Betrayed by the PC brigade: From the Mail writer who first revealed the scandal of Muslim sex gangs, a damning exposé of how politically correct police and social workers betrayed underage white victims

By Sue Reid
27 September 2012

For 20 years or more, there has been a shameful silence about the sexual exploitation of young girls in this country. Hundreds of children — some of them still at primary school — have been groomed by street gangs and turned into sex slaves.

And it is still going on today.

When I have written about this subject after investigations in towns and cities in the North of England, I have been reviled as a hater of our immigrant communities in abusive emails, letters and phone calls by those who continue to deny such things are going on.

For there is an uncomfortable truth about this abhorrent crime which we must not flinch from: the majority of girls ensnared by the street gangs are white, while most of the perpetrators come from the Pakistani and South Asian communities.

Of course, the great majority of people from these communities are decent citizens, and people from all races are capable of evil.

But I believe the controversial issue of these street gangs has been swept under the carpet, regarded as a taboo subject by police officers and social workers terrified of being labelled racist in ever more politically correct modern Britain.

Worried parents alerting social services and police about gangs have been ignored. NHS health clinics, treating the girls for sexual diseases, injuries and pregnancies, have sounded the alarm. Yet nothing has been done.

Teachers who reported teenage girls with hangovers and bruises taking constant calls on their mobiles from older men during school hours have been met with a wall of silence from officialdom.

Frightening: Dozens of children in Rochdale, pictured, were abused despite the authorities being repeatedly warned about them being at risk

Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Lancashire-based Ramadhan Foundation, a charity working for ethnic harmony, has warned: 'The police are over-cautious because they fear being branded racist'

Shockingly, one middle-class father from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, who told social workers that his 15-year-old daughter had been lured into an underage sex ring based at a local kebab shop, was told by them that the girl was making a ‘lifestyle’ choice to be a prostitute.

The social services refused to help the teenager escape.

Meanwhile, the police told the father there was ‘no prospect’ of convicting the gang members, who drove his daughter to ‘cash-for-sex’ sessions with scores of Muslim men in rented houses or public car parks all over the North of England.

At the time, despite her parents raising the alarm and subsequent DNA swabs from the girl’s underwear directly linking her to one of the gang, the police did not act and the gang’s members remained free and continued to sexually abuse her — and many other girls in Rochdale — for another two years.

As this father told me just the other day: ‘The police were scared stiff of being called racist, so for years they didn’t go after these men.



One of many victims: Laura Wilson, 17, from Rotherham had been groomed by a string of British Pakistanis before she was stabbed and thrown into a canal to die for informing her abusers' families of the sexual relationships in June this year



Killer: Ashtiaq Asghar repeatedly stabbed Laura Wilson (pictured above) and left her to die in a canal, after she told her abusers families of the sexual exploitation

‘The social workers were just as bad. They were afraid of saying it is a crime against white girls.’

His is not a lone view. Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Lancashire-based Ramadhan Foundation, a charity working for ethnic harmony, has warned: ‘The police are over-cautious because they fear being branded racist. That is wrong. These gangs of men are criminals, and should be treated as criminals whatever their race.’

But I have discovered that it is not only the police and social workers who turn a blind eye. The very agencies set up to help the girls recover from the abuse are equally reluctant to admit there is a strong racial element to these hideous crimes.

One charity, Risky Business, operating in Rotherham, refused to answer any of my questions on the racial make-up of the men in the sex gangs.



South Yorkshire Police headquarters in Sheffield where details of the problem of sexual exploitation are revealed in internal reports prepared by the force

At another, the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping, in Leeds, the chief executive told me: ‘This is a crime committed by men. We are trying to work in certain communities to change their attitudes to women. I cannot comment on the race of the criminals involved.’

This week, at last, the full truth began to emerge about the cover-up of crimes Scotland Yard estimates have affected 5,000 British-born children, the majority girls.

At least ten towns and cities on both sides of the Pennines have been particularly plagued by the gangs. Their members get rich because they can reap four times as much money trading young girls for sex as they can trading in drugs.

