What frightens me is laws being changed to Sharia Law.
What is often not made clear, to both Muslims (bizarrely) and people of other faiths, is that sharia law is not all the same. There are several schools of shariah jurisprudence within the Sunni religious tradition alone, and some of them are remarkably more conservative than others.
Again, within a school of jurisprudence itself, a lot depends on interpretation, which can vary wildly. For example, there is a well-known and respected salafist scholar at Al-Azhar that fervently maintains the wearing of the niqab is anti-Islamic. No-one dares argue with him because he has the reputation of being an excellent scholar and a hardcore Islamic purist, but because of the nature of the wider Sunni global community, which has no equivalent of a "Pope" figure or any "Vatican" style oversight of religious matters, high clerical interpretations such as his never filter down. Instead, it is the Saudi clerics with TV channel exposure that are heard and believed (and who come out with absolute tosh).
One of the problems in Britain is that you have poorly-qualified individuals acting as mullahs, clerics and judges who are applying cultural judgements under the guise of shariah law, and do so with certain community political motivations in mind.
One way to think of the situation is to consider the paradigm as somewhat similar to the legal, religious and social circumstances that surrounded the Salem witch trials. You have isolated communities, a climate of over-dependence on religious and cultural identity as binding community tools against a hostile "other", powerful community leaders with religious and judicial oversight, and a rather legally ill-informed and dis-empowered populace.
Indeed, to my mind, a lot of the problems we see in this area are down to the circumstances in which this particular diaspora formed and evolved in Britain under the detrimental policy of political multiculturalism. Political multiculturalism encouraged "mini-Salems" in poor immigrant Muslim communities in Britain by defining identity through ethnicity and religion in terms of state policy, and supporting, inadvertently, isolationism, ghettoisation, and the position of "community leader" as not only the voice of said communities, but also responsible for the behaviour and policing of said communities.
Basically, Britain took Victorian-era colonial policy, applied it to BME communities within the UK itself and called it "multiculturalism". But it is, essentially, just how the British ruled over the myriad ethnic and religious communities in British India.
If you see the situation in this way, it start to become clear just why there has been such a hands-off approach to the mass grooming situations that involve BME perpetrators across the country by both the police and state authorities. It is that old colonial mentality that has been transplanted into Britain where the imperial state structure does not get involved in "community matters", which are left to "community leaders", unless those matters escalate and threaten the wider imperial power structure itself.
Of course, all this approach has done is recreate all the same issues and fault lines within and between communities as they eventually did all across the British Empire. Only the situation in Britain is made more complex and potentially more explosive by the presence of an indigenous (for want of a better word) population that perceives governance and rule, culture and society, in a very different way, and has no collective or historical experience of living as one of many ethnic or religious communities in a defined region under an imperial mantle ... because, of course, in Britain, the definer of oppression was confined to class, which had significantly wider social and economic parameters.
Greentulips You speak very well on this subject - how do you suggest the message gets put across to these people? How do you empower Asian women to speak up and seek help?
The first thing to do is recognise what the situation actually is on the ground. And to be fair, it's worse than most people probably imagine. My DM does a lot of work in cross-community issues, being from a migrant background herself, and the isolation from wider British social and cultural understandings can be vast.
As an example, we have South Asian migrant women in our area, who have lived here for decades, had families, who have very poor English skills, that are astonished to discover that a women can be an MP in this country. Now just consider how isolated you must be to not know that, to not even realise the current PM is female, and you have some idea of how ostracised from wider British culture and society these women are.
As I said above, we have to stop making the problem worse in the first instance, which is why attempts to prevent chain migration are important. I think the state should also send out the message that certain behaviours will not be tolerated within any community at all.
But I'm afraid I don't have much hope. It would take two or three generations of demographic, community and economic stability, along with a large injection of an intensive educational programme across all impoverished communities, to eradicate the problems we are now seeing.
The situation is pretty dire, to be honest, and I can only see tensions between communities getting more and more strained. I never thought it would end up like this twenty years ago. Never.
As a side point, my DM tries, as do a select few of her colleagues, to create cross-cultural opportunities and projects to bring women from different ethnicities and religions together. Unfortunately, the political will is just not there on a wider scale (read: men, both white and Asian, either don't give a damn about this sort of thing, or they don't like it, or they will not support it, so they don't vote for the resource allocation, and nothing ever gets off the ground).