But soon, Mr. Ahmed, a father of four, would demand payback. In a room above one of the restaurants, according to testimony and evidence in later legal proceedings against him, he would play a pornographic DVD and pass around shots of vodka. Then, on a floor mattress with crumpled blue sheets and kitchen smells wafting from below, he raped them, and later forced them into sex with co-workers and friends, too.
The girls were too scared of him to talk. And when they did, no one believed them. Once, a 15-year-old got so drunk and upset that she smashed a glass counter. Mr. Ahmed and his colleagues did not hesitate to call the police. After she was released, she was coerced into sex four or five times a week, sometimes with half a dozen men at a time, in apartments and taxis around Rochdale, a town in northwest England near Manchester. [...]
The recent revelations that at least 1,400 teenage and preteenage girls had been sexually exploited
over 16 years by so-called grooming gangs in another northern English
city, Rotherham, stunned the nation because of the sheer scale of the
abuse. And it put an uncomfortable spotlight on issues of race, religion
and ethnicity in an increasingly multicultural nation: Nearly all of
the rape suspects are Pakistani men, and nearly all of the victims are
white. [...]
In a country already fiercely debating issues of immigration and
national identity, the cases have prompted anti-Muslim demonstrations by
far-right groups and some soul-searching generally. Why do
British-Pakistani men figure so prominently? Were they deliberately
targeting white girls and staying away from their own community? Did
police and local officials turn a blind eye for fear of being accused of
racism, losing votes among immigrant groups or stoking the kinds of
tensions that have unleashed periodic rioting in other British towns? [...]
A
powerful culture of shame and honor surrounding premarital sex,
including rape, among some Asian Muslims, may also have skewed the
victim statistics. Honor and shame certainly proved an effective tool
when Mr. Shabir blackmailed his Asian victim into silence during a
decade of regular abuse. “You are damaged goods,” he would tell her,
threatening to force her into marriage if she spoke up, Mr. Afzal
recalled. Asian victims of sexual abuse are three times less likely to
come forward than white victims, he said, citing Home Office data.
“They fear not just their rapists,” said Shaista Gohir, chairwoman of the Muslim Women’s Network U.K.
“They fear their own community and their own family: They fear honor
crime, forced marriage and being shunned and ostracized for bringing
shame to their family.” [...]
A video of an actress strolling round to New York cataloged scores of uninvited comments, mostly from colored people. This led to complaints of racism and death threats, forcing the video producers to state [perhaps falsely] that all sectors contributed equally to the abuse.
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