Rochdale grooming: Victim's story and Race connection.

[Joe Shearer]

Why are they free? Has their crime not been proven?

Must be pictures taken during the course of the trial.

 

[A1Kaid]

How can you blame it on girls mate? They're 13 year old? They can't distinguish between right and wrong. That's why they are called a child?

Nothing can justify, 13 year-old-girls being driven around in different flats and houses as a sex toy who can not be respected, making your 13-15 year old 'girlfriend' child have sex with dozens of men, impregnating them and then dump them like a disease, threatening them.

And half their age? Some these men are in their 60s and a victim is 13 year old. Even their granddaughter would be older than these girls!

No, but you can certainly blame their neglectful parents. A lot of these girls are out at late night wandering around the street looking for trouble and they get picked up by these opportunist men. A lot of times it isn't rape but a trade off the girls get their drugs and the guys get favors in return, though considering their age it's statutory rape. I'm not defending the actions of these men, but the parents of these girls seem to care less as well.

Also I do think there maybe a racist element to this, racist British men of Pakistani origin may well go for white British girls as they may not respect them as much on the basis of their race and lifestyle.

 

[jbond197]

Stranger danger is something that was indoctrinated into me as kids by my parents. Also good values such as not soliciting help for cigarettes and alcohol. The exchange went on for a while, they befriended the poor girl before their savage attack.

At multiple instances society failed the girls.

Asim, be honest and tell me if a kid approach you for a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of booze how would you react?The reaction itself would go on to show your rightful up bringing.

Apart from it, another basic lesson being taught to us by our parents is that, if we see weak and lost, we should not think of exploiting them rather if we see a wrong then we should make an effort to help correct it. Isn't it?

Now what kind of weird logic is that when you say, since they were already wronged so if I exploited them a bit then the blame goes on them being wronged at the first step?

I may have blamed it on Pakistani ethnicity at first (as JS pointed out, I would refrain to do so now). I actually was against people trying to seek some kind of defense for such acts..

 

[lem34]

If you guys are interested read this. I do not think it is an Asian problem. I think these are evil individuals who just happen to be of Pakistani origin. In fact one is an Afghani. The problem we have is that there is a bias in media her in the UK and statistics can be skewed one way or the other to support either side of the arguments. Especially when you see that 95% registered sex offenders come from the white community


Child sex grooming: the Asian question

Special Report day one: As nine men are jailed for a total of 77 years for abusing young girls, what do we actually know about the cultural side of such crimes?
Paul Vallely

Thursday 10 May 2012

Outside Liverpool Crown Court a large group of protesters gathered as the trial began of the nine Asian men from Rochdale who have just been jailed for grooming underage girls for sex. The demonstrators carried printed banners that read: "Our Children Are Not Halal Meat". Some had more improvised, handmade posters saying "Paedo scum", "Lock 'em up" and "Hang 'em".

These were the combined pride of the British National Party, the English Defence League and a couple of other far-right groups – called the North West Infidels and the Combined Ex-Forces. They had been brought together by websites claiming there would be a media blackout of the trial of what they described as "Muslim paedophile grooming gangs" charged with "countless abhorrent sexually motivated charges against children and minors".

Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP and a Member of the European Parliament, was there to give a video interview for the BNP website. "The mass street grooming of young girls from the English community is only being carried out by Muslims. All the paedophile groomers in this particular sort of crime – on the street, in gangs – are Muslims. That's the common denominator," he explained fluently.

"You only have to read the Koran or look at the Hadith – the expressions of what the Prophet did in his life– to see where Muslim paedophilia comes from," he continued. "Because it's religiously justified so long as it's other people's children and not their own." This is pretty poisonous rhetoric. And the BNP website prefaces it with an atmospheric recording of the Muslim call to prayer. Some of the protest placards are written in cod Urdu script. The message is clear.

The overall statistics give the lie to such claims. Greater Manchester Police, in whose area the offences took place, has declared that 95 per cent of the men on its sex offenders register are white. Just five per cent are Asian. But things do look different when the focus is narrowed to crimes involving groups of men grooming girls on the street. In 18 child sexual exploitation trials since 1997 – in Derby, Leeds, Blackpool, Blackburn, Rotherham, Sheffield, Rochdale, Oldham and Birmingham – relating to the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by two or more men, most of those convicted were of Pakistani heritage.

Sentencing the Rochdale gang yesterday, Judge Gerald Clifton appeared to give credence to the idea that cultural issues were involved. "All of you treated [the victims] as though they were worthless and beyond respect," he told the men. "One of the factors leading to that was the fact that they were not part of your community or religion."

But the judge also made it clear that such an interpretation should not have too much weight placed upon it. "Some of you, when arrested, said it was triggered by race," he continued. "That is nonsense. What triggered this prosecution was your lust and greed."

With MPs announcing the launch next month of an inquiry into grooming (which will involve visits by home affairs select committee members to Rochdale and other northern towns), the underlying question is more pertinent than ever: are there more Asians involved in this kind of crime than might be expected, as a proportion of the population? And, if so, are there any cultural factors that would account for it? I have spent the past two months trying to pick a path through a thicket of racial prejudice, on one side, and political correctness, on the other, to find an answer to these questions.

Emma Jackson's story is typical. She was chatted up in Meadowhall shopping centre near Sheffield by a couple of Asian boys a year or so older than her. But then she was introduced to their older friends and then to a glamorous suitor called Tarik, who gave her gifts and drinks, cigarettes and drugs, and rides in his smart car. He encouraged her to try the drugs because, he told her, she was old enough, whatever her parents said. She was his princess. He was the only one who understood her: her parents were just fuddy-duddies who wanted her not to have any fun.

