New Statesman: Was race a factor in Rochdale?
My article in this week’s New Statesman (print and online) can be found here
Simon Danczuk, the town’s MP, and Myriam Francois-Cerrah discuss the relevance of race and religion to the grooming case.
On 9 May, nine men were jailed for their role in a child sex abuse ring in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. Eight were of Pakistani origin and one was from Afghanistan. Their victims – teenage girls from local care homes – were white. Far-right groups have tried to exploit the issue while debate rages over whether race or religion played a role in the crimes. Here, we present two perspectives on the case.
We can’t ignore it
Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale
This month, Labour experienced some of its best ever local election results. Turnout, however, was worrying, falling as low as 13 per cent in parts of Greater Manchester. For me, one of the abiding memories in Rochdale was the exhilaration of new councillors as they won their seats; but I also recall walking up to a group of youths fixing a motorbike outside a house on a council estate in the Littleborough area on polling day. “Will you be voting?” I asked. They shifted uncomfortably, looked askance and mumbled, “No, but we would if the BNP were standing.”
A few weeks earlier I had sat facing a distraught mother in one of my weekly surgeries, watching her shake with fear and anger as she described how an Asian man had raped her daughter.
If politics is to mean more than bureaucratic white noise to people, it has to give a voice to the voiceless. When mothers tell me their daughters are being hounded by groups of Pakistani men, I will not leave it to the likes of the BNP to address their concerns.
Economic anxieties, high unemployment and uncertainty about the future blight the country, but in working-class Pennine seats like mine in the north-west of England, a host of other complicated issues follows in their slipstream.
I thought long and hard before telling the media this past week that race was indeed a factor in the grooming scandal that has brought shame on our town, and that a small Asian subculture has to be confronted. Anti-racist vigilance is the default position of many politicians like me who remember the deeply entrenched societal racism of the 1980s, but this should never blind us to uncomfortable truths in some sections of the Asian community – or any other, for that matter.
For a while now, I’ve had concerns about disturbing attitudes towards women shown by some of Rochdale’s Asian residents. It goes way beyond casual chauvinism to something far worse. In the two years I have been an MP, I’ve had to throw people out of my surgery because of their violent views on women.
I have been asked to write letters of support for rapists and, in one case, for a man who had attacked a woman with a hammer. Research by Professor Roger Penn of Lancaster University shows that a good proportion of young white women in Rochdale have been subjected to verbal abuse by young Asian men.
It sickens me that law-abiding Asians in our town might be stigmatised because of the actions of a minority of warped individuals. But I believe that neither the police and social services nor community leaders can afford to duck this issue any longer. If even Asian councillors were writing letters of support for people now found guilty of horrific sex crimes, it is clear we have a culture of denial.
Since I spoke to the media, other MPs have told me privately that they agree with what I said. Asian campaigners who have spoken out against predatory Pakistani men say that white people have thanked them for saying what they could not say themselves. This is a sorry state of affairs.
It is time we abandoned the shibboleths that leave the political classes isolated from the realities debated on buses, in pubs and on the factory floor. Compare this position to the inspiring bravery shown by the young girls who stood up to evil predators in a court in Liverpool. They were doubly let down, because their background led some within the police and social services to think it was a lifestyle choice that had driven them into the arms of abusers. Vulnerable people need help and support, so we must have the courage to face up to these problems.
As I write, I hear the English Defence League is planning another march in Rochdale. Such racist thugs will not be welcomed in our town and neither will the BNP. But we will not resist them simply by denial. We need to take this debate out into the open and make sure it is led by reasonable voices that want to build a strong and cohesive community – not by siren calls of hatred from those who want to divide it.
Race is a distraction
Myriam Francois-Cerrah
“We need to talk about race,” pleaded one guest on Question Time – and the Rochdale case has certainly thrust the issue back into the spotlight. Yet the focus across a wide range of media on race as an explanation for sex grooming misses why Asian men are over-represented in poorer areas where street grooming occurs and why white girls are over-represented among vulnerable groups in such areas. About 95 per cent of the men on Greater Manchester Police’s sex offenders register are white. Most sex gangs are not Asian. The criminologists Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley warn: “If on-street grooming continues to be reduced to the big Asian networks alone, a whole host of other offenders will get overlooked.” Asians are not over-represented in the sex-slave trade or among paedophiles.
