To think the roots of the grooming gangs go back to failures from the 1950s on?

[Carla786]

I was reading Hina Husain's excellent article here and it made me think

https://unherd.com/2025/06/mirpuris-and-the-problem-of-integration/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

that discussion of the roots of the grooming gangs tends to focus on Blair's failed multiculturalism policies, local council/police etc failings.

But what rarely gets talked about is why and how large parts of the northern Mirpuri Pakistani communities were allowed to get to such a self-segregated and dysfunctional state to begin with.
Why was there no research in the 1950s-60s on the clan systems, misogynistic practices prevalent in rural Mirpuri villages when they were encouraged to immigrate? Why PMs from Wilson, Heath, Thatcher etc never appear to make integration of such communities a priority to some extent?

Most stuff just seems to blame PC culture & Tony Blair, who do share a huge amount of blame, but less is asked about why this situation, clearly full of potential issues, was never addressed much from the 60s to 1997...

And who is enabling them/abetting them and how do we prevent that.

Because in the 50’s we might have had 50,000 people coming from those areas in a 5 year period. We now have half a million a year coming in. In the 50’s the numbers where so small that they had little to no choice to integrate and they did. Now there’s to many to actually even impose a policy to get people integrated quick enough. They want to live in familiar communities & that’s why we have such demographic changes in our cities. I live by Birmingham I travel into several times a year. And yet if I’ve not been in awhile I am shocked at the change. My kids, one of which is quite woke even commented on how different it felt. I go to London every other year with my daughter. We go to the theatre again the change there was unreal. Again my daughter who talks about tolerance etc wouldn’t have a drink in the bar as she said she didn’t feel safe & wanted to keep her wits about her. Asked her why and she said there’s a vibe here I don’t like anymore. My daughter is a 20yo. We live in a middle class area. I think if you visit an area within a short time and see big changes it’s a shock to the system

I don't think arguing one theology over another is useful for this thread. Hinduism has its own issues with sexual abuse of Dalit women, child marriage historically very common and still taking place in India, dowry murders,,sati (mostly but not only historical) and rape and street sexual hatassment still very common..
Rape of Muslim women during Partition and the Gujarat riots, and rape of Sikh women by Hindu police during the 1980s (Operation Shuddhikaran) show that attitudes to non Hindu women are in practice not always respectful either.

Yes, Hindu scriptures do not promote these things but in practice far too many men who followed Hinduism have seen them as permitted. Because of generally rural, misogynistic cultural reasons,, not because of religion (though religion may be used to justify these things).

Imo the grooming gangs are much more about rural village misogynistic clan culture. If we'd invited educated, urban Lahore or Karachi Pakistanis I doubt they would have happened.

These are good points but remember although the grooming gangs are ongoing, most of the events we are talking about took place around 1990s-2000s with men born in 1970s as perpetrators. Not men who arrived as migrants in the last few years : that's conflating different issues.

Their grandparents would have come here in the 1950s-60s. So that's why I started the thread by asking why this misogynistic rural culture was imported here in the first place. Because clearly there must have been issues with the original people who came.

The girls abused were teenagers, not prepubescent children. Historically, most cultures (Christian, Jewish, Hindu etc.) treated marriage soon after puberty as normal — that wasn’t unique to Muslims. As I said, child marriage was historically very common among rural Hindus in India.

But what happened in the grooming cases wasn’t marriage or tradition anyway, it was criminal abuse and coercion. That seems better explained by misogyny, group dynamics and local social factors than by religion.

I think this might be the same enquiry I heard journalist Charlie Peters talking about on the Triggernometry YouTube channel. He mentioned a 2018 enquiry into child sexual abuse, which had one section for grooming gangs, and for that section they chose to focus on six towns with negligible Pakistani populations, and not any of the 50 other towns he could have told them they would find a problem in. They also said that, in the case of grooming gangs only, they were going to focus on the future, rather than digging into the past. Apparently the enquiry did not find much of problem, and he has since heard politicians reference it as a reason to dismiss the problem.

You only have to look at the victims to know why. This escalated through the Blair years, he opened the floodgates and invited them in & the real reason for this is gdp. The more you buy, sell and produce the richer you look, immigration is a fast and effective way to cook the books. We look richer but we aren’t. We are actually poorer today than 30 years ago. The advances in technology has made our lives easier so it’s easy to miss we’re poorer. Our services are abysmal where having a nhs dentist is now a privilege.

