The record is clear that Rotherham officials were more willing to let the abuse continue than they were to talk about it. This cover-up was certainly motivated in part by their trying to save face. But there is another reason: political correctness.
In the words of the official report by Prof. Alexis Jay, there was a “deep-rooted problem of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators targeting young white girls.” The report shows that these perpetrators also preyed on young Pakistani girls. But in almost all cases, attackers were Muslims from Pakistan.
As the report notes, overall the perpetrators of child sexual abuse are most likely to be white men. But this particular type of teenage street-grooming is predominantly a Pakistani Muslim problem. That is not something multicultural Britain is comfortable talking about.
This is not just a trend in Rotherham—it has emerged in towns across the country. Similar patterns of abuse by organized groups “largely of Pakistani origin,” as the Times put it, have been uncovered in Oxford, Rochdale, Derby and Telford. Here is the evidence as described by Andrew Norfolk, the Times’ investigative reporter: “Since 1997, there had been 17 court cases from 13 towns and cities in which two or more men had been convicted of sexual offenses linked to the street-grooming exploitation of young teenage girls. Of the 56 men convicted, three were white and 53 were Asian [in the UK, “Asian” usually means Pakistani or Indian, rather than Chinese]. Of those 53 men, 50 had Muslim names, and the vast majority were members of the Pakistani community” (June 27, 2013).
Armed with these facts, Norfolk began asking questions. “Initial approaches to police forces, local authority social services departments and even the Home Office met with a blank refusal to speak about the issue,” he wrote. “Barnardo’s, the children’s charity that since the mid-1990s has run specialist projects to support the victims of child sexual exploitation, refused to allow any of its staff to talk to me, even off the record.”
Britain has allowed this toxic culture to thrive right within its midst. There are “communities … across Britain [where] the white world never reaches,” as Sarfraz Manzoor, an author who moved from Pakistan to Britain as a child, wrote in the Times. “These monocultural communities are perpetuated by first-cousin marriages and spouses brought over from Pakistan. The effect is that prejudices in that community are never challenged, only reinforced.”
Professor Jay’s report indicates that Rotherham’s local Pakistani leaders were unwilling to see the problem in their own community. It states that the former deputy leader of the council, Jahangir Akhtar, himself from the Pakistani community, was “at best naive, and at worst ignoring a politically inconvenient truth.”
“One senior officer suggested that some influential Pakistani-heritage councilors in Rotherham had acted as barriers” to communication, the report states.
The facts in Rotherham and in cities across Britain are undeniable. Britain has a problem with many of its Muslims. In Birmingham, some Muslims tried to use the British school system to fill the minds of young children with extreme Islamist ideology in what has become known as the “Trojan horse” plot. Details are still emerging of the same scandal in other cities. Meanwhile, London’s Tower Hamlets, one of Britain’s most Muslim electoral districts, is governed by a mayor with close links to extremist Islamists groups. Allegations of voter intimidation and electoral fraud abound there.
Certainly, Britain has many Muslims who uphold and support the British way of life. That truth is obvious to anyone who has spent any length of time here. But there are also whole groups of Muslims who hate everything Britain stands for and fight to undermine it. Some become extremists and fight against the government. Others use their religion as an excuse to view white girls as “fair game,” as Britain’s former minister for faith and communities said. These groups often live in their own enclaves with their own cultures, rarely interacting with surrounding society.
That is a problem that almost no one in Britain wants to address.
Denis MacShane, Rotherham’s M.P. during most of the period documented in the report, told the British Broadcasting Corporation, “I think there was a culture of not want [sic] to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that.”
The official report states, “Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”
Time and again, people with obviously Muslim names were coming up in court accused of these crimes. But few wanted to highlight this problem for fear of being called racist or Islamophobes.