Not content with slandering all Albanian migrants as criminals last year, the Home Secretary set her sight on maligning yet another of Britain’s Muslim communities.
This time, it was the turn of the country’s 1.5 million-strong Pakistani population to be abused by Suella Braverman’s “politics of performative cruelty,” which incorrectly and dangerously claimed that “almost all” sexual grooming gangs are of Pakistani heritage, a culture so toxic and at odds with “British values” that it inherently lends itself to collective misogyny.
It’s no surprise that her purposefully inflammatory comment elicited unprecedented levels of condemnation from legal, medical, and civil rights professionals.
Her claim, made during the announcement of new mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, is glaringly at odds with the Home Office’s own report published in 2020, which concluded that “group-based child sexual exploitation (CSE) offenders are mostly white” males under 30 and that there was “no credible evidence that grooming gangs were likely to be Asian or black.”
Her comments expectedly provoked dozens of South Asian and Muslim healthcare NGOs with thousands of members to pen a letter to the Prime Minister demanding a retraction and an apology from the Home Secretary. “We demand an apology from the Home Secretary and an honest commitment to meaningfully tackling this vital issue, which has ruined the lives of thousands of young people.”
They wrote that “words have consequences,” as it materialised in 2014 when Boris Johnson’s comments on niqab-wearing women resembling letterboxes directly resulted in a 375 per cent increase in hate crimes targeting Muslim women.
Her words prompted the former Conservative Party Chair, Baroness Warsi, to label them “racist rhetoric” and warn her father not to walk home alone from the mosque.
Braverman’s attempt to implicate child sexual abuse largely on British Pakistani grooming gangs had (awkwardly) coincided with the conviction of 21 white abusers in the “largest child sexual abuse ring in the West Midlands.”
True to form, where white grooming gangs are concerned, Braverman remained tight-lipped about the decade-long crime involving seven victims under 12, her silence is all the more striking given that the verdict was delivered during her media tour touting a tougher crackdown on that very crime.
The PM may not have defended his Home Secretary, but he did not distance himself from her claims either. Instead, he reiterated the unfounded far-right appeasing mantra that “political correctness” was to blame for not “weeding out” sex offenders, to which former Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott asked why it had not inhibited “police from stopping and searching black men.”
As Sabah Kaiser, an ethnic minority ambassador to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, said, child sexual abuse “does not have a skin colour, it doesn’t have a religion, it doesn’t have a culture,” and that it is “very, very dangerous” to turn child abuse “into a matter of colour.”
Braverman’s comments were also criticised by the NSPCC, which warned that sexual predators do not just come from “one background” and that a focus solely on race could create new “blind spots” when tackling child abuse.
Given that she has gotten away with ever more brazen bigotry and vindictiveness, nothing short of a dismissal threat is going to induce this emboldened Home Secretary to retract her remarks and apologise to Britain’s Pakistani community.
Perhaps a collapse of the “blue wall” in next month’s local elections will persuade No. 10 to rein in the Home Secretary and ditch the 2024 general election campaign, which according to former Tory adviser Iain Anderson, is centred on stoking “a culture war to distract from fundamental economic failings.”
(Photo credit: Pippa Fowles/No 10 Downing Street)
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