http://www.sasorg.co.uk/docs/Muslim%20Grooming/%E2%80%98Some%20of%20these%20men%20have%20children%20the%20same%20age.pdf
(extract)
Andrew Norfolk
January 5 2011 12:00AM
The voices of three young Muslim men climb in anger. They want to share their
revulsion for fellow members of their Pakistani community who took a group of
impressionable British schoolgirls and turned them into a collection of broken sex
toys.
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Their neighbours flirted with children as young as 12, offered rides in souped-up
cars, flashed gold jewellery and promised love, then steadily fed the girls a diet of
alcohol and drugs, eventually creating what they sought: compliant human goods
to be traded and abused by dozens of men. The groomers were men in their early
twenties. Their customers were older relatives, friends or contacts. They travelled
to the girls' home town to have sex with them or had their victims delivered by car
to Pakistani communities in northern England and the Midlands.
In a room a few streets from the address where much of the abuse took place, the
three men have agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. They are so scared of
reprisals that their town must not be named.
"The younger ones speak fluent English and they know exactly what they're doing,"
said one. "They treat the girls all nice, buy them drinks, give them cannabis. They
get them on drugs and mess them up bad. Some of the girls are from quite good
homes but they're easily manipulated.
"Half of the guys having sex with them can't speak a word of English. They're
old-school Asians or illegals working in restaurants. If a girl smiles, they think
they're in heaven. They're all a bunch of dirty, filthy bastards."
The men explain that some of the grooming was initiated on the instructions of
older relatives. Other young men were seeking kudos. Some clients were paying
customers — perhaps £10 for sex with a 14-year-old white girl. Others were being
repaid a favour. "Our community is sick and tired of these people. Some of them
are married, with children the same age as these girls. They don't deserve a place
in society. Every community has its bad apples and these are ours."
One man confides that "a lot of people" knew of the abuse but that he and others
were "too scared to do anything about it". He points to a widespread view that
betraying members of one's own community to the police would be an even greater
sin than child sexual exploitation. White girls are targeted by such men because "if
they did it to a Muslim girl, they'd be shot".
Hilary Wilmer is the chairwoman of trustees at Crop, the Coalition for the
Removal of Pimping, a national voluntary organisation that has supported more
than 400 families affected by child sexual exploitation. "Parents feel bewildered
and helpless," she said. "They have watched their child being destroyed before
their eyes by perpetrators who have very sophisticated methods."
Few experts involved in child protection in northern towns are unaware that most
cases of gang-led, on-street grooming that have come to light involve British Asian
offenders and white girls. Yet almost no one will admit it.
Important work is being done by both voluntary and statutory organisations to
protect and support vulnerable girls and their families, and also to prosecute
known offenders.
Yet The Times has been able to identify only one town in which preventive work
has been targeted on changing attitudes in the minority community to which most
of the on-street gang perpetrators belong.
Engage, a project in Blackburn, where in 2006 Police Superintendent Neil Smith
spoke of dozens of girls as young as 12 being groomed for sex by groups of men,
noting that "the majority of cases" involved Asian males, has been widely praised
for its pioneering work on child sexual exploitation.
Nick McPartlin, the project's manager, said that preventative work such as raising
awareness in mosques has led to a dramatic change in the profile of local men
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prosecuted for on-street grooming. He gave figures from the past year, which
suggested that 80 per cent of identified offenders were white, although those cases
included victims of all ages and both sexes and most prosecutions involved lone
perpetrators.
Salim Mulla, chairman of the Lancashire Council of Mosques and a local councillor
in Blackburn, said that his organisation had used its network of 103 mosques to
spread a message of "respect for young women" across the Muslim community.
"We've done a lot of preventative work in mosques and madrassas and we're still
keeping a close eye on things. We have regular meetings with the police and the
local authority. It's a very worrying situation, it's something we take very seriously
and I think we've made a real difference."
In other towns and cities, there are signs that the scale of the problem is becoming
so grave that agencies are finally prepared to seek targeted help.
In November, nine men — seven of them of Pakistani heritage, one man with a
Hindu name and one white man — were convicted of offences involving a child sex
gang that groomed, assaulted and raped 27 girls in Derby, most of them aged 12 to
16. As some of the victims were under the care of social services, a serious case
review was ordered by the Derby safeguarding children board.
Its published report urged wider consideration of "whether the ethnic background
and culture of the perpetrators had any bearing on their decision to take part in
this activity". The board is to ask the Home Office to commission the first official
research on the subject.

Barnardo's, which runs 21 projects across Britain supporting victims of child
sexual exploitation, many operating in the towns and cities of northern England,
refused to speak about the ethnicity of on-street groomers. In a written statement,
its chief executive, Martin Narey, said: "Anecdotal evidence suggests that trends
relating to the predatory adults who sexually exploit young people may sometimes
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be linked with ethnic background. But they vary enormously throughout the
country and it would be wrong and dangerous for the media or others to generalise
on the basis of one or two cases."
Fourteen years ago, Detective Chief Superintendent Max McLean, who has
recently retired, led what seems likely to have been the first British police inquiry
involving the grooming and sexual exploitation of white girls by a gang of British
Pakistani men.
It began with a plea for help from a Leeds mother whose young daughter was
leaving via her bedroom window whenever she was summoned by the beeping
horn of a private-hire car that would stop outside their house in the early hours of
the morning.
The investigation led to 23 arrests and the exposure of a sex-trafficking ring
involving a network of private-hire taxi drivers and the sexual abuse of at least 20
girls. The victims had been groomed, held captive and some were driven as far as
Newcastle upon Tyne to be used for sex by older men.
In 1997, after the two ringleaders were jailed for kidnap, rape and assault, Mr
McLean warned that what police had uncovered was the tip of an iceberg. He
alerted forces across England to the possibility that similar networks were
operating in their communities.
Looking back now, his strongest memory is of the girls' extreme vulnerability and
of the pleasure that their abusers so clearly took in exercising power and control
over them. "The men held those young girls in extremely low esteem; they thought
that this somehow justified the violation that was taking place. As the years have
passed, the message should have gone out long ago that to ignore the scale and
nature of this problem is to bury your head in the sand."
In any other type of child sex offence — online grooming, familial abuse, crimes
against prepubescent children, against boys, or grooming by adults in a position of
trust — the overwhelming majority of offenders are white men. More than 82 per
cent of sex offenders in jail are white; less than 6 per cent are Asian, a statistic that
sets in even starker relief the extent to which men of Pakistani origin dominate the
list of those convicted of on-street child grooming offences involving
gangs.