usual battle lines to be drawn. Some will argue (rightly) that grooming cases involving white men gain less media coverage and this distorts public perceptions. They will say (rightly) that if online grooming and child sex abuse within networks of families and friends are included, white perpetrators far outnumber non-whites and that most Asian men are disgusted by such crimes. And they will complain (justifiably) that focusing on race and religion risks stigmatising entire communities and feeds into the rhetoric of white supremicists. They will even rationalise that these cases largely involve the night-time economy, which provides opportunities for these crimes because it brings together professions in which Asians are well represented, like taxi driving and takeaway work, with vulnerable white girls. The strong with the weak.
Yet I can't help agreeing with Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP for Keithley, who campaigned on this issue for years, and who claims that in the wake of the Macpherson Report, following the death of Stephen Lawrence, the authorities have been "petrified of being called racist". However, the figures speak for themselves. The vast majority of those recently convicted of street grooming have been British Pakistanis, who account for just 7% of the population.
In fact, it has been Asians themselves who have been most willing to speak out on the issue. Nazir Afzal, who led the prosecution case in Rochdale, partly blamed the men's attitudes on "imported cultural baggage" that resulted in them thinking that "women are some lesser being".
Then there is Mohammed Shafiq, a founder member of the youth organisation the Ramadhan Foundation, who has criticised his own community for attempting to sweep the issue under the carpet for too long. He is right. You do not stigmatise an entire community by saying that a small minority of Asian men, as the result of a twisted code of honour, believe white girls are fair game. Hypersensitivity about race should never be allowed to trump the quest for justice in these cases. So it is good to hear Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain calling on imams to urge Muslims to report anyone they suspect of grooming.
There are two dangers in this debate. The first is that an unhealthy focus on religion and race distracts attention from the threat posed by monsters like Jimmy Savile and Tia Sharp's murderer, Stuart Hazell. The second is that sensitivity about racism obfuscates a plain truth.
Misogyny is not confined to one culture but you don't need to look far for it in traditions that promote the superiority of men over women. Race and religion are not the whole story when it comes to male sexual violence and exploitation but neither are they irrelevant. As Mohammed Shafiq puts it: "We will win far more respect by challenging abuse, rather than colluding with its cover-up."
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