Asian grooming: why we need to talk about sex
Special Report day two: Our investigation into the background to the Rochdale child abuse ring concludes by exploring its cultural and religious implications
Paul Vallely Friday 11 May 2012
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/asian-grooming-why-we-need-to-talk-about-sex-7734712.html
When it comes to sex, Alyas Karmani is a plain-speaking man. For a Muslim imam he is breathtakingly so. "Oral sex and anal sex are taboo in the British Pakistani community," he announces matter-of-fact way over gosht palak in his favourite curry-house just up the hill from Bradford University. "Sex is seen as only for procreation and only in the missionary position. More so if your spouse is from abroad."
He is addressing the question of whether a disproportionate number of British Asian men are involved in grooming underage girls for sex. He thinks the answer is "Yes" – which is also very plain-speaking on a subject around which the British policing, political, academic and social work establishment dances with over-sensitive diplomacy.
Yet Imam Karmani is no maverick. As well as being an imam, he is a psychologist with more than 20 years of practical experience in youth and community work. He is a former adviser to the Department for Education on youth empowerment and a one-time head of race equality for the Welsh Assembly and is now co-director of Street, a project whose name stands for Strategy to Reach, Empower and Educate Teenagers. .
One of its key projects is running courses to change the attitude of young British Pakistanis which, Alyas Karmani believes, underlie the cultural assumptions which have led a number of Asians to become involved in the on-street grooming of schoolgirls for sex. Eight men of Pakistani heritage, and an Afghan, were were convicted at Liverpool Crown Court this week of offences including four rapes, 11 charges of conspiracy to engage children in sexual activity and six of trafficking children for sexual exploitation.
"Many British Pakistani men live in two worlds," he begins. "The first is encompassed by family, business, mosque. It is a socially conservative culture where there is no toleration of sex outside of marriage, and little emphasis on sexual gratification."
Many are emotionally browbeaten into preserving their family honour by marrying a cousin from their family's village in north-west Kashmir, the part of Pakistan from which the forefathers of Bradford's Asian community originally migrated.
These new wives can bring with them "an unhealthy attitude towards sex and sexuality". It is not Islam which induces that, he says, but a traditional rural Kashmiri culture.
"The second world in which British Pakistani men live," he continues, "is the over-sexualised, material and lust-driven English lifestyle, where women are scantily clad, binge-drinking is a mainstream form of entertainment and porn is a massive factor." You might have thought that, as time passed, British Asians would have found middle ground between these two worlds.
But that has not been happening. "Patriarchs and matriarchs within families have huge influence," says the imam. "Conservatism is maintaining its grip. Around 60 to 70 per cent of British Asians, men and women, are still virgins when they marry."
For those Asians who work at night –such as taxi-drivers and takeaway workers – these two worlds collide dramatically in their workplaces which are filled with young women from a culture in which drinking to insensibility is commonplace. "Many of these men do not understand what is appropriate behaviour in wider society and what is not," he adds. "They are so lacking in social skills – because relationships between men and women in Pakistani culture are characterised by a real formality – that they can misconstrue an ordinary conversation with a white girl in their taxi and think she is indicating that she is open to a sexual advance when that is not what she means at all."
Others cannot resist the temptation aroused by women – and young girls – whose cultural assumptions are so alien from their own.
There are a number of ways, says Alyas Karmani, in which second and third generation British Pakistani men cope with the cognitive dissonance induced by living with two conflicting cultures.
Some give in to the temptations of Western life – which in an Asian urban context might mean celebrating values embodied in gangsta music and films. "It links sexual violence with gang lifestyle and glorifies it through rap and videos which degrade a man to 'pimp' and a woman to 'bitch'," Karmani says. Others turn their back on that and embrace religion, sometimes in a puritan or even jihadist way. But many are conflicted into living a double life.
They do that in a variety of ways. "Some have a wife from Pakistan and an English girlfriend by whom they may also have children," he says. "In some cases the English girlfriend predates the wife; some relationships go back to schooldays. Sometimes the arrangement is open – the wife knows about the other family but says nothing. Sometimes even the man will marry the girlfriend under Islamic law, though not under British law, obviously. Some of these relationships are exploitative, others are consensual.
"Some of these men with double lives, who lack the social skills to go out and chat up a white girl of their own age, use prostitutes for sexual gratification," he continues. "But a few abuse the sexuality of vulnerable young girls they come across as taxi-drivers and in takeaways. It's important to stress that this grooming behaviour is not an endemic pattern among Pakistani men; overall there is only a very a small minority of Pakistani men involved in grooming and sex gangs."
Some in the Asian communities resent even this very qualified criticism. Iftikhar Ahmad, of the London School of Islamics Trust, has complained that "native Brits have double standards and are hypocrites [who] don't mention the fact that the majority of men who go to countries in east Asia looking for under-aged sex are white European men".
By cunts
