“Just because we live here, it doesn’t alter our standards in morals,” Tom says as he hands me a mug of tea. We’re sitting in his living room at the front of a neat council semi in Heywood, on the outskirts of Rochdale in Greater Manchester. Four years ago, his 15-year-old daughter fell victim to a gang of men who were grooming young teenage girls for sex. In May this year, after an agonising and protracted struggle to bring the case to trial, nine of the men were convicted of offences ranging from rape to trafficking and “conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child”.
It was not the first such case to come to light in Britain, but the trial provoked outraged coverage, pundits reaching for quick and easy ways to explain the terrible crime. To some, race or religion played a defining role – all five of the victims were white, while their abusers were all Muslims of British Pakistani or Afghan origin. Others pointed to a defect of character in the girls themselves which, in the words of one commentator, made them “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”.
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