But one night Tarik raped her, and everything changed. Confused, and thinking it must be her own fault, Emma was easy prey when he passed her on for sex to other men. She was repeatedly raped, exploited, beaten and told that if she refused to co-operate the men would firebomb her home or rape her mother and make her watch.

Various newspapers have quoted research by two academics at the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science at University College London (UCL). Their research, which examined the 18 trials mentioned earlier, showed that of the 56 people found guilty of crimes including rape, child abduction, indecent assault and sex with a child, 53 were Asian. Of those, 50 were Muslim and a majority were members of the British Pakistani community. Most of the victims have been white, although in one case several Bangladeshi Muslim girls were also abused.

However, the picture presented by the academics, Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley, looks a lot less clear. "The citations are correct but they have been taken out of context," says Ms Cockbain. "Nor do they acknowledge the small sample size of the original research, which focused on just two large cases."

So is this a particular problem in the British Asian community? The question touches on so many sensitivities about race in contemporary society that it is hard to find anyone prepared to tackle it clearly and sensibly. Perhaps that is not surprising. When the former Home Secretary Jack Straw raised the issue last year – claiming that "there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men... who target vulnerable young white girls" seeing them as "easy meat" for sexual abuse – he found himself in political trouble. He was criticised by one fellow MP for "stereotyping a whole community".

Something similar has happened to a support group called Crop (the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping), for the parents of sexually exploited girls. Since 2002 the group, which is based in Leeds, has supported the families of 400 victims, including that of Emma Jackson. Last year it was saying that the families had suffered mainly at the hands of Pakistani men.

"The vast majority are white families and the perpetrators are Pakistani Asians," the organisation's chair of trustees, Hilary Willmer, was quoted as saying. Sources inside Crop placed the percentage as high as 80 per cent, although Kurdish, Romanian and Albanian gangs were also involved.

But today Crop has become nervous about making public statements on the racial dimension of the abuse. "We've been accused of being a cover for the BNP," Ms Willmer told The Independent.

The girls whose families Crop tries to help aretypically targeted between the ages of 11 and 15. Accounts of their experiences still fill the organisation's website. Story after story shows how subtly and insidiously the grooming is done. Crop believes, based on limited reporting data, that as many as 10,000 children in the UK may be victims of sexual exploitation. But on the cultural background of the predators, Crop has gone suddenly silent. So too have the police.

Lancashire Police are so nervous about the subject that they would not even talk about a pilot project which is considered the national model for how to deal with the grooming of unsuspecting children. Called Engage, and based in Jack Straw's Blackburn constituency, it brings together a range of services – police, social workers, nurses, sexual health and drugs workers and Crop parents – to prevent, protect and prosecute.

The project carries out surveillance operations against men suspected of exploiting children sexually. It also issues legal warning notices to suspect adults and tours secondary schools with its own film, aimed at young teenaged girls and warning them – as Emma Jackson puts it – about the dangers they face "when they are 13 and so naïve and trusting about what can happen".

In the four years since it was formed Engage has rescued 80 children from sexual exploitation and got many back into school. It has had a conviction rate of 90 per cent. Working in the Eastern Division, which had the highest figures for missing children – and where only one offender had previously been convicted – the project uncovered, in 2008-2009 alone, a total of 100 offences of child abduction, rape and sexual activity with minors involving 36 individuals.

Strangely, however, Lancashire Police refused several requests over the past two months to talk to The Independent about the success of the project. So too did Nick McPartlan, the team manager at Engage. So did the project's parents' representative. All this hyper-sensitivity has led to accusations of political correctness from right-wing newspapers, whose anti-immigration agenda is neatly fed by suggestions that on-street grooming is a peculiarly Asian phenomenon.

"Police and social services have been accused of fuelling a culture of silence which has allowed hundreds of young white girls to be exploited by Asian men for sex," the Daily Mail has said. "Experts claim the statistics represent a mere fraction of a 'tidal wave' of offending in counties across the Midlands and the north of England which has been going on for more than a decade." It reported that one senior policeman, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Edwards of West Mercia Police, had called for "an end to the 'damaging taboo' connecting on-street grooming with race", quoting him as saying that "these girls are being passed around and used as meat".

The response of the Government was for the Children's minister, Tim Loughton, to warn that that "denial" over racial grooming did nothing to help victims.

"Political correctness and racial sensitivities have in the past been an issue," he said, and the authorities still "have to be aware of certain characteristics of various ethnic communities and be sensitive as to how we deal with them." All cases must be vigorously investigated, he insisted, though he added that grooming underage children for sex was not a problem exclusively associated with one particular community. So: what are those "certain characteristics of various ethnic communities"? And where does the truth lie?

Last year, the government's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre launched a five-month investigation into the issue. It took the broadest definition of underage grooming, describing it as any situation where a child or young person receives something in exchange for performing sexual favours.

The centre identified 2,379 potential offenders who had been reported for grooming since 2008. The vast majority were men. Most were aged 18 to 24. It could fully identify only 940 of the suspects. Of these, 38 per cent were white, 32 per cent were recorded as of unknown ethnicity, 26 per cent were Asian, 3 per cent were black and less than 1 per cent were Chinese.

These figures were reported in the media with various degrees of sensationalism. The 2001 census recorded 92.1 per cent of the general population as white, 2 per cent as black, 3.1 per cent as Indian or Pakistani, 1.2 per cent as "mixed" and 1.6 per cent as "other". But what was not prominently noted was that the centre's findings were heavily qualified by phrases such as "where ethnicity was recorded". What about the cases where it was not? The overall data was poorly recorded, inconsistent and incomplete, expert academics say.