What’s more, to link sexually predatory behaviour with race is reminiscent of the racist terminology that was used to refer to black gangs in the 1980s. Take Jack Straw’s comment in January 2011 relating to a separate case in Derby: “These young men are in a western society – in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that.” Straw both singled out the men as “foreign” and reduced their behaviour to physical urges, ignoring the dimension of power inherent in rape, which is primarily a crime of violence, not sex.
Confusing matters further has been the tendency of some writers, such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, to conflate race with religion. “The rapists are all probably in one sense ‘good’ Muslims, praying and fasting
in the daytime, then prowling and preying at night,” she wrote in the Independent on 9 May.
This overlooked how, as Cockbain and Brayley pointed out, “the defendants in question are at most nominally Muslim”. Practising Muslims certainly aren’t supposed to rape children.
Other writers, such as David Aaronovitch, have presented the common view of some women as worthless and thus open to abuse as somehow inherent to Islam. Aaronovitch wrote in the Times on 10 May that grooming is the “cousin of honour killing”. Surely if this were the case the main victims would be Muslim girls.
Furthermore, such assertions ignore the inequities of power based on gender at every level of society, and expressed through a wide range of social and cultural idioms. The terminology expresses a shared disdain for women, even if it is inflected with culturally specific justifications – “slut”, “ho”, “skank”. Sexism is not an “Asian/Muslim problem”, though it does affect Asians and Muslims, too.
The focus on the race or religion of the perpetrator conveniently obscures the failures by the police, Crown Prosecution Service and social workers in bringing these men in Rochdale to trial sooner. What’s more, it makes us look past our own rape culture, in which victims’ claims are dismissed and where one in three rape allegations involves alcohol. The methods used by the Rochdale criminals are common to many white British sex offenders.
Those who seek to locate these crimes within some inherently Asian or Muslim characteristic fail to acknowledge that the vast majority of such men are law-abiding. They also choose to overlook the sheer diversity of Asian cultures – and that the chief prosecutor who reopened the case, Nazir Afzal, is an Asian Muslim.
To express these concerns is not a mark of political correctness; it is about avoiding the stigmatisation of an entire community based on the crimes of a group of men who happen to be Asian. The more important question is why some people have been so keen to attribute a racial dimension to this crime and what that says about our assumptions of Asian men.
Historically, it was black men who were viewed as the antithesis of white femininity, or as sexually predatory on white innocence and beauty. We would be naive not to notice how the same rhetoric is playing out now about men who are Asian and Muslim.
Sky news: discussing Francois Hollande’s inauguration ceremony
An extract from my commentary of the inauguration ceremony of Francois Hollande at the Elysee, Sky news, 15 May 2012.
The Danger in Referring to ‘Asian’ Sex Gangs
This piece was originally published over at the Huffington Post, here
”Asian gangs, schoolgirls and a sinister taboo” read the Daily Mail headline in November 2010, ”Muslim gang jailed for kidnapping and raping two girls as part of their Eid celebrations” states another of its salacious headlines in April this year, while the typically more demure Telegraph ran with “Asian grooming gangs, the uncomfortable issue”.
These headlines all refer to recent cases involving sexually predatory gangs, the most recent of which, is the case of a group of men in Rochdale found guilty of sexually abusing 47 vulnerable girls. The case has caused controversy as some pundits claim the police failed to prosecute the men through fear they’d be branded racist. Former MP Ann Cryer believes such fears meant that both the police and social services failed to act to protect the girls and Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation urged the police and the councils “not to be frightened to address this issue, there is a strong lesson that you cannot ignore race or be over sensitive.”
The case has thrust the issue of race back into the spotlight just as the MET is being investigated for mounting complaints about racism and as increasingly strident voices claim political correctness is impeding an assessment of the role race plays in such crimes. Columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown suggests as much as she writes she’s been “warned not to write” about such cases, for fear of encouraging racism. “The rapists are all probably in one sense ‘good’ Muslims, praying and fasting in the daytime, then prowling and preying at night”, she lambasted, ignoring as one commentator pointed out that “the defendants in question are at most nominally Muslim”. Practising Muslims certainly aren’t supposed to rape children.
Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee Keith Vaz claims that the issue has nothing to do with race or being Asian. He cautioned of the dangers in singling out the Asian community and has advised prudence in using race-related terminology.
The focus on isolating race as an explanatory variable in cases of sex-grooming ignores all other factors and essentialises the identity of the culprits – it ignores why Asian men are over-represented in socio-economically poorer areas where street-grooming occurs and why white girls are over-represented among vulnerable groups in such areas.
What’s more, plenty of sex-gangs are not Asian. Crime researchers Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley warned: “If on-street grooming continues to be reduced to the big Asian networks alone, a whole host of other offenders will get overlooked.”
The sex slave trade in this country is sadly alive and well and is not primarily Asian driven, and paedophiles are not overwhelmingly of Asian ethnic backgrounds, suggesting any abhorrent link some may seek to make between race and inherent sexually predatory behaviour is not born out by the facts.
Such a link is also reminiscent of racist terminology used to refer to black gangs in the 1980s, particularly Jack Straw’s comment in January last year relating to a separate case in Derby: “These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that…” His comment both singled the men out as ‘foreign’ by referring to them as “in a western society”, rather than products of a society they were born and raised in, and reduced their behaviour to physical urges, completely ignoring the dimension of power inherent to rape, which is primarily a crime of violence, not sex.
Some have referred to culturally specific terminology in order to claim that the view of some women as worthless and thus open to abuse is restricted to certain communities. This ignores power inequities based on gender manifest at every level of society and expressed through different social and cultural idioms. Different terminology expresses a shared disdain for women, inflected with culturally specific justifications: “sluts” “hoes” “gora” “skank” “cheap” “easy” – sexism is not an ‘Asian’ issue, though it does of course affect Asians as it does everyone else – it is sadly omnipresent, cross-culturally.
Those seeking to locate these crimes within some inherent Asian characteristic need to explain the vast majority of law abiding Asian men, the diversity of Asian cultures, not culture and the fact the Chief prosecutor who re-opened the case is himself an Asian Muslim, Nazir Afzal.
The treatment of this case is not about political correctness, it is about not stigmatising an entire community based on a mis-identification of the explanatory variable in the crimes of this group of men, who happen to be Asian.
Both the police and the judge appear to believe the race of the victims and abusers was “coincidental”, so the real question is why as a society, we are seeking to attribute a racial dimension to it and what that says about our unspoken racist assumptions concerning Asian men.
Academic Vron Ware recounts that the black male has been historically constructed as the antithesis of white femininity, sexually predatory upon white innocence and beauty – we’d be naive not to notice the same rhetoric being played out now with Asian/Muslim males…
BBC World service: The danger in referring to “Asian” sex gangs
Just contributed to a debate with Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation on whether race is relevant in the discussion of the recent sex gang cases in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, on the BBC World Service.
My points:
- Isolating race as an explanatory variable ignores all other factors and essentialises the identity of the culprits – it ignores why Asian men are over-represented in socio-economically poorer areas where street-grooming occurs and why white girls are over-represented among vulnerable groups in such areas.
- Plenty of sex-gangs are not Asian – the sex slave trade in this country is sadly alive and well and is not primarily Asian driven. In addition, pedophiles are not overwhelmingly of Asian ethnic backgrounds, suggesting any abhorrent link some may seek to make between race and inherent sexually predatory behaviour is not born out by the facts. It is also reminiscent of racist terminology used to refer to black gangs in the 1980s, particularly Jack Straw’s comment in January last year relating to a separate case in Derby: “These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that…”
- some have referred to culturally specific terminology in order to claim that the view of some women as worthless and thus open to abuse is restricted to certain communities. This ignores power inequities based on gender manifest at every level of society and expressed through different social and cultural idioms. Different terminology expresses a shared disdain for women, inflected with culturally specific justifications: “sluts” “hoes” “gora” “skank” – sexism is not an ‘Asian’ issue, though it does of course affect Asians as it does everyone else – it is sadly omnipresent, cross-culturally.