I have established that in the small city of Blackburn alone, at least 385 girls were groomed by men in a recent two-year period. Sheila Taylor, chairwoman of the National Working Group for Sexually Exploited Children and Young People, has told me that this figure will be similar in any other town of the same size in the North of England or the Midlands.



Ringleader: Shabir Ahmed was convicted of 30 counts of rape following a two week trial at Manchester Crown Court

What is most shocking is the fact that a series of new reports show police and social services have missed hundreds of opportunities to protect the child victims.

Yesterday, an official review of sexual exploitation of girls in Rochdale — ordered after the jailing of nine men aged between 22 and 59 for multiple child sex offences in the town — revealed that 50 children, the vast majority aged ten to 17, were identified [by the authorities] five years ago as having ‘clear links to take-away food businesses and to associated taxi companies’.

The girls, repeatedly raped, were treated by social workers as ‘wilful’ young teenagers ‘engaging in consensual sexual activity’.

‘When complaints reached the police, their investigations were inadequate,’ the review said.

From South Yorkshire, confidential documents told the same sorry story. A police intelligence report compiled in 2010 says thousands of sexual exploitation crimes against young white and mixed race girls have gone on in the county.

‘There is a problem with networks of Muslim offenders both locally and nationally,’ it reported. ‘This is particularly stressed in Sheffield, even more so in Rotherham, where there appears to be a significant problem with Asian males exploiting young white females.’

Yet local police, social workers and councils ignored the growing crisis.

One white girl in Rotherham, who was sexually abused by one such gang, was — incongruously — offered lessons in Urdu and Punjabi by social services to help get her over her ordeal.

According to the documents, 54 girls in Rotherham were sexually exploited by three brothers from a ‘British Pakistani’ family. Eighteen of the girls identified one of the brothers as their ‘boyfriend’, and he had made several of them pregnant.

Three brothers from another ‘British Pakistani’ family and 41 associates were linked to the sexual abuse of another 61 girls in the same area. Denis MacShane, the local Labour MP, says the serial sexual abuse of young girls should be a wake-up call for the police, local authorities and Britain’s Asian community. He is demanding an independent public inquiry, and blames a ‘misplaced racial sensitivity’ for the crisis.

So how are such vile crimes taking place in so-called civilised Britain, and why have such gangs been allowed to flourish so they now believe they can act with impunity?




Monsters: Abdul Aziz (left), 41, was given nine years for conspiracy and trafficking for sexual exploitation. Mohammed Sajid (right), 35, received 12 years tor conspiracy, trafficking, one count of rape and one count of sexual activity with a child



Scum: Hamid Safi (left), 22, was given four years for conspiracy and trafficking but not guilty of two counts of rape. Adil Khan (right), 42, was found guilty of conspiracy and trafficking for sexual exploitation

‘They are laughing at the police,’ one youth worker in South Yorkshire told me this week. ‘These men may get called into the police station for a dressing down, but so few are taken to court.

‘They now think they are invincible, and, of course, they’re not frightened of accusing the police of racism themselves if things get tricky for them. Then everything is dropped.’

At the heart of the scandal are uncomfortable cultural issues. Many men of Pakistani heritage believe white girls have low morals compared to Muslim girls.

The same youth worker explained to me: ‘These girls wear what the men call “slags’ clothing” and show too much of their bodies.’

To add to this cultural divide, the men are often in loveless arranged marriages with wives from Pakistan who speak no English. They want to have sex, and a young virgin free of sexual diseases is the perfect victim.

Victim: A vulnerable 13-year-old white girl wrote a letter to herself saying Asian men took her dreams and life away from her (posed by model)

Gang members are often unemployed, so have time to groom girls — luring them into a trap which is nearly always sprung in the same way.

The girl might be out with her friends in the town centre, often on a Saturday afternoon. She is bored, and when a group of smiling men pull up in a flashy car with blaring rap music, she is flattered.

Tanya’s story illustrates their modus operandi. In 2001, Tanya, a 13-year-old, became Britain’s youngest mother after she was coerced into becoming the sex slave of a gang in Yorkshire.

Tanya went to the local secondary school and lived with her single mother in a neat terraced house.