"[The centre] drew data from a whole range of groups, like the children's charity Barnardo's, and as a result all the figures compiled have to be treated with caution as they were not all compiled in the same way," say Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley from UCL.

"There is no criminal offence of 'on-street grooming'. Consequently, it is very difficult to measure the extent of this crime based on court statistics," they say. As with their own report, they worried that "findings were being overextended from a small, geographically concentrated sample to characterise an entire crime type".

But the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre deliberately refrained from drawing conclusions about ethnicity, admitting itself that the data was "too inconsistent". "Focusing on this problem simply through the lens of ethnicity does not do it service," said its chief executive, Peter Davies. The organisation has passed the buck on this delicate issue to the government's Office of the Children's Commissioner, which is nine months into a two-year inquiry into child sexual exploitation by street gangs.

Until that inquiry reports, those who are reluctant to rush to racial stereotyping may, as Ella Cockbain puts it, "not be involved in a culture of silence so much as a culture of caution".

So what can we know about these victims and predators? Wendy Shepherd, child sexual exploitation project manager with Barnardo's in the north of England, says that most abusers are white and most child sex exploitation happens in the home. White males who are predators on the street tend to work alone, though they also prey in internet grooming rings, she says.

"When I started this work 12 years ago," she says, "the problem was mainly young people being put on the street by their older 'boyfriends'. An older man is anyone [who is at least] five years older than the girl. All ethnicities and professions were involved. Today it's much more hidden, with young girls being groomed at takeaways, in parks, shopping malls or bus stations.

"There has been a shift from the men selling children in ones or twos to something that is much more organised in groups and networks. The networks of men come from different backgrounds: in the North and Midlands many have been British Asians; in Devon it was white men; in Bath and Bristol, Afro-Caribbeans; in London, all ethnic mixes, whites, Iraqis, Kurds, Afghans, Somalis.

"The danger with saying that the problem is with one ethnicity is that then people will only be on the lookout for that group – and will risk missing other threats." The gifts given to girls in grooming are breathtakingly trivial. Often the presents involved are nothing more than a bag of chips, a cigarette or two, or a few illicit swigs of vodka. "Gifts such as mobile telephones are far less common," say Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley. Attention, affection and excitement are often enough.

And for all the talk about "gangs" of offenders, the two researchers from UCL's Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science say a lot of grooming has little to do with organised crime. "The offenders abused their victims casually, almost as a hobby-type behaviour," they say. "While some cases have involved the commercial exploitation of victims this is not the norm. When victims have been sold for sex this has typically been at prices below the market rate."

The big problem that the police have in prosecuting over these offences is that many of the abused girls do not see themselves as victims. When questioned by the police they continue to describe their abusers as their "boyfriends". In the case that ended at Liverpool Crown Court on Tuesday, one of the teenage girls, who was made pregnant by her abuser, had said earlier, under cross-examination, that she was still in love with him.

Such attitudes are commonplace. Child sex abuse can involve brutal and savage behaviour, but most instances, according to the UCL researchers, the abusers are coercive in more subtle ways, using confusion, peer pressure and emotional blackmail as well as alcohol and drugs.

"Grooming is best understood as a cumulative process: the way a victim is treated by one offender may affect their response to another," say Cockbain and Brayley. Girls can draw their friends into the offending groups, sometimes to feel safety in numbers, though sometimes to distract an abuser. "You are dealing with teenagers," says Cockbain, "and most teenagers do stupid things. It is just that generally those stupid acts do not lead them into serious danger." That explains why Crop, the support group for the parents of sexually exploited girls, is so keen to emphasise that victims are not just dysfunctional kids from broken homes or children in local authority care – though most victims are – but can also be middle-class girls who have ponies.

"It can happen to any child in any family," says Hilary Willmer, Crop's chair of trustees. Indeed, girls from more sheltered backgrounds, who are less streetwise, may be easier targets. "Affected families come from right across the social spectrum. What they have in common is that their child has been 'caught' by clever manipulative criminals who know exactly what they are doing. Part of the grooming involves alienating the child from her family. Parents are bewildered, angry, and feel guilty but they are then often judged and blamed as well for what has happened. The whole family become victims."

What cannot be denied in all this is that – whether the percentages are disproportionate or not – significant numbers of British Pakistani men are involved in such abuse. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre report hinted at that when it said that many offender groups "were related to each other in some way, either as friends, family members or work colleagues" – noting that "where offenders worked together, the place of work was either a takeaway restaurant or a taxi firm".

Martin Narey was the director-general of Britain's prisons for seven years, after which he became chief executive of Barnardo's, the charity which cares for vulnerable children and young people. "When I began at Barnardo's I was resistant to the idea that there was a racial or cultural dimension to child abuse," he says. "If anything, my experience in running the Prison Service taught me that sex offenders were generally white. But some time ago I decided that in not exploring that we were leaving children at risk. I found the picture not to be constant, but certainly in the North the repetitive evidence of Asian men as perpetrators could not be ignored."

This is not to buy into the British National Party's "Our Children are Not Halal Meat" anti-Muslim agenda. The BNP refers to this type of offending as "Muslim paedophilia", but, as Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley point out: "This is misguided for two reasons. First, it is not paedophilia since the victims are not pre-pubescent.

"There is also no indication that the offenders are exclusively or preferentially sexually attracted to minors. Secondly, religion seems to be a red herring here, in that many offenders seem to be Muslim only in a nominal sense. Prior to arrest many drank alcohol, took drugs, did not have beards, and all engaged in extramarital sex with underage girls. Hardly the hallmarks of a strict Muslim."

