Many years before the award-winning journalist Andrew Norfolk wrote his first piece about the grooming gangs in northern towns in England, I was investigating this phenomenon. But despite the quality of material I had amassed, it took me until 2007 to get my first piece published because some editors feared an accusation of racism. In this particular geographical area, many of the members of grooming gangs were of Pakistani origin. As a feminist who has always gone after the men who abuse women and girls, whichever social class or ethnic group they belong to, I was concerned that the story would only be told by racists. The British National Party (BNP) had been already been claiming that nasty Muslim “paedophiles” were preying on innocent white girls.
Knowing as I did how prolific child sexual abuse was, I began to investigate the pimping of children in northern towns by speaking to the other members of CROP and feminists in child protection agencies. I discovered that the police and social services did not want to know, despite the fact that the parents had gathered some really important intelligence including telephone numbers of pimps and punters found on their daughters’ phones, and the number plates of the fancy cars driven by the pimps and their accomplices.
What I also discovered was that the police and social services appeared to be scared of intervening in these particular grooming gangs, because a large number of the men involved were of Pakistani Muslim origin. The professionals who were turning a blind eye did not want to be labelled as racist, and did not understand that all they had to do was make it clear that the majority of child sexual abusers and pimps in the UK are white men, and that they were abusing children because they were child abusers, not because they were from a particular ethnicity or religion.