The answer to successful intergration in my opinion was for indigenous people to be more accepting and tolerant, to change language, to water down our cultures and traditions. To be accommodating. That the immigrants would somehow be bowled over by kindness they’d want to reciprocate. Which over years has been implemented through educational institutions, through media, films that its turned into an indoctrination. Scholars can’t accept their ideology might be wrong because they’ve been groomed themselves & in doing so inadvertently blame the victims at worst and a best think it’s acceptable collateral damage for the greater good. They’ve done such a great job of exploiting our values that we’re are so scared of being called racist, damaging public cohesion, raising racial tensions that were prepared to turn a blind eye. Mix that together with our class system where working class people have always been treated less than, it created a perfect storm.

That's very important. The IICSA made many important findings but it let grooming victims down terribly.

What do you mean by 'change language, water down our cultures and traditions'? I agree the integration ideas as a whole were flawed.

Yes, I’m not surprised.

In fact a terrible cynic might suggest that was the purpose of it.

I think when happy holidays replaced Christmas in our institutions and media that somehow a Christian holiday should be adapted to include everyone, unacceptable if it was any other religious holiday, I think when some schools changed nativity plays into celebrations of the worlds ceremonies, when the girl got suspended for wearing a Union Jack dress to school for an ‘inclusive’ diversity day, that her letter which she has read publicly was deemed offensive. She spoke about the weather and love of tea. Look it up, non of it was offensive and the school had to backtrack and apologise, with even Keir saying it was a ridiculous overreach. The countryside is to white in a report that came out just the other week. A comment that would be unacceptable said about anywhere else for example saying Birmingham demographics had changed was controversial and inflammatory. The fact a blasphemy law is about to be implemented protecting only one religion.the rhetoric that if any this concerns you’re a bad person. They didn’t want an inquiry into the grooming gangs. Saying it was a far right talking point. It was pressure predominantly from America that made it happen.

I agree re Blair's mistakes and the role of classism.

However, what I’ve read about the major cases (Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, etc.), most of the perpetrators weren’t recent migrants at all. They were overwhelmingly British-born men whose families had been in the UK since the 50s, 60s or 70s. So they weren’t people arriving under late-90s or 2000s immigration policies — they were second or third generation and grew up here.

Also, this type of exploitation clearly predates Blair. There are reports and professional accounts going back decades. Someone on this thread mentioned hearing about similar patterns in the 70s while studying social work, and I’ve seen references to cases and concerns in the 80s and 90s too — they just didn’t get the same media attention at the time

Thank you.

Happy holidays - isn't that a US thing (if it is one at all)? I've never heard of 'Merry Christmas' or 'Christmas' references being forbidden in institutions. We still have: Christmas adverts, markets, parties, carols on BBC, specials,“Merry Christmas' everywhere.

Nativity plays being replaced by 'celebrations of the world' - again, how common is this? Most primary schools still do a nativity play & no one finds it offensive.

The Union Jack dress girl - One school made a stupid decision, people objected, the media covered it, politicians criticised it, and the school apologised and backtracked. It feels more like an isolated case of a school being overly “woke” than evidence that British culture is somehow being erased nationally. The news always amplifies extreme cases, that doesn't mean this is standard nationally.

DEFRA saying the countryside was too white? - yes that is stupid. Rakib Ehsan has pointed out that the context of trying to get ethnic minorities to enjoy places like Lake District is far more an issue of poor public transport, lack of accessibility from inner cities and minorities who can only afford one holiday going to their heritage country than an issue of racism.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/31/no-the-english-countryside-is-not-racist/

Re blasphemy law ; I agree an Islamophobia law is dangerous. They are shifting to 'anti Muslim prejudice'. This is a better idea imo. Prejudice against any religious group of people is different from criticising the religion itself.

id assume historic cases would in part boil down to the child not really being believed over that of an adults, parents reluctant to report because of the stigma.

the fact you have second & third generations committing these crimes also boils down to the lack of integration policy, the social contract we’ve imposed on the indigenous and not on the immigrants & our value system being different, they’re living in a world where outside the home it’s very liberal whilst inside it’s ultra conservative. They have nothing but contempt for western women. The fact they weren’t just getting away with it but also having social workers and police facilitating it doesn’t help either. Imagine arresting a 12yo girl for being drunk in house with grown men only to be returned there when you sobered up, having a social worker be a witness of a 16yo getting married to her abuser & seeing concerned parents arrested for daring to retrieve their daughters from these men.

i think this has happened as I stated in my previous replies. There had been little to no expectation from the people we’ve allowed in.