The evidence that the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science has gathered suggests that victims are targeted not because they are white but rather in a haphazard opportunistic manner – with the perpetrators cruising the streets for whatever girls they happen to see hanging about there. Convenience and accessibility, rather than race, appear to be the primary drivers. The men go for the easiest targets.

"Indeed, though most of the victims are white British," the researchers say, "the proportion of black and minority ethnicity victims was actually higher than what might be expected, given the local demographics." Martin Narey agrees. "I have never subscribed to the view that these men have some sort of moral code and would not abuse Asian girls," he says. "They'd abuse any child over whom they could exert power. The reality, however, is that the girls who make themselves vulnerable on our cities, particularly at night, are generally white. Asian girls, more strictly parented, are at home."

Even so, it is clear that some Asian men do target underage schoolgirls and attempt to groom them for sex. The exact proportion may be unclear because the statistics on these crimes are so incomplete and inconsistent. But there is a serious problem within parts of the British Pakistani community.

What is to be done about that? Wendy Shepherd, Barnardo's on-street grooming expert is clear. "As with any community where child sexual exploitation is occurring," she says, "you need to engage the community and its leaders to combat the problem".

 

[Rafi]

Asim, be honest and tell me if a kid approach you for a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of booze how would you react?The reaction itself will go on to show your rightful up bringing.

Apart from it, another basic lesson being taught to us by our parents is that, if we see weak and lost we should not think of exploiting them rather if we see a wrong then we should make an effort to help correct it. Isn't it?

Now what kind of weird logic is that when you say, since it was already wrong so if I exploited it a bit then what's wrong in it?

I may have blamed it on Pakistani ethnicity at first (as JS pointed out, I would refrain to do so now). I actually was against people trying to seek some kind of defense for such acts..

Of course - we would not do that, that is why there are criminals in every race, nation etc - part of human nature - I am afraid, reminds me of what the bible says.

Luke 10:3-11 Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves. Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes: and salute no man by the way. And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house. And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again. And in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give: for the laborer is worthy of his hire.

As long as there are the weak, there will always be someone to exploit them, regarding sex offenders the vast majority of them are white.

 

[jbond197]

Of course - we would not do that, that is why there are criminals in every race, nation etc - part of human nature - I am afraid, reminds me of what the bible says.

Luke 10:3-11 Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves. Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes: and salute no man by the way. And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house. And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again. And in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give: for the laborer is worthy of his hire.

As long as there are the weak, there will always be someone to exploit them, regarding sex offenders the vast majority of them are white.

Again we should be more worried about ourselves then others. A wrong is wrong and nothing can justify it..

 

[Cloakedvessel]

regarding sex offenders the vast majority of them are white.

No suprise there, given that 90% of Britain is white.

<>


Victim of Rochdale child sex ring: 'they ripped away all my dignity'

Victim whose 2008 complaint to police eventually led to conviction of nine men tells how grooming began

The girl whose complaint to police in 2008 led to the conviction on Tuesday of nine men for running a child sex ring said the grooming began when a friend introduced her to men who promised her "free alcohol and cigarettes, food and taxis and things".

She thought it was "great" at first because there were no sexual strings attached.

"I just thought: 'I can get all this stuff for free.' And then I ended up living pretty much with this girl because I thought how good it was and I could do what I want. That's when the relationship turned bad with my mum and dad because of the way I was acting."

She said the first time she was attacked, "you don't expect anything like that to happen. I just thought I was having a good time with this getting drunk and stuff. I was young and I didn't think they'd want me."

The men did not talk to the girls much. "We'd be upstairs [above a takeaway] and they'd be downstairs … and they'd come up now and then and have a chat to us for five minutes. It made me feel like I was pretty. I never thought they'd do what they did to me because you don't think that, do you? That that will happen."

She said of one man: "He asked me to come upstairs and I didn't really think anything of it. Then he was basically saying about all the things he's bought for me and he wants something back for it. Then I was saying no, like, I was kind of saying it in a giggly way. I felt like if I'd said it nastily to him he could have hurt me. I tried to say no in a nice way but he just weren't having it."

She said her friend had changed her. "At that time I was scared of her and I was scared of them as well. At first I felt really bad and dirty and ashamed, but after a while it had been going on for so long and so many different men that it just became … I didn't feel anything. It weren't like me any more."

The girl said it just became something she had to do "and I couldn't get out of it. Like once you're in it, you're trapped. It just became like a daily life." She said this could mean having sex with up to five different men in a day, sometimes every day, but at least four or five times a week.

"They'd arrange a time and they'd come and pick me and her up and we'd go to the place, a flat or a house, and there would be different men waiting. There were quite a few men who would be there and there's other men who would pick us up and take us to different places for the other men waiting. But there was a lot of men that I'd only seen once or twice."

She said that on one occasion she had got drunk and angry and smashed the counter in the takeaway, and the men rang the police and she was arrested. She said she was scared to tell her parents "because I didn't know what the consequences would be from the men. Because I knew what they were capable of, because they'd threatened me."

During the 2008 interview, she told police what had happened, gave them her underwear and described the places where it had happened. When the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute, she said the abuse just carried on.

"I was back in the same position and she [the other girl] was introducing other men to me again. It just started again with different men and more men this time. And that's when it started becoming like up to five men a day."

She said: "I felt let down. But I know that they believed me … then in 2008 it weren't really heard of … Asian men with white girls. Nobody like … it was just unheard of. You think of Muslim men as religious and family-minded and just nice people. You just don't think they'd do things like that."