At the shops one day, a group of men came up to her. They took her off in their car and plied her with vodka. They gave her a mobile phone to receive calls from them, and bought her gifts and meals.

After a week or two, they said they wanted to have sex with her in return. Frightened of them, she agreed. She became pregnant, but by then she had slept with so many men from the Pakistani community that she did not know who the father was.

DNA tests by police on five of the most likely candidates did not prove paternity. Two of the gang members who were tested confessed to sleeping with Tanya when she was 12.

Shockingly, they were never charged with any offence for having sex with an under-age child.

The birth was hushed up, and the gang got off scot-free. The local council and social services department then went to the High Court in London and secured an injunction stopping anyone — including Tanya and her family — ever talking about the matter again. They have never done so.

The terrifying question is just how many other girls like Tanya have been let down by a system that does not dare tell the truth?

Lessons need to be learnt. And they need to be learnt with great urgency.

Education Nation: Rural Arkansas Town Rethinks High School

A group of students in a high school gym hovers over a remote controlled robot while it shoots basketballs from the free throw line with better precision than Dwight Howard. They built and programmed the robot themselves, and it won first prize in a global robotics competition.

In a classroom nearby, other students are studying leeches recently used in microsurgery to reattach a severed hand.

And down the hall, a third group of students is working on a team building exercise—competing against each other to build the tallest tower using nothing more than marshmallows and toothpicks. "We need to break these right here," says one student, as the exercise tests their communication skills and math. (Read More:Broken Education System To 'Destroy Everything' If Not Fixed: Langone)

You might think you've landed in a high-priced private high school, prepping teenagers for America's top colleges. Instead, this is a public high school in a small town in Northern Arkansas.





Mountain Home Career Academies High School has taken a big gamble over the last decade. It transformed itself from a traditional high school into one consisting of three academies--engineering, communications, and healthcare. Unlike many high schools which have career mentoring programs tucked inside a regular curriculum, Mountain Home is "wall to wall" academies. Each of its 875 students were tested as freshmen, and based on their learning styles, skills, and interests, the students have chosen which academy to join.

"Our community came to us and said their workforce was retiring, and they were looking at different areas where we could continue to grow our community and keep our graduates in town," says principal Dana Brown, who oversaw the switchover. "At first it was scary...but if you empower people, people support what they help create."

Brown says nearly a decade in, student test scores are above average, and more students are going to two- and four-year colleges after graduation. "There is a passion behind these students," says academy coordinator Brigitte Shipman. "You can see it, and you can't fake that."

Thomas McLees is a senior who moved here from Montana, where he attended a traditional high school. After some thought, he chose Mountain Home's engineering academy. "I knew I was more 'hands on' because all my life I had been taking apart computers, toasters, my mom got really made at me for that." He comes from a long line of military veterans. "I want to make military body armor and medical stuff."

Do career academies better prepare students for life after high school? Social policy research group MDRC looked at results from nine academies in or near large urban school districts and found that graduates earned, on average, 11 percent more over eight years compared to non-academy peers. The effect was concentrated among men. Nearly all academy students--95 percent--graduated or completed their GEDs. (Read More: America's Top States for Business 2012- Education Rankings)

Principal Brown says Mountain Home has thrived in this new format because of community support. Businesses like Baxter Healthcare [BAX 61.39 0.24 (+0.39%) ] and Wells Fargo [WFC 35.50 0.405 (+1.15%) ], along with other local professionals, come in regularly to mentor students. At the same time, students do internships, and teachers participate in what are called "externships"--pairing them with businesses to learn what kind of job applicants are needed.

"We bring real life applications for things out in the community to the kids, things they wouldn't have the opportunity to see if we were a regular, traditional high school," says medical professions teacher Alecia Czanstkowski.

Still, it was a learning curve for teachers.

"When I first heard we're thinking about academies, I thought, 'Ok, is this the next big educational thing we will go through...and then not?" says teacher Kathy Gonten. "But when I saw the real makeup of it, I thought, 'This IS the next big thing. This is where we should be heading.'"

