In Pakistan, more than 12 children are sexually abused every day (ASIF HASSAN/AFP via Getty Images)

The first time Rahim* was raped by a family member, he was six years old. In the early Nineties, three of Rahim’s uncles immigrated from Pakistan to the small town in Southern Ontario, Canada where Rahim’s family lived. He was five years old at the time; his elder sisters were nine and 14, and his baby brother was a new-born. The sexual abuse started almost immediately. Rahim says he was raped by one of his uncles “extremely frequently” for five years: two to three times a week, every week. His sisters weren’t spared either.
When he was eight, Rahim told one of his sisters that he had seen their uncle naked on numerous occasions. Both of them realised that they, along with their other sister, were being sexually abused after their daily Quran class with him. “Each day he’d pick who gets to leave and who gets to stay,” Rahim says. “I got the worst of it.”
In the liberal West, just implying that Pakistani communities have high rates of child sexual abuse (CSA) can result in accusations of bigotry. The subject is even more unmentionable in Pakistan itself. The nation has one of the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the world: over half a million children are raped there every year. (That is a conservative estimate.) According to recent reports, children are most at risk from the age of six, with nine being the most common age to be raped.
As the grooming gang scandals erupting in the UK have shown, this permissive attitude towards CSA seems to be spreading. A new documentary by GBNews attempts to uncover why the abuse scandal in Rotherham — in which more than 1,500 underage, often impoverished, white girls were groomed and raped by gangs of Pakistani men — was allowed to go on for decades without the authorities intervening. One obvious reason is that these authorities were afraid of being seen as “racist” for focusing the investigation on the predominantly Pakistani men who are running these rings. But it’s equally important to recognise that these crimes were covered up by the Pakistani community itself, which allowed abusers to continue with impunity. The documentary shows how Pakistani-British policemen and Rotherham city councillors either tried to suppress reports about the scandal, or deny it was happening at all.
To reject the uncomfortable truth is the modus operandi in Pakistan, where more than 12 children are reported to be sexually abused every day. In the tight-knit, working-class communities where it’s most likely to take place, fear of bringing “shame” on the family is prioritised over safeguarding individuals, even if they’re children. A conservative attitude towards discussing topics of a sexual nature doesn’t help. A 2013 report by Save The Children offers an insight into how family dynamics play out when CSA is uncovered in Pakistan, where its prevalence “appears to be high”. Of the 99% of mothers in Pakistan who were aware of CSA, around one-fifth either considered children as compliant, or blamed them for the abuse. Confronted with the grizzly details of such crimes, it is common for Pakistanis to downplay their severity, with men often seeing it as “a part of life”, to use the report’s phrase.
In Rahim’s family, when the eldest sister finally told their mother that an uncle had regularly raped three of the four children in the house, Rahim’s mother didn’t believe her, instead accusing her of “being hysterical and dramatic”. When her siblings insisted that the abuse was, in fact, happening, their mother finally confronted the uncle — but didn’t mention it to Rahim’s father, a marine engineer who was away from home for up to 10 months of the year. The uncle apologised, and the abuse stopped — but just for a few months. It was only when the uncle got married and moved out that the children’s five-year ordeal finally came to an end. By then, Rahim says, the eldest sister’s “problems started manifesting because of the trauma and she started rebelling”, eventually running away from home and telling the authorities about the abuse. When Rahim’s father was told, he didn’t believe any of it was true.
We have to recognise that these attitudes are cultural, if we are to understand what happened in Rotherham. Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of The Ramadhan Foundation UK, has often commented on the over-representation of Pakistani men involved in grooming gangs in the West: “They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought.” In communities where parents are willing to sacrifice their own children in order to “keep the peace”, it’s rare for anyone to stick their neck out to speak up for the rights of poor and vulnerable white girls, who are considered outsiders. The general attitude seems to be: those non-Muslim “white slags” had it coming.
Predators exploit the high-trust environment enjoyed by citizens in more developed nations, such as the UK and Canada. Girls outside the Pakistani community are more accessible to predators because they have greater social freedom; the most accessible are those without reliable carers. One of the eeriest moments in the documentary was when a victim of the grooming gangs described what happened to her as “normal”. The sexual abuse of young girls like her was so commonplace in these towns, they didn’t think it was unusual to be drugged, gang raped, and trafficked by young men who passed themselves off as the girls’ boyfriends. Is this what a multicultural society is supposed to tolerate under the guise of “social cohesion”?
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