Muslim community must address issue of street grooming, says Nazir Afzal

There are currently 48 live CSE investigations in Bradford, he said – 18 of which are classed as on-street grooming involving taxi drivers and takeaway businesses and other aspects of the night time economy. There are 61 men in the city on bail for CSE-related offences, he revealed, saying: “So if you were ever in any doubt that we don’t have a problem in Bradford, that should tell you we do.”

Firth said Bradford’s Muslim community should support victims and their families rather than stigmatising them. “We are getting evidence that when we arrest perpetrators, the families of the victims sometimes gets ostracised. Somehow and goodness knows how people get there in their minds, people blame that family. People blame that wife of that perpetrator or they blame that victim,” he said.
He urged Muslims to take responsibility for safeguarding Bradford’s children. “There are [young girls] walking about with older men and it doesn’t look right. If it doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t. What we want to get is a culture when we are not walking by and pretending it’s not happening. We want a culture where people are picking the phone up to the police and saying, ‘do you know what? I’ve seen this and it doesn’t look right.’ We’ll investigate those calls all day long. And if they are totally lawful, if it’s a father with his daughter or whatever, we don’t mind. I’d rather have a hundred of those calls just to find the one where there is something going on where a child is getting exploited.”

Afzal agreed, saying: “Don’t walk by. My 15-year-old boy was playing snooker a few months back and noticed these young girls and these older men. Maybe he is more aware than he ought to be, but he came home and told dad, and dad told the police and the police acted on that information. This is what we should be doing – routinely, daily, all the time, everywhere. When you are suspicious, you act on that suspicion.”
He added: “People say to me: do you want us to grass every one up? Do you want whistleblowers? No! I want good neighbours. It could be your child, your friend’s child next. How are you going to make sure you share your suspicions and stand up for the society you are a part of.”
Asked why Pakistani men are overrepresented in statistics relating to on-street grooming, Shaista Gohir, chair of Muslim Women’s Network UK, said it was a complex issue but partly stemmed from a lack of respect for women and girls. She has produced a report called Unheard Voices looking at the sexual exploitation of Asian Girls and Young Women, in which she asked Asian men and boys for their attitudes towards women. One told her: “They wear high heels, wear make up, nice clothes, smell nice, their body language, it’s the tone of their voice. We get tempted and then they scream rape. They call it rape afterwards just because they feel dirty.”
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Too many Muslims prefer to blame women or even evil spirits rather than accept that men can be responsible for terrible crimes, said Afzal. He cited the case of Caneze Riaz from Lancashire, who was killed by her husband along with their four children in 2006. There was good evidence to prove Mohammed Riaz had set fire to the house in Accrington because he didn’t like Caneze’s western lifestyle, said Afzal, and yet: “There are people still in that community who believe he didn’t do it – it was a haunted house. They would rather believe it was a ghost than a man that could kill women and children.”
Sabilha Akhtar, a community development worker at Al Markaz ul Islami, an Islamic educational institute in Bradford, said she had worked with Asian girls for years. “Their conflict that they are of the mindset that they can only tell their problems to God,” she said. “And if they get the courage to tell their mosque teacher, they think that’s it and then they have to forgive and forget because forgiveness is part of their faith.”
The Muslim community needed to stop acting like immigrants and become part of British society, suggested Afzal: “This is our home now. When my parents came here 50-odd years ago they thought we were here as visitors. We’d spend a bit of time here, make a bit of money and go back. But this is my home, this is my children’s home. It’s your home and therefore we have a responsibility to belong to it, to look after each other and our families at the same time.”
Thursday’s meeting was organised by the Professional Muslims Institute after a series of very public grooming scandals involving Asian, usually Pakistani men. In August a report by Professor Alexis Jay, which revealed authorities in Rotherham had turned a blind eye to the abuse of at least 1,400 children, accused Muslim leaders in that town of “ignoring a politically inconvenient truth” by insisting there was not a deep-rooted problem of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators targeting young white girls.
Police told the Jay inquiry that some influential Pakistani councillors in Rotherham acted as barriers to communication on grooming issues. In Rochdale, in 2012 a sex trafficking gang of nine Asian men (eight of Pakistani origin and one Afghan) were convicted of sexual offences against 47 girls, prompting national debate about possible links between race, religion and ethnicity and child sexual exploitation.