Yes, I agree with what you've said. I just think that describing the crimes as committed by people who came in the Blair era risks overlooking the huge failings of the 50s-60s policies that started this & the later ones which continued it.

Blair holds a huge amount of blame. We also need to examine the roles of Eden, Macmillan & Douglas-Home for allowing the initial migration & lack of integration, and Heath, Wilson,Callaghan, Thatcher & Major for doing very little to address the integration issue.

@5MinuteArgument Yep apologies for me being over simple for the sake of brevity in terms of the message i was replying to which referenced ‘Assault’. I dont disagree with you that much is lost in muddying this actually. So yes, all CSE is CSA but not all CSA is CSE of course, you’re correct. A few recent reports dealing specifically with CSE not A have still determined that the majority of perpetrators in group-based (prefer this to ‘clan’) CSE were white though.

Worth noting also that the Casey report itself highlights that the data sets in her own time limited, voluntary reporting data were insufficient to draw many of the conclusions youre talking around ethnicity, despite saying that yes ofc we shouldnt be afraid to talk in terms of ethnicity when it was necessary. (Which we shouldnt.) She called it a disaster of data collection if i remember rightly.

For me it was a shame that muxh of the reporting we did around CSE all got lost under shouting about two instances where oerpetrators werent white. Which also did no good service to the victims of those perps either. My opinion only.

Thank you for the info on CSA vs CSE. This is very important & needs to be widely known

Again, you are refusing to recognise the mainly Pakistani rape gangs in question as a separate phenomenon. The reports you mention are as far as I am aware based on incomplete perpetrator data. The whole tone of your posts is dismissive. We are talking about a criminal phenomenon which occurred in a very similar way in virtually every large town in the north of England, as well as other parts of the country. Like the governments you worked for, you are seeking to disappear that into a larger, broader whole. Because it’s inconvenient.

And of course you prefer “group based” to “clan”. Clan is a more accurate description, arguably.

Re Birmingham, the reasons for the changes you've seen aren't only caused by recent immigration. Pakistani families have traditionally had high birth rates, average 3-5 kids, sometimes more, so that would amplify it too.

What Casey said (my bold)

The ethnicity of people involved in grooming gangs has been "shied away from" by authorities, according to a new report by Baroness Louise Casey.
The finding comes after the peer was tasked with producing an audit on the nature and scale of group-based child sexual abuse in England and Wales.
The report said ethnicity data is not recorded for two-thirds of grooming gang perpetrators, meaning it is not robust enough to support conclusions about offenders at a national level.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper apologised to victims as she presented the findings to MPs and announced a new national inquiry into grooming gangs.
In the report, Baroness Casey said: "We as a society owe these women a debt.

"They should never have been allowed to have suffered the appalling abuse and violence they went through as children," she added.
On the question of ethnicity, the report said: "We found that the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data".
However, it added that at a local level for three police forces - Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire - there was enough evidence to show a "disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation".
Cooper said: "Ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities."
In a later interview, Lady Casey said the data should be investigated as it was "only helping the bad people" not to give a full picture of the situation, adding: "You're doing a disservice to two sets of population, the Pakistani and Asian heritage community, and victims."
The report concluded that ignorance and a fear of being seen as racist meant organisations tasked with protecting children turned a blind eye to abuse.
"We found many examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems," the report said.
The audit criticised the "failure" of the authorities to "understand" the nature and scale of the problem to date.
"If we'd got this right years ago - seeing these girls as children raped rather than 'wayward teenagers' or collaborators in their abuse, collecting ethnicity data, and acknowledging as a system that we did not do a good enough job - then I doubt we'd be in this place now," the report stated.
Speaking on BBC Newsnight later on Monday, Baroness Casey said: "I'm raging, actually, on behalf of the victims."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clynyyqdnrdo

And this is her damning 2015 review of Rotherham Borough Council.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a8152f4ed915d74e33fd945/46966_Report_of_Inspection_of_Rotherham_WEB.pdf

When she says Asian, doesn't she essentially mean Pakistani? Or were there other groups substantially involved too?

Thank you. And yes, clans are very important.