The vacuum left by the state has been filled by far right politicians who have distorted the
issue with lies and Islamaphobia, Andrew Norfolk, a journalist for the Times who
has covered the issue extensively, told RT.
RT: You’ve worked extensively on this issue – is there
evidence of neglect on the part of authorities due to the racial
or religious character of a crime?
Andrew Norfolk: I think that conclusion is unavoidable.
Just to give you one example in the North of England, we obtained
over 200 confidential documents that showed there was a ten year
history in one town of young girls typically aged between 11
and14-years-old being targeted and befriended and then being
given alcohol and
drugs and eventually being passed around ever increasing groups
of men to be used for sex. That was known about for ten years by
the police force concerned, by the local authority concerned and
there was an abject failure to take the
action that was needed to protect those children and to prosecute
the offenders.
RT: So why did nobody react in the appropriate
way to this?
AN: I think one of the factors that you have
already been very clearly discussing is there
was a terror of
treading into what was seen as a cultural minefield. There was
an additional
problem in that some of these agencies genuinely don’t seem to
have understood
quite how serious these crimes were. There was a sense that
girls were somehow
consenting to their own abuse. The reality was far, far
worse.
RT: So what other factors could be in play
here when we talk about a rise in the number
of crimes committed by
the Muslim committee?
AN: The thing we on the Times have been
arguing from the very first story we published
about this more
than two years ago was that here is a crime pattern, a crime
pattern that the
authorities have ignored for at least 10 years. If you’re going
to address this
you need to understand why this has happened. There are
issues there to
this day which to this day no research has been carried out to
try to discover.
For example issues surrounding the age of consent, in this
country you have
to be sixteen before you can legally consent to have sex. In
the communities
from which the main offenders come from, in their home
communities back
in Pakistan, village tradition says that puberty is the age of
consent and religious law, Sharia, also says that
puberty is the age at which a girl can
be marriage. And
the average age for puberty in this country is
11-years-old.
RT: We’re bviously dealing with a
cross-cultural problem here. What does this
situation say about the
authorities’ efforts to integrate these committees?
AN: Multiculturalism is a very thorny issue in
this country. The idea that you should
allow different
communities to develop separately and to continue with
traditions which
make them feel more comfortable with their life in a country
where those traditions are completely alien. The Times
would never suggest the use of young girls or sex is condoned in those
societies, but the fact is there was
clearly a lesser
degree of shame.
RT: So what’s the way out of this vicious
circle – is there a way to tackle both the growing
crime rate among the
Muslim population and growing Islamophobia?
AN: The way to tackle the crime, I am
increasingly convinced for the Muslim community
itself to take the
lead in exposing and eradicating those who think it’s alright to
do this to girls.
There are some very encouraging signs finally that there
are some leading
Islamic organizations are prepared to grasp the nettle on this
and do something
about it. In terms of Islamophobia one of the troubles was
because for ten
years because no mainstream politicians or media were looking at
this the field was
left to the far right politics to spread poisonous
distorted lies.
They were claiming that somehow this was part of some global
Islamic plot to
impregnate every white girl in the country and spread the Islamic
Khalifa — that was
nonsense. When there are problems on the backstreets of northern
towns the elite in
London has to look and say: “we’re going to do something about
it, we won’t leave it to
the far right to rant about it.”
This article originally appeared on: RT