The Chief Crown Prosecutor for the Northwest (of England), Nazir Afzal, is getting some heat for doing his job.
As the Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West, I led the teams that brought the so-called Rochdale Grooming Gang to justice in 2012 for abusing up to 47 girls.
My work saw me go up against not only the offenders, but those who tried to intimidate me for bringing abusers before the courts. They said I had given racists a stick with which to beat minorities – I said our communities should be carrying their own sticks.
Right-wingers went after him too.
The network of prosecutors I lead has tackled grooming and child sexual abuse in England and Wales for the past two years. We are advising about hundreds of suspects while, at the same time, protecting hundreds of victims. In one operation alone by Greater Manchester Police there are 20 potential victims and 180 suspects.
The problem we identified in Rochdale was that justice was prevented from being delivered because the credibility of the young victims was questioned.
Why? Sexism and classism. The ideal victim should be male, middle-aged, white, and prosperous.
If we don’t believe a young, vulnerable girl, who will? The authorities and communities appeared to have turned a blind eye to the abuse of its children.
The ethnicity of many of the abusers in Rotherham, Rochdale and other places is a matter of fact – they were from Pakistani or South Asian backgrounds.
I do not care where they come from as long as they are stopped and brought to justice. I told Parliament in 2012 that the ethnicity of the perpetrators was an issue, not the issue. It was not the abusers’ race that defined them, but their attitude to women and girls. They targeted girls because of their vulnerability, and failings by those who should have safeguarded them.
There is no excuse for what the abusers did, nor is there any excuse for the authorities to choose not to believe and protect them.
There should be more like Nazir Afzal.
A lot more.
There is nothing to support this statement in the passages you cite, unless you mean to imply that only “right-wingers” question sexual violence victims’ integrity. Sadly we know that victim-blaming is a broad social phenomenon that cannot be put down to politics.
Also are Muslim rapists and pimps who preferentially target non-Muslim women not “right-wing”? Is that rubric reserved, as it so often is in leftish discourse, for white Christians?
I call this out too. A white, prosperous, heterosexual female is the ideal victim, as centuries of English literature and Orientalist tropes attest. Male victims of rape are barely acknowledged. Hanna Rosin had a nice piece at Slate a few months ago on the topic. Plus prison rape is a running joke.
Yes there is; it’s right there in the story. I was simply paraphrasing what he said.
And I meant, obviously, the ideal victim for purposes of being believed from the POV of the police. In other words women are always suspected of lying about rape.
I know men are raped too, but that’s not what this story is about. If you can’t even let this story be about girls being raped and not believed, you should be reading MRA sites instead of this one.
I may be being dense, but I can’t see anything in the passages cited that supports the “right wingers went after him too” line. If right-wingers have done anything, it’s criticise these people for not doing more, sooner. They’ve certainly not tried to stop him investigating. If anything they’ve been marching and loudly demanding something be done, and been ridiculed and condemned for doing so.
See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-28955170. Specifically:
If you can’t even let this story be about children of both genders being abused and not believed you should be posting on… well, I don’t know where you should be posting.
[meta]
Katherine Woo and (in particular) sonofrojblake, I’ve clicked the link:
That’s in the linked story, but not quoted here.
As Ophelia noted in #3 without refuting Katherine (though obviating part of her criticism).
PS, sonofrojblake @4, re
You quoted “significant number of girls and some boys who are being sexually exploited” in order to rebut “girls being raped”? I recognise pedantry when I see it.
(You might care to consider whether the claim that the story is about “girls being raped” is either false or misleading, as you strongly suggest)
More than 70 alleged victims in one report from seven years ago = pedantry.
False? No.
Misleading? Possibly.
Disingenuous, sexist and dehumanising of the seventy male victims we know about from the one report and the likely many more we don’t?
This story is not about “girls being raped”. If this story is “about” anything, it’s defining characteristics are:
1. the widespread, organised sexual abuse of children of both genders over the course of decades
2. the fact that this abuse was perpetrated with apparent impunity specifically by men of Pakistani origin, specifically operating from within a culture of contempt for women and children in general and non-Muslim women and children in particular.
3. the fact that the authorities, up to and including Members of Parliament, hushed up these crimes in the name of community cohesion
The ‘acceptable’ sexual exploitation of boys in some cultures is a real issue. But the current reports seem to be focused on ‘South Asian’ and Muslim hatred of women/girls and the sense of entitled superiority that Islam teaches.
I have seen no report of boys being trafficked or raped in Rotherham, yet.
I needed to see that there are some like him still in authority structures. Thank you. That helps with the optimism.
As for the commentary controversy,
I think that the application of “right-wingers” is fair because that does map onto conservative and other groups that are in appropriately biased on race, sex and class. Speaking of group biases is fair and like Ferguson other nations will have their bigoted authority structures that feed off of the culture. I’m sure that a predatory abuser would have no problem appealing to such biases in order to “stay off radar” or push an authority to think that prosecution was too much trouble even if they were also part of those marginalized groups. The rot tends to be at multiple levels and sides.
Is there a reason to think this might not apply to England? I know that the terms do flip around in other countries with respect to political biases.
I did not really have a problem with this either because this speaks to the fact that the authorities usually have the least trouble acting as if this group are victims. They have the most trouble treating female, non-white, young, and poor people as victims because of institutional bias.