The girl said social services intervened because different men were picking her up and dropping her off from school, and she was arriving dirty and smelling of alcohol.

"Then I got pregnant and social services said to me that if I don't leave that house [the house she was sharing with the other girl] they'll remove my baby at birth and I were frightened to go because I didn't know what they'd do … the men."

When she moved back in with her parents, she was getting phone calls and taxi drivers were parked outside the house, watching it.

"I'd be getting phone calls off the girl and the men and that went on for months. I would not go out of the house on my own for nine months or something without my mum or dad because I was frightened what could happen." She said she eventually moved out of the area.

"I just hope now people realise it does happen and how it happens and how they do something about it … and justice will be done."

She added: "There are so many different men and you're being forced to sleep with these other men for them to gain money for selling you out. They frighten you and you're scared of them and obviously that's how they make you do it. The girls are too frightened to get out of it in the first place – to tell somebody."

The girl she was staying with and her sister thought they were in a relationship with the perpetrators, but "it's not a relationship. They're just brainwashing you so you think that they love you so you'll do what they say.

"I think what they did to me was evil. They ripped away all my dignity and my last bit of self-esteem and by the end of it I had no emotion whatsoever because I was used to being used and abused daily.."

She said she regarded the defendants' testimony describing the victims as prostitutes running a business empire as "ridiculous".

"How could I make it up? It was too big to lie about. How can 13, 14, 15-year-olds run a business empire of prostitutes? It's just stupid."

Victim of Rochdale child sex ring: 'they ripped away all my dignity' | UK news | The Guardian

 

[Rafi]

^^^^^
Proves my point exactly, criminals exist in every race and people.

 

[jayron]

The irony among British Pakistanis is, though they are the poorest, least educated , most unemployed and most crime ridden, they think they are some how inherently superior to people of other races and religion. They should be ***** slapped and shown the reality that they are not conquerors but refugees there.

 

[Rafi]

The irony among British Pakistanis is, though they are the poorest, least educated , most unemployed and most crime ridden, they think they are some how inherently superior to people of other races and religion. They should be ***** slapped and shown the reality that they are not conquerors but refugees there.

 

[A1Kaid]

The irony among British Pakistanis is, though they are the poorest, least educated , most unemployed and most crime ridden, they think they are some how inherently superior to people of other races and religion. They should be ***** slapped and shown the reality that they are not conquerors but refugees there.

Good idea. You should go over there and do that to them.

 

[Cloakedvessel]

^^^^^
Proves my point exactly, criminals exist in every race and people.

Child sex grooming: the Asian question
Special Report day one: As nine men are jailed for a total of 77 years for abusing young girls, what do we actually know about the cultural side of such crimes?

Outside Liverpool Crown Court a large group of protesters gathered as the trial began of the nine Asian men from Rochdale who have just been jailed for grooming underage girls for sex. The demonstrators carried printed banners that read: "Our Children Are Not Halal Meat". Some had more improvised, handmade posters saying "Paedo scum", "Lock 'em up" and "Hang 'em".

These were the combined pride of the British National Party, the English Defence League and a couple of other far-right groups – called the North West Infidels and the Combined Ex-Forces. They had been brought together by websites claiming there would be a media blackout of the trial of what they described as "Muslim paedophile grooming gangs" charged with "countless abhorrent sexually motivated charges against children and minors".

Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP and a Member of the European Parliament, was there to give a video interview for the BNP website. "The mass street grooming of young girls from the English community is only being carried out by Muslims. All the paedophile groomers in this particular sort of crime – on the street, in gangs – are Muslims. That's the common denominator," he explained fluently.

"You only have to read the Koran or look at the Hadith – the expressions of what the Prophet did in his life– to see where Muslim paedophilia comes from," he continued. "Because it's religiously justified so long as it's other people's children and not their own." This is pretty poisonous rhetoric. And the BNP website prefaces it with an atmospheric recording of the Muslim call to prayer. Some of the protest placards are written in cod Urdu script. The message is clear.

The overall statistics give the lie to such claims. Greater Manchester Police, in whose area the offences took place, has declared that 95 per cent of the men on its sex offenders register are white. Just five per cent are Asian. But things do look different when the focus is narrowed to crimes involving groups of men grooming girls on the street. In 18 child sexual exploitation trials since 1997 – in Derby, Leeds, Blackpool, Blackburn, Rotherham, Sheffield, Rochdale, Oldham and Birmingham – relating to the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16 by two or more men, most of those convicted were of Pakistani heritage.

Sentencing the Rochdale gang yesterday, Judge Gerald Clifton appeared to give credence to the idea that cultural issues were involved. "All of you treated [the victims] as though they were worthless and beyond respect," he told the men. "One of the factors leading to that was the fact that they were not part of your community or religion."

But the judge also made it clear that such an interpretation should not have too much weight placed upon it. "Some of you, when arrested, said it was triggered by race," he continued. "That is nonsense. What triggered this prosecution was your lust and greed."

With MPs announcing the launch next month of an inquiry into grooming (which will involve visits by home affairs select committee members to Rochdale and other northern towns), the underlying question is more pertinent than ever: are there more Asians involved in this kind of crime than might be expected, as a proportion of the population? And, if so, are there any cultural factors that would account for it? I have spent the past two months trying to pick a path through a thicket of racial prejudice, on one side, and political correctness, on the other, to find an answer to these questions.

