In Rotherham more than 1400 children were systematically raped. The authorities knew about this, but did not step in. The reason? Because the perpetrators were all of Pakistani origin, and because all were Muslims, the people in charge preferred to look away, lest they be called ‘racist’. Politically correctness run amok.
Yesterday, Nazir Afzal, the Crown Prosecution Service’s lead on child sexual abuse and violence against women and girls, tried to politically correct the situation. It is an ill-advised attempt at saving something that shouldn’t be saved.
So I know that the vast majority of [sex] offenders are British white male
That’s not the point. In this case they weren’t. It is exactly this attempt at relativism that has angered the public. The children don’t really care if they have fallen prey to a statistical anomaly – they still were raped. The ethnicity and religion of the perpetrators is not in dispute. What has caused the anger was that the perpetrators were untouchable for exactly that reason. But the real scandal wasn’t their ethnicity, it was that the authorities ignored the girls.
A few weeks after the Rochdale case, we dealt with a case of 10 white men in North Yorkshire who had been abusing young girls, and they were all convicted and they got long sentences. It didn’t get the level of coverage
And neither got as much attention as Jimmy Savile who abused hundreds of children. It’s not the media’s job to attribute attention justly. It’s the authorities’ job.
He argues that evidence suggests that victims were not targeted because they were white but because they were vulnerable and their vulnerability caused them to seek out “warmth, love, transport, mind-numbing substances, drugs, alcohol and food”.
Except that the girls were all white, and did not represent the demographical average. Why argue against facts?
Afzal was disturbed at the way that some responded by muddling the actions of those prosecuted with their religious backgrounds. […] Someone called the Radio 4 Any Answers programme. “He said the Qu’ran supports paedophilia. I’m not paraphrasing, that is what he said. He wasn’t cut off”
That is probably because the Qu’ran does support paedophilia: As the Hadith narrates, Aisha was married to Mohammed at age 6, raped (Mohammed ‘consummated’ the marriage) at age 10 (Sahih al-Bukhari, 7:62:64). Again, this is not in dispute. Why argue the facts?
if there are lessons to be learned from the Rotherham tragedy, they are less to do with the dangers of political correctness, and more with the need for a radical shift in the way that victims of this kind of crime are treated.
This is a surprising conclusion, given the fact that the problem stemmed entirely from too much politically correctness – the authorities didn’t act because they were afraid that they would be called racist.
Nazir’s attempt at downplaying this is entirely misguided. At issue isn’t as much the suspicion that ‘Religion’ (Islam) and ‘Asian’ (Pakistani) origins are the cause for the rapes. The issue is with the authorities who did not help the children because they feared for their own reputation. The whole Guardian interview is a textbook example of what went wrong: diversions, misattribution and red herrings are everywhere, and to blame is no-one but the nebulous community. A pity, since Nazir seems to be a decent chap who actually wants to help. But the first step is to acknowledge that this issue is much simpler than people make it out: Islamists are very quick to use the words ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Racist’, which has become an effective weapon because politically correct people fear being labelled that.
This will only improve once we understand that ‘Islamophobia’ is a BS term, and that religion is not a race.
And, perhaps, that it’s always a good idea to stop rapists.