The scale of the grooming gangs operations, and the sheer length of time in which the perpetrators operated with near impunity, have prompted uncomfortable questions about the diaspora in which these crimes flourished. For many years, those questions could not even be voiced without risking serious reputational consequences. It is only now, with the announcement of a national inquiry into the grooming gangs, that it has become possible to countenance the ethnic heritage of some of the perpetrators without courting accusations of racism, Islamophobia or “dog whistling”. As Baroness Casey’s review starkly states, there has been a lack of research into ethnicity and cultural issues that might improve our understanding of offending and increase our chances of tackling it.
The unavoidable truth, though, and one that will be central to the inquiry, is that the majority of these rapists were of Pakistani Muslim heritage. This was laid out in an academic study of the topic in 2020, as well Alexis Jay’s 2014 report into the Rotherham component of the abuse. But to attempt to dig deeper into this tendency has hitherto been fraught — as Kemi Badenoch found out earlier this year when she clumsily referred to a certain element of this diaspora as “peasants”.
Inevitably, Badenoch’s comments were met with outrage — mainly because of the terminology she used. But there was an element of truth to her observations. Badenoch was referring to a subsection of the Pakistani community who, over the past decades have made their way to Britain from Mirpur, which is a rural district of Azad Kashmir, the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir. This is a significant diaspora: 70% of Britain’s already numerous Pakistanis can trace their heritage to this poverty-stricken region in their motherland’s north. And to examine it further might be useful.
Mirpuris began to come to the UK, at first in small numbers, more than a century ago. After the Second World War, though, the British government started encouraging young, single men from Mirpur and the surrounding areas to move to the UK’s northern industrial areas to make up for labour shortages in factory towns.
This suited the Mirpuris. Their region sits on the periphery of Kashmir, which was on the Pakistani side of Partition, whose function was essentially to split the subcontinent’s Hindus from its Muslims. One result of the new border was that Mirpuris were now less able to take up jobs in Mumbai. This meant that British jobs became more attractive to villagers.
Those who remained did not experience much largesse from the new Pakistani state. Mirpur was given little in the way of roads, schools, and other public services. Those who had settled in Britain sent back word to their kinsmen of the new opportunities that were opening up.
The migration was still not large-scale, but that changed in the Sixties. Pakistan’s construction of the Mangla Dam, which began in 1961, had submerged hundreds of villages in the Mirpur District, displacing more than 100,000 people — many of whom moved to Britain. This was the labour migration phase of the chain, which was followed by family migration and reunification in the Seventies and Eighties. The new arrivals were mostly conservative villagers adhering to a rigid set of social and cultural hierarchies. These Mirpuris, like those they were joining in Britain, were not highly educated, and they had little or no experience of urban living in Pakistan. From the Nineties onwards, Mirpuris flowed into the UK through “marriage migration”, with rural and low-skilled men from Kashmir marrying British-born Mirpuris in the UK and moving to towns such as Bradford, Birmingham, Luton and the surrounding areas.
Tony Capstick, an associate professor of language and migration at the University of Reading, has been studying the UK’s Pakistani Mirpuri population for almost 17 years, working closely with families in both Lancashire and Mirpur. “What’s happened, in a nutshell,” says Capstick, “is migrants from a very poor part of the other side of the planet, with completely different religious and cultural practices, have come to live and work in a very disadvantaged part of the UK where already there’s huge social problems”. As a result, these post-industrial towns are now embroiled in “this situation where it’s been difficult for both communities to live together”. Of course, not all British Mirpuris are conservative, and not all of them are reluctant to integrate. But a certain element has preferred to stay in insular communities, choosing to import spouses from villages and small towns in Azad Kashmir. Integration isn’t happening.
“It’s a reflection of attitudes that one sees not just in Pakistanis in the UK, but that are commonly held by many people in Pakistan as well,” says Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani scientist who is an outspoken critic of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism in Pakistani society. “From what I saw in Birmingham and in Bradford,” says Hoodbhoy, “these communities essentially do not interact with others and look at them with a degree of hostility, particularly when it comes to their women and girls being in contact with the rest of the British population.”
It is important to note, as Hoodbhoy does, that there is a growing movement within the population and its diaspora to embrace liberal values. Increasingly, the later generations are university educated and increasingly detached from the culture and traditions of their forebears. “But those at the lower end of the social stratum keep an insular existence, and the strong influence of the imams at their local mosques makes it even more difficult for them to break out into mainstream society.”
Meanwhile, the number of these mosques and madrassas (Islamic schools) have been growing, from 338 mosques in 1985 to over 2,000 today. These institutions sometimes perpetuate an Islamist worldview that prevents the newcomers from seeing themselves as British — as with the hardline Muslims who tried to impose an “intolerant and aggressive” Islamic agenda on some schools in Birmingham. The more radical among them include preachers who encourage their followers to dismiss any notion of their identity being tied to Britain.
As Hoodbhoy suggests, “Britain’s experiment in multiculturalism did not take into account the regressive values that Islam can preach.” And some of those values are at odds with life in liberal Britain, as many are now pointing out. Furthermore, it’s a dynamic, suggests Hoodbhoy, that has allowed a sub-section of the community to utterly avoid integration. Indeed, rather than marrying out, many families choose to bringing over to be “imported husbands” — young men who have come to Britain via the spousal visa scheme.
“Britain’s experiment in multiculturalism did not take into account the regressive values that Islam can preach.”
In 2000, more than ten thousand Pakistani nationals were cleared to join spouses in the UK, around half of whom were male. These “unhappy husbands”, as they have been called by academics, face unenviable challenges on first arriving in the UK. They often don’t have good English, and are expected to conform to their in-laws’ expectations of what a ghar damad (house son-in-law) is supposed to do when it comes to his professional and personal lifestyle choices. Many of these men have to accept low-status employment and contend with being dependent on their spouses for their immigration status.
Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that this insular community has closed ranks against what it sees as persecution regarding the grooming gang scandal. The loyalties of the men involved, and of the women to whom they are married, are predominantly to their clan. Outsiders are less worthy of moral regard and protection. Might anything change this?
Hoodbhoy thinks change needs to come from the local mosques which hold such influence over the traditions and beliefs of the population. “Proselytisers crossing borders should be banned,” he says. “Madrassas deprive young children of fundamental skills which are needed for surviving in British society, and unless they are reformed in a manner that is clear and transparent to all, they should not be allowed to function.”
Capstick, though, has a more pessimistic view of the future. “I don’t see them assimilating,” he says of the Mirpuris. “I’ve been doing this now for twenty years and I haven’t seen Mirpuri men and women marrying non-Mirpuris, which, after four generations of being here, is quite unusual for a community.” The cultural dysfunction, it seems, will not be easily abated. Indeed, Casey says that grooming gangs are still operating. And as the inquiry gets underway, officials are bound to obfuscate the true extent of the cover-up — because the truth will be too damaging to contemplate.