Emma Jackson's story is typical. She was chatted up in Meadowhall shopping centre near Sheffield by a couple of Asian boys a year or so older than her. But then she was introduced to their older friends and then to a glamorous suitor called Tarik, who gave her gifts and drinks, cigarettes and drugs, and rides in his smart car. He encouraged her to try the drugs because, he told her, she was old enough, whatever her parents said. She was his princess. He was the only one who understood her: her parents were just fuddy-duddies who wanted her not to have any fun.

But one night Tarik raped her, and everything changed. Confused, and thinking it must be her own fault, Emma was easy prey when he passed her on for sex to other men. She was repeatedly raped, exploited, beaten and told that if she refused to co-operate the men would firebomb her home or rape her mother and make her watch.

Various newspapers have quoted research by two academics at the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science at University College London (UCL). Their research, which examined the 18 trials mentioned earlier, showed that of the 56 people found guilty of crimes including rape, child abduction, indecent assault and sex with a child, 53 were Asian. Of those, 50 were Muslim and a majority were members of the British Pakistani community. Most of the victims have been white, although in one case several Bangladeshi Muslim girls were also abused.

However, the picture presented by the academics, Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley, looks a lot less clear. "The citations are correct but they have been taken out of context," says Ms Cockbain. "Nor do they acknowledge the small sample size of the original research, which focused on just two large cases."

So is this a particular problem in the British Asian community? The question touches on so many sensitivities about race in contemporary society that it is hard to find anyone prepared to tackle it clearly and sensibly. Perhaps that is not surprising. When the former Home Secretary Jack Straw raised the issue last year – claiming that "there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men... who target vulnerable young white girls" seeing them as "easy meat" for sexual abuse – he found himself in political trouble. He was criticised by one fellow MP for "stereotyping a whole community".

Something similar has happened to a support group called Crop (the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping), for the parents of sexually exploited girls. Since 2002 the group, which is based in Leeds, has supported the families of 400 victims, including that of Emma Jackson. Last year it was saying that the families had suffered mainly at the hands of Pakistani men.

"The vast majority are white families and the perpetrators are Pakistani Asians," the organisation's chair of trustees, Hilary Willmer, was quoted as saying. Sources inside Crop placed the percentage as high as 80 per cent, although Kurdish, Romanian and Albanian gangs were also involved.

But today Crop has become nervous about making public statements on the racial dimension of the abuse. "We've been accused of being a cover for the BNP," Ms Willmer told The Independent.

The girls whose families Crop tries to help aretypically targeted between the ages of 11 and 15. Accounts of their experiences still fill the organisation's website. Story after story shows how subtly and insidiously the grooming is done. Crop believes, based on limited reporting data, that as many as 10,000 children in the UK may be victims of sexual exploitation. But on the cultural background of the predators, Crop has gone suddenly silent. So too have the police.

Lancashire Police are so nervous about the subject that they would not even talk about a pilot project which is considered the national model for how to deal with the grooming of unsuspecting children. Called Engage, and based in Jack Straw's Blackburn constituency, it brings together a range of services – police, social workers, nurses, sexual health and drugs workers and Crop parents – to prevent, protect and prosecute.

The project carries out surveillance operations against men suspected of exploiting children sexually. It also issues legal warning notices to suspect adults and tours secondary schools with its own film, aimed at young teenaged girls and warning them – as Emma Jackson puts it – about the dangers they face "when they are 13 and so naïve and trusting about what can happen".

In the four years since it was formed Engage has rescued 80 children from sexual exploitation and got many back into school. It has had a conviction rate of 90 per cent. Working in the Eastern Division, which had the highest figures for missing children – and where only one offender had previously been convicted – the project uncovered, in 2008-2009 alone, a total of 100 offences of child abduction, rape and sexual activity with minors involving 36 individuals.

Strangely, however, Lancashire Police refused several requests over the past two months to talk to The Independent about the success of the project. So too did Nick McPartlan, the team manager at Engage. So did the project's parents' representative. All this hyper-sensitivity has led to accusations of political correctness from right-wing newspapers, whose anti-immigration agenda is neatly fed by suggestions that on-street grooming is a peculiarly Asian phenomenon.

"Police and social services have been accused of fuelling a culture of silence which has allowed hundreds of young white girls to be exploited by Asian men for sex," the Daily Mail has said. "Experts claim the statistics represent a mere fraction of a 'tidal wave' of offending in counties across the Midlands and the north of England which has been going on for more than a decade." It reported that one senior policeman, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Edwards of West Mercia Police, had called for "an end to the 'damaging taboo' connecting on-street grooming with race", quoting him as saying that "these girls are being passed around and used as meat".

The response of the Government was for the Children's minister, Tim Loughton, to warn that that "denial" over racial grooming did nothing to help victims.

"Political correctness and racial sensitivities have in the past been an issue," he said, and the authorities still "have to be aware of certain characteristics of various ethnic communities and be sensitive as to how we deal with them." All cases must be vigorously investigated, he insisted, though he added that grooming underage children for sex was not a problem exclusively associated with one particular community. So: what are those "certain characteristics of various ethnic communities"? And where does the truth lie?

Last year, the government's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre launched a five-month investigation into the issue. It took the broadest definition of underage grooming, describing it as any situation where a child or young person receives something in exchange for performing sexual favours.

The centre identified 2,379 potential offenders who had been reported for grooming since 2008. The vast majority were men. Most were aged 18 to 24. It could fully identify only 940 of the suspects. Of these, 38 per cent were white, 32 per cent were recorded as of unknown ethnicity, 26 per cent were Asian, 3 per cent were black and less than 1 per cent were Chinese.

