Britain: Is ‘sexual grooming’ an Asian problem?

“No schoolgirl is safe” from Asian gangs hell-bent on recruiting “sex slaves,” said Jerry Lawton in the London Daily Star. Two British men of Pakistani descent were jailed this month for leading a gang that raped and abused dozens of white girls. It was no isolated case. Jack Straw, a top Labor MP and former home secretary who represents a heavily Asian district, has come out and said what police have been whispering for years: Asian men specifically target young white girls for “sexual grooming” because they see them as “easy meat.” A new report showed that in major prosecutions over the past 15 years for sexual exploitation of girls, fully 53 of the 56 men convicted were Asian. And the victims were overwhelmingly white.

To focus only on Asian gangs and white victims is to miss the point, said Alexandra Topping in the London Guardian. “Children of all backgrounds are at risk.” Last year alone, the children’s aid group Barnardo’s dealt with more than 1,000 kids who had been groomed for sex, and while most were white, there were also Asian and black children among the victims. The technique is insidious. A young girl will be approached, plied with gifts and flattery, and made to believe she is loved. Then the man she thinks loves her starts forcing her to have sex with his friends. Some girls are coerced into posing for sexually explicit photos that are used “to blackmail and control them.” It is true that much of the “on-street” grooming involves Pakistani men, but the vast majority of grooming in general is done online, and by white men.

Don’t change the subject to online grooming—we’re talking about Asian gangs, said Leo McKinstry in the London Express. “The hypocrisy of the politically correct brigade is truly nauseating.” These zealots claim to be champions of women’s rights and protectors of the weak and oppressed. “Yet, suddenly, when confronted with the reality of vicious sexual exploitation of young white girls by Asian men, they drop their supposedly cherished principles” and claim that these girls aren’t being singled out. The fact is that Muslim culture encourages men to see women in general as objects and white women in particular as immoral sexpots. “It is absurd to pretend” that this despicable trend involving Asian gangs “has nothing to do with Islam.”

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Perhaps it’s true that “Asian boys view white girls as drunken, worthless, subhuman trash,” said Barbara Ellen in the London Observer. But “frankly, so does much of non-Asian Britain.” The British media has devoted endless coverage to the phenomenon of boozy “ladettes” who stagger out of pubs and vomit into gutters. “In recent years, haven’t we all become rather too comfortable with seeing girls portrayed like this?” It isn’t just Asian society that doesn’t respect white girls—it is British society. And that’s something we all need to change.