Grooming of white girls for sex is exposed as two Asian men jailed
A hidden world in which Asian men “groom” young white girls for sex has been exposed with the jailing yesterday of two men for child-abuse offences.
Zulfqar Hussain, 46, and Qaiser Naveed, 32, from east Lancashire, were each jailed for five years and eight months after exploiting two girls aged under 16 by plying them with alcohol and drugs before having sex with them.
Both men pleaded guilty at Preston Crown Court to abduction, sexual activity with a child and the supply of a controlled drug.
Despite being told explicitly by police and social services that both girls were under-age and should be returned to care, the men picked up one girl from a children’s home in Blackburn and then drove on to collect her friend who was living in temporary foster care in North Wales.
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The trial came amid growing concern at the attitudes of some Asian men towards white girls which campaigners for women claim few people wish to address.
Parents have complained that in parts of the country with large Asian communities white girls as young as 12 are being targeted for sex by older Asian men yet the authorities are unwilling to act because of fears of being labelled racist.
Ann Cryer, a Labour member of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, has been at the forefront of attempting to tackle the problem after receiving complaints from mothers in her constituency about young Asian men targeting their under-age daughters.
Although campaigners claim that hundreds of young girls are already being passed around men within the Asian community for sex, she said that attempts to raise the problem with community leaders had met with little success, with most of them being in a state of denial about it.
After the case, the mother of one of the girls, who cannot be named for legal reasons, welcomed the jail terms. “This will hopefully act as a warning to others,” the woman said. She had had to leave the court as details of the men’s sexual relations with the teenagers were read out. After the trial, Ms Cryer said that young Asian men were caught between two cultures having been brought up in a Western society in families while retaining the cultural values of the Asian sub-continent.
She said: “The family and cultural norms of their community means they are expected to marry a first cousin or other relative back in a village in Mirapur or wherever the family comes from. Therefore, until that marriage is arranged they look out for sex.
“At the point in their lives when they are ready for this sort of activity, Asians cannot go to Asian girls because it would be a terrible breach of the honour of the community and their family to have sex with an Asian girl before marriage.” She said that the reason Asian men targeted very young white girls was because older white girls knew that a relationship with an Asian youth was unlikely to last as the community would seek an arranged marriage with someone from the Asian sub- continent. Police and groups campaigning to protect women insisted that the grooming of youngsters is not segregated along race lines, though there is concern at the attitudes of some young Asian men towards white girls.
Parents claim that criminal networks are able to prey on young girls because the authorities are reluctant to tackle the issue for fear of upsetting race relations in areas of the North West with large ethnic minority communities.
However, Ms Cryer added: “I think there is a problem with the view Asian men generally have about white women. Their view about white women is generally fairly low. They do not seem to understand that there are white girls as moral and as good as Asian girls.”
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‘If it had been white guys, it would have been reported sooner’
Some parents, support workers and community leaders claim that an ugly pattern has emerged across Lancashire and Yorkshire in particular in which vulnerable, white, working-class girls are being used for sex by groups of older and predominantly Asian men.
Once the girls have moved into these social circles, they are encouraged to rebel, with peer pressure leading to petty crime, says Samantha Pratt, of CROP, the Leeds-based Coalition for the Removal of Pimping.
The victims become criminalised themselves, she said. “A lot of these kids are getting ASBOs and being treated as if they are naughty teenagers. But these men are puppeteers.”
This is a universal pattern, familiar throughout communities across Britain. Julie (not her real name), whose 13-year-old daughter fell prey to this kind of sexual exploitation, believes that, in her case, sensitivity about perceived racism led to a reluctance to tackle the problem. “There must be hundreds of girls going through the same thing. But I felt I had a brick wall to knock down before you even got to the real issue. I do believe if it had been white guys, it would have been reported a lot sooner.”
She believes that the men have no respect for the victims. “These guys think the girls are white trash. They know what they can get away with.”
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Mother tells how her daughter, 14, was lured into abusers’ clutches
Jackie is fixed to the computer screen, scrolling through pictures and profiles of her daughter’s 122 “friends”. There are three girls who, like Mandy, 16, are white, young and blonde. The rest of the pictures show young men, with nicknames such as Ginger and Naz. There are enough photos of shiny cars to make a boy racer proud.
“Here’s a toast 2 us,” writes Mandy on the social networking website. “For the men who have us, the losers who had us, and the lucky b*stards who will meet us.”
This is now the only contact Jackie has with her daughter, who, two years ago, became seduced by men who gave her presents and compliments, in exchange for sexual favours among their extended network of brothers, cousins and friends. She had just celebrated her 14th birthday.
Like other mothers in the North West area, Jackie believes the ethnicity of her daughter’s abusers ? predominantly Asian ? makes the subject more difficult to tackle.
She said: “They are committing a crime; it doesn’t matter what colour or religion they are. People are scared it will start a race riot but it is this perception of racism that is putting up a barrier. It is so frustrating. Why should it be swept under the carpet? This is destroying people’s lives. They need prosecuting.”
It started with some new female friends ? Asian girls whom Mandy got to know. Within a year, she had accelerated through the pattern of truancy and drug-taking into full-scale sexual exploitation.
“She began wearing low-cut tops, and horrible heavy make-up,” Jackie recalled.
Then came the drugs. “She would come home from school, her eyes rolling, pupils dilated.”
The socialising took place in the park, the railway station, the street corner. Mandy, once a normal chatty schoolgirl, became a stranger whom her mother would glimpse circling the local shopping centre, accompanied by more than a dozen Asian boys aged from 14 into their twenties.
Then she began to disappear, at first for hours, then days and nights. Finally, her mother would learn later, she would end up in certain houses in predominantly Asian neighbourhoods.
“They call them slag dens,” said Jackie.
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