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...

That's isn't accurate.. I am a history student and I specialise in India. Give me a minute and I will craft a post with reference books.

Can I ask what your sources are?

All these immigrants did imho is learn it from us and join in with what English men have done for over a thousand years.

Bollocks. Honestly, just utter drivel.
I grew up in the 80s around South Asian people. If the “ it’s all the fault of the English” - by which you mean British anyway- is true, why did British Hindus or Sikhs not set up human trafficking gangs?
Many of the Pakistani boys I grew up with were 100% encouraged by their families to think non Muslim girls were scum (including their female teachers) and that they were little princes who could do as they pleased. They came from the villages and they brought the village with them. And as Pakistan moved forward with the times, the communities here in many cases did not, because they were left to themselves.
The contrast to the Indian diaspora here is stark.

Have you heard of the Ottoman Empire or the Barbary slave trade? I suggest you do more research before acting like the white was the only evil throughout history and come on here finding a way to blame the rape of white girls by Pakistani men on white men

It’s all very hypocritical and ahistorical to claim that sex trafficking/grooming gangs either never existed on these Great British Isles or had been eradicated before the 1950s

• where on this thread have I claimed that?

Exactly. This view is racist imo & as it treats Mirpuri as having no choice but to rape in response to oppression : which SummerFenice has exaggerated anyway.

There are trafficking gangs with Hindus and Sikhs in them. I think you will find that religion is less important than sex and class.

Depends who you ask. Plenty of writers & historians, including many Muslims, do criticise slavery etc of Ottomans. Loud SM culture warriors & pundits, less so.

The National Police Chiefs Council said that Pakistani men are 3.9% of male sex offenders while only 1.25% of men in the UK are Pakistani men.

If you take out the historical institutional abuse and compare more like with like, the percentage for Pakistani men rises to 13.9%.

The main issue with the rape gangs that were predominantly Pakistani Muslim men (as opposed to white or other ethnicity men) is that whole communities and the police/social services/courts enabled these men (and are allegedly still doing so) whereas in other white communities, rapists and paedophiles are shunned and ostracised once found out.

There is a big difference in culture and OPs article sheds some light on this.

You really are so determined to defend the British Empire that you’d fabricate a claim of no choice but to rape.

They were patriarchal and raping, we came along and we were also patriarchal and raped too, so all the men involved in the clash of cultures were in agreement that raping is culturally acceptable in the oh so civilised British Empire.

That's a really interesting, and worrying, article.

I think that the children of these conservative groups are being failed, with families allowed to deny them opportunities which other British children enjoy - the right to a good secular ducation, getting to play sports, forming friendships, and then arranged marriages, to bring other family members over, and the problem with intergenerational cousin marriage.

I think schools dropped the ball big time, for fear of being racist, they accepted the restrictions which parents put on their kids, allowed kids to be put of school for months at a time, as families returned to their home countries.

The lack of integration seems to have been ignored, and the develooment of parallel commumities not seen as a problem, in part as no one seemed that bothered about how long the seperation of communuties would continue, maybe policy makers thought the second generation would fully embrace being British, because why would they not? When they didn't, no one really cared - the left was very concerned about respecting people's culture and religion (regardless of whether it stifled human rights of women and children) and the right happy to have seperation of communities, as they didn't see the immigrants as British, but handy for cheap labour.

And of course decision makers weren't living in Bradford or Luton, so easy to ignore what was happening on the ground.

I don't know how things can be change except possibly through education, though challenges to the commuity culture can have significant push back from the wider commumity eg sex education in schools in Birmingham.

If community leaders worked to support integration it could help, but commumity leaders are older relugious men, they're the ones benefiting from the status quo.

Commumity members who challenge the status quo can find themselves rejected, and if they are, they leave.

The issue of self-segretation is a really tricky one - it's not just Pakistanis from this region, Travellers and Roma have similar issues with self-segregation, but it hasn't become such a big issue, as there seems to be more of a geographic spread, and they have not come to public attention in the way the grooming gangs have put a spotlight on the Pakistani commumity.

You alluded to it with the scalping analogy.

Please could you link to articles showing UK Sikh & Hindu communities also having grooming gangs?

I think the latter describes summerfever. Hasn’t responded to me asking if she’s heard of the ottomon empire or Barbary slave trade.
The belief that only whites can do wrong and we’re the only villains throughout history is what let the grooming gangs get brushed under the carpet for so long.

Sorry, to clarify, the analogy was claiming that a coloniser brought something over when it was already there. I wasn't claiming Mirpuris invented sexual abuse as Native Americans invented scalping.

This attitude is partly the problem. No one wants to believe the grooming gangs exist and that there is a race element to it. If they do believe it, the next sentence is 'what about.....' as a way to shut the discussion down.

Well if you, as a student, are only going as far back as 1950s India you are missing out on a lot of the history of the sexual violence and exploitation of the British Empire and all the pre-colonial history as well.

Excellent post.

I think you nailed it here : 'maybe policy makers thought the second generation would fully embrace being British, because why would they not? When they didn't, no one really cared - the left was very concerned about respecting people's culture and religion (regardless of whether it stifled human rights of women and children) and the right was happy to have separation of communities, as they didn't see the immigrants as British, but handy for cheap labour.'

Sadly Traveller & Roma girls have many similar issues. To some extent also the Haredi community. However, as these tend to affect only in-community girls, they are mainly ignored.

Yes the countries we colonised and invaded were absolutely paragons of social justice, womens rights, childrens rights, workers rights, lands of milk and honey until the British arrived and showed them the bad ways.

Yup.

Yes, and initial post wasn’t claiming that the coloniser brought over sex trafficking as a new practice never before seen or done. It was more we showed them it was ok because we did it too.

In fact, my research includes the 19th century. Less so the 18th but I do have knowledge of this issue then specifically, as I'm interested in Anglo-Indians.

First, the British did bad things in India but NOT mass sexual exploitation, as I will elaborate in next post.

Second, even if the British had done that to the same extent, why would that mean that Pakistanis (well they were Indians during the Empire) would only then 'know it was ok'? Were they not able to judge beforehand?

This ‘reap what you sow’ ‘tit for tat’ attitude I often hear repeated disgusts me.

We are living now. We should not be defending the terrible behaviour of men now by pointing at people who are long dead and existed in a different time. I’m not convinced your ‘history’ is even correct.

Have some humanity. Imagine yourself talking to a survivor of one of the rape gangs and making your point. See how that pans out.

If you agree that 'They were patriarchal and raping' before, why did you then put the emphasis on the British Empire 'reaping what it sowed'? Your (incorrect) narrative of mass exploitation of Indian women would then have been a contributor but the problem of rape & exploitation would already have been there.

So you are saying that it was rare for the British soldiers or civil servants of the Raj to sexually exploit local, working class/lower caste women while simultaneously holding themselves up as the role model of western civilisation come to lift up the brown man as was often extolled by leading British colonial figures like Kipling, Trêvelyn, Macaulay and other contemporaries?

'We' didnt need to show them it was ok and validate their behaviour any more than they validated ours.

It was ok, its been ok in countless cultures for thousands of years across the world.

There was nothing different or exceptional about the British or any other culture who went into those areas, because people talk as if the British Empire was the only Empire, forgetting the French, Dutch, Portguese, Spanish etc.

People have always used other people badly, it is the way of humans. The idea of human rights and agency and protections really only came into legal being around the time that some (not all) countries outlawed slavery but later with the end of WWII, and even then its not universal, or applied universally.