Baroness Falkner, the Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has written a hard-hitting comment piece for the Sunday Times urging the Government to set up a proper national inquiry into the rape gangs. Here’s how it begins.
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?
Yes, of course, if you look at sexual abuse in general, white British people will form the majority of abusers. But focusing specifically on the exploitative gang abuse, there does appear to be a distinctive Pakistani problem, more than among other south Asian Muslims. Maybe, as some still insist, their role has been exaggerated. Either way, we need the facts, cold and hard, from an authoritative statutory inquiry that will bring some kind of national reckoning in the way we have had with other scandals — Grenfell Tower, the Post Office, contaminated blood. It need not last as long as some of those nor prevent the immediate implementation of some of Cooper’s plans.
We need an understanding of the cultural patterns, as Cooper concedes, not to demonise a whole community but to hold the pathology of a subset up to the light and ensure it never happens again. It would also provide the platform for a proper repudiation of the crimes by the Pakistani community itself. For a community so concerned about “honour” and “shame”, it is dismaying to note that there does not seem to have been a loud, community-wide disavowal of these crimes, nor a shunning of those released from prison (some far too early).
And what of the collective failure of the public authorities? The anti-white racism shown towards the victims was mirrored by a kind of hands-off racism shown towards the offenders: “That’s what they do, don’t they? Everyone knows about it, so there’s nothing to see here.”
The “warped ideas of community relations”, as the prime minister describes it, the acceptance of parallel lives and community self-policing and the acquiescence in the weaponisation of racism and victimhood — that too is a cultural pathology, a bastard child of well-meaning anti-racism, that needs to be held up to the light and banished from our institutions.
Liberal, multiethnic societies are a permanent balancing act between accommodating difference and embracing common norms. What to do when some groups become too inward-looking and stray too far from the common norms? This too is, at least indirectly, unavoidable territory for a statutory inquiry and something that Labour has not been afraid to tackle in the past. Gordon Brown tried to define British values, Tony Blair looked at social cohesion through the lens of Muslim extremism and both brought weight to the national conversation. Labour needs to rediscover that burning concern for national integration even at the risk of further alienating its Muslim voter base.
Worth reading in full.
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