Baroness Louise Casey's national audit forced the Labour government to launch an inquiry into the Pakistani grooming gangs.
But even Casey herself is still terrified that the truth will be "a gift to racists", and that “plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”
Even in Casey’s courageous work, too much emphasis is still being placed on how,
“flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue … does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”
During Tuesday’s hearing, Casey condemned the lack of data gathering as “a different level of public irresponsibility”, considering “the prejudice and racism that people of colour experience in this country”.
Casey insists that, despite the clear pattern of offenders, “We cannot and should not draw any conclusions from individual nationalities or cultures alone.” But why not? Were it the other way around, there would be a national reckoning over white British men raping, torturing, and murdering Muslim girls.
With odious MPs like Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Naz Shah already deflecting from the role of ethnicity and Islam in the grooming gangs, can we trust that the inquiry won't be contaminated by the same fears of being called racist and ruining "community cohesion" that silenced whistleblowers and victims for decades?
It is not the fault of a phantom far-right that the British public have an increasingly negative opinion of the Pakistani enclaves in their country. It is the fault of the Pakistani men who rape British children; and of the Pakistani women who blame victims, attack survivors, and cover for their husbands’, cousins’, fathers’, brothers’, and sons’ crimes to avoid “siding with the white ‘enemy’”.
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