While more kids are scoring better and going to college, it's not clear they are coming back to work in the town of Mountain Home, population 12,454. Dana Brown admits they need to improve their post graduation job tracking. There's also been some concern that putting teenagers into academies limits their choices at a time when they should be exploring all options. "I don't think it limits them, I think it enhances what they already have," says math teacher Kathy Wham. "We're giving these kids opportunities already that other kids don't have until their third or fourth year of college." 

Students in each academy are exposed to classes in the other career tracks, and they can change their minds. Thomas McLees vacillated between engineering and health services. "Instead of going to college and taking a major and not wanting to finish it, and having to switch and pay thousands of extra dollars, you will go to college knowing, 'Hey, I liked this, but I didn't want to do it,' so you can jump into something you know you are good at." 

Mountain Home administrators and teachers also think they've better prepared the students for job interviews and public speaking. Rachael Arp is in the communications academy, where students have to make business presentations in the community. "I think it has definitely made me more confident."

The school boasts several examples of students who suddenly realize, through an internship or a mentor, what they're passionate about. 

"I was just born to be there," says senior Megan Cantrell of the health services academy. Cantrell, raised by a single mom who is a probation officer, has chosen a very different career path for herself. "I want to go into anesthesiology." Why? "When I started going through medical classes, I was like, 'This is what I really want to do.'" 

[ed. It is way past time for our schools to stop being conveyor belts for drop outs and started to actually teach our young people the important skills necessary to take on the world. This is accomplished by channelling their time and energies into activities they are good at, show an aptitude for or at least show more of an interest in. It isn't an easy task but at least one school is trying to "think outside the box". Kudos to them...]

Muslim-led nations seek global ban on insults of Muhammad

By Guy Taylor
The Washington Times
September 24, 2012

As the U.N. General Assembly convenes this week in New York, several leaders of mostly Muslim nations are suggesting that the world body consider sanctions on blasphemy, amid widespread protests against an amateur movie that denigrates Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he will focus at least part of his remarks on the film when he addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday.
“I am the prime minister of a nation, of which most are Muslims, that has declared anti-Semitism a crime against humanity. But the West hasn’t recognized Islamophobia as a crime against humanity. It has encouraged it,” Mr. Erdogan told reporters last week.
Turkey heads the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a body of 57 nations, which has long pushed for a U.N. resolution condemning the “defamation of religion.”
Nonbinding versions of the resolution have been adopted, but the effort was crushed last year by religious groups and human rights activists who argued that it represented a dangerous step toward an international law against free speech.
The debate has been reignited by “Innocence of Muslims,” a crudely produced film made in the United States that has sparked fury in the Muslim world. Protesters have breached the walls at U.S. embassies and desecrated American flags in sometimes violent demonstrations. A protest in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi ended with the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appealed Monday to Muslims to show “dignity” and not resort to violence as they protest the film, the Associated Press reported.
“Dignity does not come from avenging insults, especially with violence that can never be justified,” Mrs. Clinton said at her husband’s Clinton Global Initiative. “It comes from taking responsibility and advancing our common humanity.”
In New York on Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alluded to the film and accused the United States and others of misusing freedom of speech and of failing to speak out against the defamation of people’s beliefs and “divine prophets.”
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose country boasts the world’s largest Muslim population, has condemned the film and called on “the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the U.N. to mull over international protocol to prevent such things like this from happening again.”
Pakistan’s parliament passed a resolution condemning “Innocence of Muslims” and demanding the nation’s leaders to call on the United Nations to take action against those who made the film.
Nonbinding resolution
At least one politician has gone a step further in Egypt, where the anti-American protests were triggered after a Salafist Muslim TV network broadcast Arabic-dubbed clips of the film.
“We call for legislation or a resolution to criminalize contempt of Islam as a religion and its prophet,” Emad Abdel Ghaffour, who heads the ultra-orthodox sect’s Nour political party, told Reuters over the weekend.
Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi will address the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, and many are waiting to see whether he will echo Mr. Ghaffour’s remarks.

