I’m quite willing to believe that “cultural attitudes” underlay the apparent belief of members of the Asian criminal gang that young white girls, many of whom were or had been in care, were “easy meat” for their predatory sexual behaviour.
After all, such cultural attitudes are hardly confined to those with family connections in Pakistan. They even seem to have been prevalent at the Crown Prosecution Service, which decided back in 2008 that a girl who had come forward to describe being raped would not make a credible witness. If traditionally-minded Asians are indeed liable to believe that children like her are of less account than their own overprotected daughters it must be asked how they came by such ideas. Perhaps they have been reading the Daily Mail‘s frequent and lurid accounts of the Hogarthian decadence with which a high proportion of this nation’s teenage girls supposedly conduct themselves.
A Guardian editorial yesterday helpfully explained that “the force that shaped it [the sexual abuse] was not the ethnicity of the abusers but the poor, chaotic family lives of the victims.” Thus was the blame seemlessly (and perhaps unconsciously) transferred from the perpetrators. Poor and chaotic family lives may have rendered the victims vulnerable to the blandishments of these criminal gangs but it does not explain why they were raped. The only force that shaped the abuse was the behaviour of the abusers.
And it didn’t take long, last night, for the BBC’s “flagship” Question Time to degenerate into a veritable orgy of slut-shaming. Peter Oborne, a Telegraph journalist who has written extensively against Islamophobia, was the worst offender. “What does it tell us about what’s happened to our society,” he wondered, “that we have 12 year old girls, 13 year old girls, who are happy to give up their affection and their beauty to men in exchange for a packet of crisps or a bit of credit on their mobile phone?” He later elaborated that the girls had shown themselves “ready to surrender their innocence for a bag of crisps”.
The implication is clear: the problem is with young girls, well below the age of consent, who (allegedly willingly) “surrender their innocence”, rather than with the men who take. “Society” is to blame for allowing this to happen. The perpetrators, presumably, just couldn’t help themselves, like children in a sweetshop. And Oborne’s language of “beauty” and “innocence”, with its nauseating fetishisation of female purity, seemed to embody precisely those “cultural attitudes” towards women that are assumed to characterise conservative Muslim communities.
A man in the audience who appeared to be a bishop then chipped in with the suggestion that 13 year-old girls “go out dressed as if they are looking for that sort of issue to take place”. He later withdrew the obvious imputation that they were “asking for it”, but it’s striking how naturally the thought had come to his mind. As it came to the mind of Caroline Spelman that the solution lay in giving girls (it’s always girls, isn’t it?) “the right values… to keep themselves safe.”
It would be naive to suppose that many of the girls who found themselves at the mercy of these gangs didn’t already have “issues”. A high proportion came from broken homes and had been in the care system. It’s undeniable that such children are more likely than average to become involved in crime or drugs, to become pregnant at an early age, to end up homeless or engaged in street prostitution. But that only makes it more important not to make them complicit in their own degradation.
It’s not so many years ago that it was standard practice for underage prostitutes to be regarded by the police and justice system as criminals rather than as victims. It’s only a couple of weeks ago that a rape victim was named on Twitter by fans of the footballer convicted of assaulting her. The charge being levelled against her, effectively, was one of having “loose morals”. No-one invoked the alien “cultural norms” of football supporters to explain such attitudes, as did David Starkey in response to the Asian grooming gangs, or saw it as evidence that the education system had failed adequately to convey the “history of feminism” in these islands.
The trial that ended this week in Liverpool was not the first, and won’t be the last, to feature predominantly Pakistani-British gangs preying sexually upon mainly white girls from troubled backgrounds. There are, no doubt, special features at work in these cases: two that spring to mind are the sexual frustration experienced by young men from strict, patriarchal families and the “biraderi” system of male mutual support which might easily be debased into one of passing around young girls for sex. But the sexual double standards, the valuation of women based on their actual or presumed availability, the writing off of girls from difficult backgrounds as “white trash”: such attitudes are far from being the preserve of those from conservatively-minded ethnic minorities.
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