Pricey house secretary,
Monday’s newsletter of the nationwide audit on group-based kid sexual exploitation and abuse, led by way of Louise Casey, marked a pivotal second. No longer handiest in confronting the horrific crimes dedicated in opposition to susceptible ladies in cities corresponding to Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Telford, however in deciding how we reply to them as a rustic.
The Casey evaluate provides a sobering account of institutional failure. Those ladies weren’t merely let down. They have been failed by way of programs and folks tasked with their coverage. That will have to by no means occur once more. Justice, responsibility and reform are crucial.
I write to you as a British Muslim, a third-generation British Pakistani lady, and any individual who has labored with communities around the nation, to specific deep fear about how this factor is being spoken about and misrepresented.
You requested Woman Casey to inspect ethnicity along “cultural and social drivers”. The evaluate identifies disproportionate numbers of Asian males amongst suspects in Higher Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. On the identical time, it stresses that nationwide information is incomplete and inconsistent. Those findings are in rigidity. But the media and political reaction has amplified a simplified message: that there was once a cover-up and that ethnicity itself was once the reason.
In spaces the place British Pakistani communities are extra populous, over-representation might mirror native demographics, no longer cultural characteristics. With out that context, statistics are simply distorted. Crime patterns ceaselessly practice social prerequisites. They don’t disclose cultural predisposition.
The best way this has been framed has led to well-liked worry and alarm. Over the last few days, I’ve gained messages from buddies and associates apprehensive in regards to the course of the nationwide dialog. Phrases like “Pakistani rape gangs” or “Asian grooming gangs” have ruled headlines. Social media are awash with commentators calling for the dying penalty and a ban on Pakistani migration, whilst a sitting MP has known as for deportations within the “many, many hundreds”. A posh factor is being lowered to destructive generalisations.
The declare that British Pakistani tradition itself is guilty for those crimes is not just unfaithful – this is a bad distortion, when kid sexual exploitation and abuse impacts all the nation. There’s no credible proof to indicate that ethnicity or faith are using components on this type of abuse. Turning this right into a query of id fairly than responsibility shifts consideration clear of the very programs that failed to give protection to susceptible ladies. It permits prejudice to masquerade as coverage, and that can not move unchallenged.
When tradition is invoked with out proof or definition, it does greater than difficult to understand the information – it casts whole teams of folks underneath suspicion. This has actual penalties for folks like me, my circle of relatives and neighbours, who’re being considered no longer as electorate, however as possible threats. The danger now’s that prejudice is embedded into coverage. Institutional screw ups in safeguarding and responsibility thus develop into repurposed to legitimise the collective blame of British Muslims.
We have now already noticed what this sort of framing can galvanize. Final summer time, riots erupted in towns throughout England and Northern Eire, stoked by way of incorrect information and inflammatory rhetoric. Mosques and neighborhood centres have been attacked. Automobiles have been stopped as a result of drivers “appeared Asian”. Simply days in the past, in Ballymena, there have been racially motivated assaults on foreigners that “left households cowering of their houses”, in line with the police, after days of dysfunction that left communities in worry and misery. Even in Liverpool, after a automotive was once pushed into lovers collected for a soccer parade, police have been fast to verify the suspect’s ethnicity, a mirrored image of the way heightened the ambience has develop into, and the concern that incorrect information may spark race-related unrest. That is the local weather through which any executive intervention now sits. The will for no longer simply reason why and calm however a principled defence of minority communities, of equity and share, is pressing.
The ache of the survivors will have to stay on the centre of this dialog. Justice for them is non-negotiable. We will have to additionally no longer put out of your mind that some sufferers got here from the very minority communities that at the moment are underneath scrutiny. Their studies are ceaselessly erased. The perpetrators didn’t care who their sufferers have been. Their motives have been abuse, keep watch over and exploitation.
The Casey evaluate items a chance to fortify safeguarding and rebuild agree with. We will be able to handiest do this if we keep grounded in proof, no longer prejudice, and in duty, no longer rhetoric.
The approaching inquiry will have to read about how those crimes have been allowed to occur, how establishments failed to reply and the way to save you such abuse in long run. It will have to no longer permit the tale to develop into considered one of racialised suspicion. That trail leads to not justice, however to department.
British Muslims, like every electorate, need justice and protection. We wish our establishments to behave somewhat and with integrity. What we are not looking for is to be made to really feel complicit in crimes we didn’t dedicate.
Criminals will have to face the regulation, whoever they’re.
Zara Mohammed is former secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain
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