Finally, how can accusations be leveled at something inherent within ‘Asian’ culture (not cultures?!) when the Chief prosecutor who re-opened the case is himself an Asian Muslim, Nazir Afzal.
This is not about political correctness, it is about not stigmatising an entire community based on a mis-identification of the explanatory variable in the crimes of this group of men, who happen to be Asian. Both the police and the judge appear to believe the race of the victims and abusers was ‘coincidental’, so the real question is why as a society, we are seeking to attribute a racial dimension to it and what that says about our unspoken racist assumptions concerning Asian men. Vron Ware recounts that the Black male has been historically constructed as the antithesis of white femininity; as sexually predatory upon white innocence and beauty – we’d be naive not to notice the same rhetoric being played out now with Asian/Muslim males…
Sky news Press Preview: Sunday 6th of May 2012
Nigel Farage, UKIP Leader and MEP, and I doing the press preview on Sunday 6th May 2012, 9h30pm, discussing the French and Greek elections which headline the papers.
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Francois Hollande: The Candidate for Change? Not for French Muslims
This article was first published over at the Huffington Post, here
Wednesday night’s presidential debate saw Socialist hopeful Francois Hollande pitted against incumbent President, Nicolas Sarkozy on key points of the political agenda including nuclear energy, the relationship with Europe and the economy. Hollande has marketed himself as the candidate of ‘change’, the central concept in his slogan and the leitmotif of his speeches, banking on Sarkozy’s unpopularity and on the feeling that France needs a new, alternative vision.
And yet, when the candidates got on to discussing the hot topics of Islam and multiculturalism, the visions seemed to narrowly converge. Despite some heated repartee, both affirmed their credentials in dealing with France’s “problem” of communalism and the role Islam has to play in exacerbating it.
Muslims have been a regular political fodder throughout the election. In the first round President Sarkozy adopted Far Right rhetoric by suggesting halal meat was a “central concern” for the French, while Marine Le Pen spoke of the “rise of green facism” in the wake of the attacks by Mohamed Merah, whom she described as “the tip of the iceberg”.
The socialist candidate, Francois Hollande has raised the hopes of many, drawn in by his rejection of the Far-right and his objection to fear based rhetoric. In a France where a young generation of North African origin are seeking to make their mark, he appointed Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, a Moroccan born French politician as his co-spokesperson. And in Wednesday’s debate, he argued that foreigners who’ve lived in France for over five years should have the right to vote in local elections, a proposition Sarkozy opposes.
However, it was here that the limits of French political discourse on Islam became apparent. As the subject of Islam was raised, Sarkozy asserted that it is the Muslim identity of immigrants which fuels his opposition to their right to vote in local elections where they would have power to influence policy and would fuel the “rise of radical Islam”: “…the majority of those concerned are not Norwegians or Americans” Sarkozy exclaimed “the communalist tensions I’m talking about, who do they come from? Or where do they come from? From the absolute necessity to have an Islam of France, not an Islam in France.” The president was pulled up by Hollande, who pointed out that to reduce immigrants to their religious identity was to ignore their diversity, “some might not even identify as Muslim” he corrected. But Hollande’s indignation at the reification of Muslim identity stopped there. And so does much of the hope, he might offer change in this contentious realm.
In France, the essentialisation of Muslims identity and attribution of their difference to a single inassimilable culture which allegedly threatens the French way of life, is common currency across the political spectrum. Even the Far-Left is not immune from this perception: “You can’t say you’re a feminist and wear a sign of patriarchal submission” exclaimed Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2010 in response to a veiled Muslim political candidate.
As Sarkozy went on to link the right to vote for foreigners to “the rise in communalism and tensions”, Hollande’s discourse veered right. Reassuring the public he would make no concessions to the Republic’s golden calf of ‘laicite’, he agreed with his opponent that the sort of ‘extravagant’ demands Muslims might make on municipalities – the option of halal meat in school canteens, occasional women-only swimming sessions and access to female doctors -would not be tolerated.