These figures were reported in the media with various degrees of sensationalism. The 2001 census recorded 92.1 per cent of the general population as white, 2 per cent as black, 3.1 per cent as Indian or Pakistani, 1.2 per cent as "mixed" and 1.6 per cent as "other". But what was not prominently noted was that the centre's findings were heavily qualified by phrases such as "where ethnicity was recorded". What about the cases where it was not? The overall data was poorly recorded, inconsistent and incomplete, expert academics say.

"[The centre] drew data from a whole range of groups, like the children's charity Barnardo's, and as a result all the figures compiled have to be treated with caution as they were not all compiled in the same way," say Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley from UCL.

"There is no criminal offence of 'on-street grooming'. Consequently, it is very difficult to measure the extent of this crime based on court statistics," they say. As with their own report, they worried that "findings were being overextended from a small, geographically concentrated sample to characterise an entire crime type".

But the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre deliberately refrained from drawing conclusions about ethnicity, admitting itself that the data was "too inconsistent". "Focusing on this problem simply through the lens of ethnicity does not do it service," said its chief executive, Peter Davies. The organisation has passed the buck on this delicate issue to the government's Office of the Children's Commissioner, which is nine months into a two-year inquiry into child sexual exploitation by street gangs.

Until that inquiry reports, those who are reluctant to rush to racial stereotyping may, as Ella Cockbain puts it, "not be involved in a culture of silence so much as a culture of caution".

So what can we know about these victims and predators? Wendy Shepherd, child sexual exploitation project manager with Barnardo's in the north of England, says that most abusers are white and most child sex exploitation happens in the home. White males who are predators on the street tend to work alone, though they also prey in internet grooming rings, she says.

"When I started this work 12 years ago," she says, "the problem was mainly young people being put on the street by their older 'boyfriends'. An older man is anyone [who is at least] five years older than the girl. All ethnicities and professions were involved. Today it's much more hidden, with young girls being groomed at takeaways, in parks, shopping malls or bus stations.

"There has been a shift from the men selling children in ones or twos to something that is much more organised in groups and networks. The networks of men come from different backgrounds: in the North and Midlands many have been British Asians; in Devon it was white men; in Bath and Bristol, Afro-Caribbeans; in London, all ethnic mixes, whites, Iraqis, Kurds, Afghans, Somalis.

"The danger with saying that the problem is with one ethnicity is that then people will only be on the lookout for that group – and will risk missing other threats." The gifts given to girls in grooming are breathtakingly trivial. Often the presents involved are nothing more than a bag of chips, a cigarette or two, or a few illicit swigs of vodka. "Gifts such as mobile telephones are far less common," say Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley. Attention, affection and excitement are often enough.

And for all the talk about "gangs" of offenders, the two researchers from UCL's Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science say a lot of grooming has little to do with organised crime. "The offenders abused their victims casually, almost as a hobby-type behaviour," they say. "While some cases have involved the commercial exploitation of victims this is not the norm. When victims have been sold for sex this has typically been at prices below the market rate."

The big problem that the police have in prosecuting over these offences is that many of the abused girls do not see themselves as victims. When questioned by the police they continue to describe their abusers as their "boyfriends". In the case that ended at Liverpool Crown Court on Tuesday, one of the teenage girls, who was made pregnant by her abuser, had said earlier, under cross-examination, that she was still in love with him.

Such attitudes are commonplace. Child sex abuse can involve brutal and savage behaviour, but most instances, according to the UCL researchers, the abusers are coercive in more subtle ways, using confusion, peer pressure and emotional blackmail as well as alcohol and drugs.

"Grooming is best understood as a cumulative process: the way a victim is treated by one offender may affect their response to another," say Cockbain and Brayley. Girls can draw their friends into the offending groups, sometimes to feel safety in numbers, though sometimes to distract an abuser. "You are dealing with teenagers," says Cockbain, "and most teenagers do stupid things. It is just that generally those stupid acts do not lead them into serious danger." That explains why Crop, the support group for the parents of sexually exploited girls, is so keen to emphasise that victims are not just dysfunctional kids from broken homes or children in local authority care – though most victims are – but can also be middle-class girls who have ponies.

"It can happen to any child in any family," says Hilary Willmer, Crop's chair of trustees. Indeed, girls from more sheltered backgrounds, who are less streetwise, may be easier targets. "Affected families come from right across the social spectrum. What they have in common is that their child has been 'caught' by clever manipulative criminals who know exactly what they are doing. Part of the grooming involves alienating the child from her family. Parents are bewildered, angry, and feel guilty but they are then often judged and blamed as well for what has happened. The whole family become victims."

What cannot be denied in all this is that – whether the percentages are disproportionate or not – significant numbers of British Pakistani men are involved in such abuse. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre report hinted at that when it said that many offender groups "were related to each other in some way, either as friends, family members or work colleagues" – noting that "where offenders worked together, the place of work was either a takeaway restaurant or a taxi firm".

Martin Narey was the director-general of Britain's prisons for seven years, after which he became chief executive of Barnardo's, the charity which cares for vulnerable children and young people. "When I began at Barnardo's I was resistant to the idea that there was a racial or cultural dimension to child abuse," he says. "If anything, my experience in running the Prison Service taught me that sex offenders were generally white. But some time ago I decided that in not exploring that we were leaving children at risk. I found the picture not to be constant, but certainly in the North the repetitive evidence of Asian men as perpetrators could not be ignored."

This is not to buy into the British National Party's "Our Children are Not Halal Meat" anti-Muslim agenda. The BNP refers to this type of offending as "Muslim paedophilia", but, as Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley point out: "This is misguided for two reasons. First, it is not paedophilia since the victims are not pre-pubescent.

