Rochdale sex grooming gangs: Warsi gets it right

We can only hope that journalists and opinion formers take note of Baroness Sayeeda Warsi’s carefully nuanced articulation of the Rochdale sex grooming gangs and the wider questions it raises. I’ve said on these pages before that language is key if we want to highlight a particular problem within a community without demonising the whole community.

In an interview with the Evening Standard Warsi, who is Tory Party chair stated that,

'A small number of men of Pakistani heritage believe white girls are fair game for sexual abuse.'

She goes on to say that the authorities and communities themselves must deal with these problems in an ‘open and front footed’ way otherwise it would, ‘create a gap for extremist to fill, a gap where hate can be peddled’.

The point Warsi is making is that there are particularly questions that need to be raised in often relatively closed Muslim communities in which some vulnerable non-Muslim young women are being targeted by some men precisely because they are all of the above and often easy to exploit. Key to Warsi’s interview which has been missing in almost every news piece and article written about the Rochdale convictions is her opening statement:

A small number of men of Pakistani heritage.

If we are going to talk about crimes and race, which should only be if it is germane to the story, even then we should be careful to avoid making sweeping statements which can only add to the accumulation of ‘passive racism’.

For example when most of the media talks about sex gangs they speak about ‘Asian sex gangs’, but when they talk about paedophiles which is overwhelmingly white and of certain age no race is mentioned. Same goes for football hooliganism, bank robberies and ‘white colour’ crime. There are exceptions for ‘white collar’ crimes of course: Kweku Adoboli, the young "rogue trader" brought up and educated here was often described as Ghanaian.

Racial reference quickly leads to racial profiling: ‘We are looking for a young black man aged between 14-18’, translates to all young Black men are potential criminals. ‘Asian male sexual deviants’, equally translates to all Asian men are potential sexual deviant.

If the Tory Party Chair Sayeeda Warsi, like many others are prepared to have an honest conversation about particular problems within communities, then society would do well to avoid unnecessary racial referencing and its more pernicious offshoot, racial profiling.

Somehow I don’t hold much hope.

Simon Woolley