Sexual grooming of young British girls have created a widespread terror in the minds of parents, who now constantly worry about their daughters growing up in this country. The story of Emma Jackson, who was raised near Leeds is not a stand alone case. When Emma was 12, she was befriended by Asian boys around her own age who soon introduced her to relatives in their twenties and thirties. She did not realise that she was being groomed and brainwashed until one day, totally out of the blue, she was taken to wasteland and raped by the gang leader. The attack was watched by laughing gang members and recorded on a number of mobile phones. With a threat to petrol bomb her family home, Emma had to succumb to their pressure of repeated rapes, and felt trapped. This is the case in mostly every girl sexually groomed in Rochadale, Oxford, Rotherham, Oldham, Slough, West Midlands, Lincolnshire or Buckinghamshire.
Speaking to Asian Voice, an Indian family from South East England said, they were worried about their teenage daughter and friends, as the safety of school going girls in the country fell low, especially after the government and its several apparatus failed many families, repeatedly. While government spokespersons tried to stay politically correct, they led to a crisis that instrumentally destroyed young lives. According to some of these mothers, a fear of being branded racist made many of the police and social services reluctant to investigate the crimes as organised and connected- despite the gravity of the situation.
Some of these government officials were also very highly paid to do their job right, yet they failed to speak out about grooming gangs. Sue Berelowitz had her £960-a-day contract with the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC) recently cancelled for breaching such government rules. She downplayed the role of groups of Pakistani men in committing child sexual abuse, and stood down from her £99,333-a-year post on April 30 after taking voluntary redundancy. However, the Times reported that despite her track record, she received a severance payment of £134,000 and on the following day was rehired on a consultancy basis to continue chairing an inquiry into sexual abuse within a family on whose case she had been working in her former role.
Grooming gang jailed in Leeds
On 2 June, a court in Leeds brought 10 men who took advantage of a vulnerable 13-year-old and cynically “sexually corrupted” to justice and jailed them for a total of 51 years. Tariq Islam, Nasir Sultan, Amir Zaman and Zafar Iqbal are among ten men found guilty of a range of serious sexual offences committed against the youngster in the Beeston area of Leeds.
They groomed systematically, abused them and sometimes forced the victim to have sex against her will inspite of knowing that she was under age.A jury at Leeds Crown Court heard the girl would be given cigarettes and alcohol, contacted via Facebook with demands for sex and picked up in the street and ordered to get into cars with the men.
Jailing the men, judge Geoffrey Marson, QC, said: “(the victim) was systematically abused, in some cases by men who knew each other and exchanged their experiences with each other which no doubt led to further sexual abuse.
“Over a period of more than six weeks I have had the opportunity of observing the defendants and hearing their evidence.
“Not one of them has uttered a single word or sentiment of remorse.
“Their only concern is that they have been caught and brought to justice.”
Predators in the community
There is an established pattern in these grooming gang cases- perpetrators- mostly Asian men of Muslim or Pakistani origin, trying to take advantage of white or non Muslim girls, including Hindu and Sikh Asians, though most victims- were not from broken homes- as opposed to the common belief. They were just teenagers with normal dreams, aspirations and curiosities, who ended up losing everything- from their modesty to confidence to their sanity.
While most of the Pakistani community is aghast by this sexual there are, Julie Bindel in Standpoint Magazine wrote that a growing number of individuals within the Muslim communities are willing to speak out against the criminals. Mohammed Shafiq, the director of the Lancashire-based Ramadhan Foundation, a charity working for peaceful harmony between different ethnic communities, said: "I was one of the first within the Muslim community to speak out about this, four years ago... and at the time I received death threats from some black and Asian people. But what I said has been proved right — that if we didn't tackle it there would be more of these abusers and more girls getting harmed."
Shafiq said he was "disgusted" to hear some perpetrators refer to their victims as "white trash". He added: "I say to them, would you treat your sister or daughter like this?"
Mohan Singh, head of the Sikh Awareness Society, travels the country to give public talks about the issue. His organisation runs a helpline and is dealing with 19 current cases around the country.“We have dealt with 600 cases over 15 years. In the 50 worst cases it was more than one man, all of them Muslims,” he said. “Shame is a major issue. People don’t want to go to the police so they come to us.”
In 2013 five of the six men convicted in Leicester were Muslim and one was Hindu. Ashish Joshi, chairman of the Sikh Media Monitoring Group, reportedly said such gangs typically targeted girls “from outside their community”. He added: “They go for white, Sikh or Hindu girls because a small sub-section of the Muslim community holds the prejudiced view that non-Muslim girls are not to be respected like girls from their own community.”
The adversity and grim stories of the victims are heart breaking, what is more painful is the notion that the victims and in many case the local community face no remorse at such heinous acts- rather they just regret being caught. We will perhaps allow such gangs to operate with impunity if we deny their existence to avoid being politically incorrect or culturally insensitive. Some people, including many white liberals, are averse to admit the reality.
If we do not face the problems head-on, and work together to fight this dreadful abuse of children, the only beneficiaries will be the extremists.
