I actually think if the police had stomped all over it when it first started happening we wouldn’t have the scale of the problem we have now. But lets be honest the police at the time basically didn’t care if crimes were committed against women and girls generally.
I was thinking about this and I think the psychology of this is interesting. The thing is to a lot of aisan men fair skin is highly desirable (I think for a lot of communities this is dying a death a bit). Most of the Pakistani boys I came across growing up despised non muslim women, proper mother/ whore complex So I guess you have this dichotomy of highly desiring white females but also being taught to despise them. I don’t think it’s as simple as these girls were just more available. A lot of asian women get affronted at this idea but it’s true, look at the level of colourism within asian communities that was completely normal 20 years ago. The level of abuse and rage these girls seem to be subjected to isn’t just about wanting to have sex (rape obviously), it was punishment and torture.
I also don’t think you necessarily look at an incoming group and automatically assume that you are going to have problems with rape gangs in a few years. Why would you, at the time it’s not like people were overly concerned about the wellbeing of women anyway, from the perspective of the left as well you would have looked on incoming migrants as workers who may be additionally disadvantaged by their colour, so victims of exploitation really. I think some people seem to still hold the view that if you are from a minority group your crime is less “bad”. Personally I loathe all rapists, whatever their colour and child rapist are on my “should be lined up against the wall and shog” list.
On the colonial thing, Pakistan didn’t exist when Britian colonised Indian but you don’t see indian rape gangs roaming around so it’s not a bloody excuse is it. If it were simply behaviour as a consequence of colonialism you would see more colonised people behaving this way. You don’t, which suggests there is a specific cultural problem at play here. You don’t seem to have punjabi Pakistani rape gangs either. It’s probably extremely specific to a sub population. It would be interesting to see actual origin completely disaggregated to understand exactly who these people are. I also wonder at the rates of cousin marriage within these groups.
There has to be very specific family types, the whole celebrating eid by having your cousins visit and then raping girls thing that blew up on twitter astounded me a bit (two confirmed cases, in that there are court records). Most normal muslim families will be celebrating eid together, eating together, giving gifts, family time etc. I don’t know a single muslim family that would tolerate a bunch of men taking off on eid together to go out and coming back smashed.
I also don’t think it does anything useful to pretend that it’s not happening/didn’t happen or that if it is happening it’s some else's fault. Most Pakistani families will be looking at this and thinking “oh hell no, that is absolutely not the kind of people we are” and they would be right. BUT there is a subsection of the Pakistani community that has fostered this behaviour and either ignored it or joined in. It’s not going to go away, lets not try to find a way to somehow excuse rapists or not hold them accountable because thats what happened before and we left children defenceless, we allowed crimes to be committed against children because British society was too cowardly to just deal with it.