Earlier this month, in a report highlighting the “staggering extent” of the victimization of young people across the world, the UNICEF noted that about one in 10 girls experience serious sexual violence.
It put the level at an unbelievably appalling 70 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Equatorial Guinea, and close to 50 percent in Uganda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
Such statistics inevitably raise uncomfortable questions about human nature, and more specifically about the societal cultures that permit such atrocities. African states, though, are by no means exclusive in this respect. It’s a global phenomenon — and societies in which the incidence is low deserve to be studied as intently as those where the trend defies belief for clues to such startling levels of depravity. The UNICEF also cites sexual victimization in richer countries, with large numbers of girls reporting harassment or exposure to pornography. What has been going on in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham, in England, goes well beyond that.
A report by Prof. Alexis Jay, commissioned by the local council, last month offered a “conservative estimate” of 1,400 victims between 1997 and 2013. The girls, some of them aged as young as 11, were native English. The perpetrators were men of Pakistani origin, most of them tracing their antecedents to Mirpur in Azad Kashmir. The general pattern of abuse entailed mostly young men befriending the girls in arcades and other such places, offering affection and gifts, and subsequently — sometimes with a substantial time lapse — subjecting them to unspeakable levels of sexual abuse, including gang rape and trafficking. Jay’s report points out in considerable detail how local figures of authority, from councilors to the police, generally turned a blind eye to what was going on. This has been described as political correctness gone mad, the implication being that there was a reluctance to pursue or charge the perpetrators precisely on account of their ethnic origin in view of the possibility that such actions would be dubbed racist. This may well be a part of the context, but in all likelihood a small part, given that the English police often enough exhibit the opposite tendency.
It has also been claimed that local elected officials were concerned about the loss of votes that alienating the Pakistani-origin community might entail. Rotherham, however, has been a Labour stronghold since the Second World War, and voters of Pakistani origin comprise about three percent of the population. Instances have been cited, meanwhile, of police accosting adult men with a girl in what could euphemistically be described as compromising circumstances, and choosing to haul up the 12-year-old victim for being inebriated while ignoring indications of what is called statutory rape under English law.
The horrific picture that has emerged in Rotherham in the view of some exemplifies the consequences of multiculturalism, and it is not particularly surprising that on the fringes of society in South Yorkshire and elsewhere it has fed into the racist mythologies of neo-Nazi organizations such as the British National Party and the English Defense League.
As some commentators, including The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, have pointed out, though, the failure to pursue the perpetrators in Rotherham in itself points to racist presumptions, including that unconscionable exploitation of pubescent girls is par for the course as far as some communities are concerned.
Many others have dwelt at length on the fact that the victims invariably were working-class girls, most of them either effectively without families or belonging to dysfunctional families, who tended to be looked upon by figures of authority as “young prostitutes” making a “lifestyle choice” — notwithstanding evidence of threats, coercion, violence and torture.
In a thought-provoking article in The New York Times last week, Sarfraz Manzoor notes: “The Pakistanis who raped and pimped got away with it because they targeted a community even more marginal and vulnerable than theirs, a community with less voice and less muscle: White working-class girls.” Manzoor also dwells on the immigration trends of the 1950s and 1960s, and the segregated communities they spawned. “An enlightening breeze of modernity needs to blow through those pockets of England that remain forever Pakistan,” he argues, and it would be difficult to disagree.
Meanwhile, Nazir Afzal, the British Crown Prosecution Service official who oversees all child abuse cases in England and Wales, says between 80 and 90 percent of child sex offenders in his jurisdiction are British white males: “It’s not the abusers’ race that defines them”, it’s their “attitude to women.”
The appalling crimes of Rotherham, though, are not exactly an aberration. The same pattern was highlighted in Rochdale a couple of years ago, and instances of it have since emerged elsewhere. Misogyny isn’t any means be a Pakistani or Muslim prerogative, but its implications in the reported circumstances are heinous beyond belief, and although criminality of this nature is a minority occupation, the knowledge that it permeates societies at a lower, sometimes subliminal, level nonetheless substantiates the case for “an enlightening breeze of modernity” and for notions of morality divorced from medieval impulses. Numerous heads have lately rolled in Rotherham, indicating the British state’s belated efforts to make some amends. Will the Pakistani-origin community likewise be inclined to do its bit?