The Presidential debate highlighted the extent to which Islam has been singled out as problematic across the political spectrum. By linking such basic issues as dietary provisions, to the bogeyman of communalism, Sarkozy was suggesting they are fundamentally incompatible with his cryptic and yet emblematic notion of “an Islam of France.” And yet, efforts to foster a balanced French Muslim identity have been met with the President’s ire. Oxford Professor Tariq Ramadan who contends that French Muslims don’t need to negate their religious identity in order to become fully French, but must rather live out both aspects of their identity fully, was recently described as ‘unwelcome’ by the President and specialist Catherine Wihtol de Wenden states that French Muslims don’t share the state’s complex about their contested identity: “Most Muslims in France feel very French – but they feel that the French don’t see them that way, because they may look Arab or black.” Rather, the stigmatisation of Islam in public discourse has fostered a climate which ensures hostility towards its practitioners, despite their own desire to fully identify with the nation.
Rather than tackling this climate, Hollande sought to shore up his ‘secular’ credentials during the debate by boasting that his party was behind the 2004 law banning veils in schools. Since then, legislation targeting Muslim female dress has continued to increase, supported and instigated at times by the Left. In 2011, Sarkozy instated the ban on the wearing of face veils in public in France with near unanimous support, and in January 2012, the Senate approved a law, proposed by a Socialist, to ban nursery assistants from wearing headscarves on the basis of “protecting children from women unworthy of their trust.” The Ecologist party denounced the law as intrusive and discriminatory and Muslim groups have expressed fears the law will increase suspicion and hostility towards women who wear the headscarf.
During the debate, Sarkozy went unchallenged as he argued that Islam has been the cause of “an extravagant rise in communalist tensions” despite the fact the most frequent cause mentioned for the 2005 riots was joblessness and the reality that Muslims are over represented in disadvantaged neighbourhoods with high unemployment, poor educational facilities and few career options. This omission of the social and geographical marginalisation of Muslims is compounded by the oft-denied omnipresence of hostility towards Islam.
Nearly four-in-ten Muslims French Muslims report that they have had a bad experience attributable to their race, ethnicity or religion. Legislation prohibiting discrimination in employment is rarely implemented in France and employers have been allowed to discriminate on the grounds of religious or cultural symbols, in direct conflict with European Union anti-discrimination legislation. Linda, a thirty year old administrative assistant of Algerian origin tells me her employers declined her request to pray in an empty office during her lunch break on the grounds the office is a “secular space.” A young white convert explained to me that she was refused entry to a bowling alley on the grounds her headscarf was unwelcome there. Shaima, a journalism graduate from one of France’s top universities, explains she has been unable to find employment due to her headscarf and is seeking to emigrate. Amnesty international’s expert on discrimination, Marco Perolini has denounced the pandering to prejudices by political parties in quest of votes, which he linked directly to human rights violations: “Muslim women are being denied jobs and girls prevented from attending regular classes just because they wear traditional forms of dress, such as the headscarf. Men can be dismissed for wearing beards associated with Islam.(…) There is a groundswell of opinion in many European countries that Islam is alright and Muslims are ok so long as they are not too visible. This attitude is generating human rights violations and needs to be challenged.”
Despite an increasing number of studies suggesting French Muslims are getting a raw deal, politicians don’t appear to be listening and the rise of the Far-Right has made initiating such discussions political suicide. American academic Joan Scott argues that France has failed to integrate its former colonial subjects as full citizens and believes that the suppression of diversity is not a feasible path for social harmony in the contemporary era. The candidate for ‘change’ who calls for national unity has so far offered an alternative vision for France on many fronts, but the issue of social harmony has yet to be tackled from a different angle. The question remains whether on the issue of Muslim visibility and acceptance, a Socialist President will make any difference at all. It seems unlikely.
Save an Orphan charity: a documentary
This is the short version of a mini-documentary I made for the charity Save an Orphan on the plight of orphans in Bangladesh.
Save An Orphan is a registered charity in the United Kingdom, Registration Number: 1134007
Sky News: Live commentary on the French elections
A snippet of my commentary on the first round of the French Presidential elections on Sunday, on Sky News.
BBC World Service: Asma al Assad and the Syrian regime
I discuss the video made by the British and German ambassadors to the UN for the attention of Asma al Assad, seeking to pressure her to act against the massacre of civilians in Syria.
