Jack Straw says Pak must face up to grooming scandal following Rochdale case

September 27, 2012 | World News | Written by

London, Sep. 27: British lawmaker Jack Straw has said the issue of ethnicity in the Rochdale case cannot be ignored and that the Pakistani community should face up to the grooming scandal following the case, where dozens of girls were found to be groomed for sex by a group of men of Pakistani origin.

“There is an issue of ethnicity here which can’t be ignored. It is true that if you go into the sex offenders wings of prisons there are proportionally more white men than Asian men. But there’s also the separate issue of group grooming in the Asian community,” The Telegraph quoted the former Home Secretary, as saying.

“In terms of group grooming, there is an ethnic dimension to this which is Asian men and white girls, and that has to be faced by the Asian community. These are small communities, and people would have an idea that there are groups of men that are abusing girls in this way, and that has to be faced,” he added.

According to Straw lay with the police and social workers who failed to take action to protect them.

A report into the events in Rochdale has found that police and social services missed dozens of opportunities to intervene to stop the abuse.

Girls as young as 10 were considered to have consented to sex, and were said to have made a lifestyle choice to have relations with dozens of strange men in return for money, food and drugs.

Nine members of the group were convicted of rape and other offences following a trial in May.

Last year, when the Rochdale scandal first emerged, Straw claimed that some men in the Pakistani community viewed white girls as “easy meat”.

“There is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men … who target vulnerable young white girls. We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way,” he said. (ANI)