Issan Ghazni - Stop racialising the Rochdale child grooming crimes

Continuing to focus on race and ethnicity is fanning the flames of far right recruitment and hatred while the real underlying issues are about class, weakness, vulnerability and a desperate void in community leadership.

Media reporting of the Rochdale "sex grooming trial" and the brutal exploitation of vulnerable young teenage girls raises many troubling questions, and has so far concentrated largely on the fact that the men were of Pakistani background while all 47 victims, were from white and working class backgrounds.

However, 'Racialising' the crime over claims about Muslim men grooming white girls tends to hide legitimate worries about a system that fails victims of abuse. It is important that an entire community should not be tarred with the same brush; in 2009, eight white men were found guilty in Scotland of a range of criminal charges relating to child abuse. The whole community was never stereotyped or blamed for the crimes of the few.

Focusing on the race element of this situation ensured that the extreme right had a field day, nearly causing the case to collapse when BNP leader Nick Griffin tweeted the news regarding the conviction of the defendants before the actual reporting in court. In response, some of the defendants are now accusing the judge and jury of racial prejudice. This is a false argument on both sides.

We must not forget that this is part of a wider picture of abuse which is not unique to one community. Co-chair of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, Marai Larasi has argued: "An excessive focus on some cases of sexual exploitation with a primary focus on ethnicity rather than the exploitation itself is misleading and fuels racist attitudes which ultimately won't help women and girls."

Larasi goes on to state that there may well be "issues of ethnicity" but only with regard to recognising and dealing with some aspects of predatory behaviour. Evidence exists within some communities of people, places and institutions across all ethnicities, where strong male bonds can ultimately lead to a culture of silence - we can take the priesthood as another example and not just focus our anger at a criminal minority within UK based Pakistani society.

True, there most certainly is a higher incidence of on-street grooming convictions among some "Asian" men acting in groups. However, there is also strong evidence to suggest that most sexual offences are carried out by white men acting alone, according to the CPS.

Agencies that work with victims of sexual violence including the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) - believe that we really ought to challenging stereotypes and increase awareness about such abuse. As such, our focus for a remedial response should be based on the fact that vulnerable young people from poor and chaotic backgrounds are being targeted. These are the sort of children who are easy to identify, target and exploit for the sexual gratification of criminal groups of men.

The person responsible for bringing the perpetrators to trial is newly appointed Chief Crown Prosecutor Nazir Afzal, who himself is of Pakistani origin openly agreed that Asian men are disproportionately responsible for on-street grooming. But he also argues that in most cases of sexual assault, including 'Rochdale', men prey on girls because "they were perceived to be unwanted, unloved, they were on the streets late and nobody seemed to care".

His argument compounds the fact that, as with the majority of rape or sexual assault cases, it is the powerful preying on the weak rather than for the colour of their skin.

At the same time we must not shy away from being severely critical of the abject failure of community leadership within many Pakistani communities in the UK. I agree wholeheartedly with Mohammed Shafiq, Chief Executive of the Rochdale-based Ramadhan Foundation, when reported in the Times, how religious elders and councillors in his own community have shrugged their shoulders at child-sex grooming by young men, fully aware that it is illegal. That they at times are inclined to keep silent rather than challenge and expose criminal behaviour, and sometimes inclined to blame wider British society for the over-sexualisation of the young. They have shamefully failed to take responsibility for challenging the sexual exploitation of young girls happening in their midst. A grass roots strategy for education and prevention urgently needs to be undertaken in such communities.

These victims have not been preyed upon because they are white, but because they are perceived as unprotected, impoverished, weak and vulnerable - the same characteristics exhibited by most victims of predatory sexual violence. They were targeted because they were in that situation and they were there. It wasn't their race which defined the perpetrators of this barbaric act of criminality, it was their treatment of women - we should be clear that under certain conditions, there is no community where women and girls are not vulnerable to sexual attack and exploitation.

We must aim to stop the spread of child sex grooming wherever it occurs in a firm and objective manner. Community and civil society groups, youth centres, religious institutions along with relevant statutory agencies, including the police, children's services and the third sector must come together to tackle this holistically.

We cannot allow politicians and the media to continue to vilify whole communities; to continue to hand over ammunition to far right groups like the BNP and the EDL, who in their simple language of hate, blame Muslims for almost every bad thing that happens in Britain.

Issan Ghazni

Chair of Nottingham City Liberal Democrats

Chair of Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats (EMLD)

Website : www.issanghazni.co.uk

Twitter : @issanghazni