While the Nour party holds the second-largest bloc in Egyptian parliament to Mr. Morsi’s more mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, doctrinal and political differences exist between the two.
Mr. Morsi may be more likely to use his first appearance as president before the U.N. to focus on other regional issues, such as Egypt’s potential role as a mediator in Syria’s civil war.
Free-speech and human rights advocates were watching the United Nations closely in anticipation of a charged debate about free speech within the context of the “Innocence of Muslims” film.
“The behavior of an anti-Islam propagandist, as hurtful as it may be to the religious sensitivities of some Muslims, should not be used as a justification to curtail core freedoms or justify potential government repression,” said Sanjeev Bery, an advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International USA.
His comments echo a statement that the U.S. government issued to the U.N. in 2008, asserting that “the concept of ‘defamation of religions’ is not supported by international law.”
“There have been numerous reports that this concept is being used in some member states to justify torture, imprisonment and other forms of abuse,” said the statement, which was made after the General Assembly’s 2007 passage of a nonbinding resolution titled “Combating defamation of religions.”
The resolution stated that “everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” and put forth a wide set of conditions under which such freedom could be curtailed.
“[It] should be exercised with responsibility and may therefore be subject to limitations, according to law and necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others; protection of national security or of public order, public health or morals; and respect for religions and beliefs,” the resolution stated.
‘The film is an excuse’
The language pitted the U.S. and much of Europe against Middle Eastern and some African and Latin American nations that had pushed for the measure and ultimately paved the way for a carefully reworded 2011 U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution that focused less on defamation and more on prohibiting discrimination.
The 2011 resolution is titled “Combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief.”
While some conservative groups in the United States criticized the Obama administration for backing the 2011 resolution, free-speech advocates generally have embraced it.
Courtney C. Radsch, program manager for the Global Freedom of Expression Campaign at Freedom House, said the 2011 development shifted the discussion at the U.N. away “from this attempt to create an international blasphemy law and instead focused it on combating religious intolerance at the ground level.”
The problem with the earlier resolution, Ms. Radsch said, was that it equated “religious discrimination, which is a real human rights issue, with this vague concept of defamation, not to mention the issue of who decides what constitutes blasphemy or what constitutes defamation.”
She said it “remains to be seen” whether Muslim leaders will try to renew calls for a blasphemy law this week. “I think there’s a lot of talk about it because of everything that’s been happening with this video being used as an excuse to insight violence on the ground,” she said.

 “The film is an excuse,” Ms. Radsch said. “The film did not incite violence. There were intermediaries who used the film as a pretext to manipulate the public and public opinion that has resulted in mass violence. But there’s no causal link between the video itself and the violence that has occurred.”

France set to ban the words 'mother' and 'father' from official documents

 

 France is set to ban the words "mother" and "father" from all official documents under controversial plans to legalise gay marriage.

 The move, which has outraged Catholics, means only the word "parents" would be used in identical
marriage ceremonies for all heterosexual and same-sex couples.

The draft law states that "marriage is a union of two people, of different or the same gender".

It says all references to "mothers and fathers" in the civil code – which enshrines French law – will be swapped for simply "parents".

 The law would also give equal adoption rights to homosexual and heterosexual couples.

Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told France's Catholic newspaper La Croix: "Who is to say that a heterosexual couple will bring a child up better than a homosexual couple, that they will guarantee the best conditions for the child's development?"

"What is certain is that the interest of the child is a major preoccupation for the government."
The head of the French Catholic Church Cardinal Philippe Barbarin warned followers last week that gay marriage could lead to legalised incest and polygamy in society.
He told the Christian's RFC radio station: "Gay marriage would herald a complete breakdown in society.

"This could have innumerable consequences. Afterward they will want to create couples with three or four members. And after that, perhaps one day the taboo of incest will fall."
Leading French Catholics have also published a 'Prayer for France', which says: "Children should not be subjected to adults' desires and conflicts, so they can fully benefit from the love of their mother and father."

And Pope Benedict XVI invited 30 French bishops to Italy to urge them to fight against the new law.
He told them: "We have there a true challenge to take on.
"The family that is the foundation of social life is threatened in many places, following a concept of human nature that has proven defective."

President Francois Hollande pledged in his manifesto to legalise gay marriage. The draft law will be presented to his cabinet for approval on October 31.