"There is also no indication that the offenders are exclusively or preferentially sexually attracted to minors. Secondly, religion seems to be a red herring here, in that many offenders seem to be Muslim only in a nominal sense. Prior to arrest many drank alcohol, took drugs, did not have beards, and all engaged in extramarital sex with underage girls. Hardly the hallmarks of a strict Muslim."

The evidence that the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science has gathered suggests that victims are targeted not because they are white but rather in a haphazard opportunistic manner – with the perpetrators cruising the streets for whatever girls they happen to see hanging about there. Convenience and accessibility, rather than race, appear to be the primary drivers. The men go for the easiest targets.

"Indeed, though most of the victims are white British," the researchers say, "the proportion of black and minority ethnicity victims was actually higher than what might be expected, given the local demographics." Martin Narey agrees. "I have never subscribed to the view that these men have some sort of moral code and would not abuse Asian girls," he says. "They'd abuse any child over whom they could exert power. The reality, however, is that the girls who make themselves vulnerable on our cities, particularly at night, are generally white. Asian girls, more strictly parented, are at home."

Even so, it is clear that some Asian men do target underage schoolgirls and attempt to groom them for sex. The exact proportion may be unclear because the statistics on these crimes are so incomplete and inconsistent. But there is a serious problem within parts of the British Pakistani community.

What is to be done about that? Wendy Shepherd, Barnardo's on-street grooming expert is clear. "As with any community where child sexual exploitation is occurring," she says, "you need to engage the community and its leaders to combat the problem".

Tomorrow: SEXuality, Britain and the Muslim psyche – our special investigation continues

Child sex grooming: the Asian question - Crime - UK - The Independent

 

[AUSTERLITZ]

The paedophile dogs are inexcusable,stop excusing their actions on the women.Its culture there for women to be lot more open to sex,since these people went there its their responsibility to adapt.But i do agree these type of people exist in all societies.But when it happens in a foreign country gives a very bad impression.Especially 9 men and not 1.

 

[Sher Malang]

LONDON (AP) – Nine men of Pakistani and Afghan descent were convicted Tuesday of luring girls as young as 13 into sexual encounters using alcohol and drugs, in a case that has heightened racial tensions in Britain and stirred protests among the far right.

The five victims who shared their stories with jurors during the trial were all white. They spoke of being raped, assaulted and traded for sex, sometimes being passed from man to man, and sometimes being too drunk to stop the abuse. One said that by the end of the ordeal, she "had no emotion."

The trial has been controversial in more than one respect. One of the victims first spoke to police in August 2008, supplying underwear with DNA evidence implicating one of the suspects, but a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer failed to press charges after concerns that the jury might have questioned the girl's credibility.

An Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating why that decision was made. And police have interviewed more than 40 girls as part of their investigation, raising the possibility that there are other victims who did not come forward to testify.

"We'd get free alcohol, cigarettes, food and free taxis and things," said the girl who went to the police in 2008. "At first I thought it (was) great because nothing had happened, like nothing sexual. Towards the end it was like, it could be up to five different men in a day, sometimes every day, at least four or five times a week."

The girl, who was lured in to the sex ring at age 15 and is now 20, escaped the gang after she became pregnant. The ring was based in the town of Rochdale, about 170 miles from London and abused the girls in taxis, kebab shops and apartments.

The men, who were convicted Tuesday of charges including rape, assault, sex trafficking and conspiracy, range in age from 22 to 59. One worked as a religious studies teacher at a mosque but it is not known if the others were religious.

The men used various defenses, including claiming that the girls were prostitutes.

Sentencing for the men — Kabeer Hassan, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid, Adil Khan, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Amin, Hamid Safi and a 59-year-old man who cannot be named for legal reasons — begins Wednesday.

"The details of the offenses that we have heard in this trial in the last few weeks have shocked and appalled us all," said Nazi Afzal, chief crown prosecutor for the North West Area.

Greater Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood denied that the case was about race.

"It is not a racial issue," he said. "This is about adults preying on vulnerable young children."

But race was repeatedly brought to the fore as the case progressed.

Far right groups such as the English Defence League and the British National Party led protests shortly after the trial began Feb. 6. The father of one victim told the court he joined the BNP after learning of what had happened to his daughter.

The trial also was delayed after two nonwhite lawyers representing some of the men were attacked by far-right protesters and quit the case.

Muslim leaders condemned the crime and praised the bravery of the victims for coming forward.

"These criminals have brought shame on themselves, their families and our community," said Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation, one of Britain's largest Muslim organizations.

British law prohibits publishing the names of sex-crime victims. The Associated Press also generally does not name victims of sexual assault.

During the trial, one girl described how she was forced to sleep with 20 men in a night. Another was raped by two men while so drunk that she was vomiting during the ordeal. The sex ring used another girl, dubbed the "honeymonster," to lure other girls into the ring.

"They ripped away all my dignity and all my last bit of self-esteem," one victim said. "By the end of it, I had no emotion."

Both the Crown Prosecution Service and police apologized for not taking the first victim's case to trial earlier.

It was Afzal who overturned the initial decision and decided to file charges against the men that girl had accused.

"The witness was entirely credible," he said. "To put it bluntly, the original decision was wrong."

Tuesday's convictions bore similarities to a large investigation into a sex ring in the East Midlands that wrapped up in November 2010.

Several men of South Asian descent were convicted of rape and other sexual offenses for preying on vulnerable girls, aged 13 to 20 years old, by plying them with alcohol and forcing them to have sex.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: 9 convicted in racially sensitive U.K. sex ring case