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 labor 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.

Suggested reading

Labour’s grooming gang shame

By Mary Harrington

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 labor 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.”

More by this author

Pakistani child sex abuse is an open secret

By Hina Husein

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.

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.

Under the leadership of Justin Trudeau, Canadian policy has hewn quite close to the transactivist’s ideal: gender identity has become a protected characteristic under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and gender reassignment surgery is now often covered by the country’s universal healthcare system. Meanwhile, school boards and teachers’ unions have been quick to adopt some of the most extreme tenets of gender ideology — for instance, not telling parents when their children start to socially transition. 

Now, parents are pushing back. Last month, parents marched in almost 100 cities under the banner of #1MillionMarch4Children calling for the removal of material from school curriculums that sexualises children. Trudeau had claimed the protests were being “fuelled by the American right-wing”, but the alliance includes all political stances — from Liberty Coalition Canada, a Christian conservative advocacy group, to Blueprint for Canada, a non-partisan platform advocating “classical liberal” values. Some are issue-based, such as Our Duty Canada, a support network for families struggling with the impact of gender ideology. Plenty are grassroots, springing up in villages and towns in response to specific local events.

More from this author

Why Trudeau got tough on immigration

By Hina Husain

The protests, though they have been criticised for being anti-LGBT, are actually about protecting minors from harmful content in schools. At the protest I attended — in Durham, just outside Toronto — there were marchers of all races and religions. And their motives varied. Two young moms with children going to kindergarten soon held up placards that read “Education, not indoctrination” and “Stop sexualizing our kids”. A young girl sat next to a poster that read, “No boys in my bathroom!” A father of five children under the age of 15 was there with his wife and kids to protest against Ontario’s sex education curriculum, which he felt introduces material on sexual orientation and gender identity to children too young to understand the concepts. And three Pakistani brothers — one in high school and the other two in university — gave an interview to a local media outlet about why they felt they should not be required to partake in pride activities that went against their beliefs as Muslims.

Conservative Muslims have been overrepresented at recent protests, with a noticeable number of women in hijabs or niqabs. And as a result the movement as a whole has received accusations of being motivated by Muslim extremism. Protests against gender ideology in schools took place over the summer in Ottawa and Calgary, organised by local Muslim parents groups, with reports of young Arab boys stomping on rainbow pride flags while others cheered them on. There was a flurry of progressives questioning Muslim values and attitudes that clash with their beliefs in multicultural Canada. Several hundred people were present at the march I attended, and I’d estimate that 60-70% of them were Muslims.

It would not be fair to assume that all these Muslims were marching in opposition to same-sex relationships as well as in support of parents’ rights; but the Canadian Muslim community is known to have more negative views of LGBT rights than the general population. One transgender protestor I spoke to was in Durham because the chapter in her own town — led by conservative Muslims — was advocating not only for parental rights, which she supports, but also for the eradication of all gay and transgender people. So, the accusation that the movement has an anti-LGBT strain is not entirely unfounded.

There was also a conspiratorial minority at the protests. Anti-vaxxers complained about “shot deaths”, and told tales of what “really” happened during the pandemic. One former nurse who lost her job because she wouldn’t get vaccinated, believed that people were getting sick because of radiation poisoning from 5G towers. The trucker Freedom Convey was also present, waving “Fuck Trudeau” flags; one vehicle was covered in news stories about people who died after getting the Covid vaccines. These conspiracists were not representative; most people really were there to protest against the school boards and advocate for reform of the education system. Indeed, some parents were surprised to see people discussing vaccines and lockdowns. One mom told me: “It’s a free country, they can come here and protest too if they like.” But these fringe elements could be undermining a movement that should, in theory, have mainstream support.

The presence of more extreme groups has doubtless contributed to the Conservative Party of Canada keeping its distance from the march. The more Right-wing, less popular People’s Party of Canada did participate — which would have given the Conservatives another reason not to engage. Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, sent a memo out to his caucus before the march warning them not to speak publicly about the issue — even though, at the recent convention in Quebec City, delegates voted in favour of a future Conservative government prohibiting “life-altering” medical and surgical interventions for gender-diverse and transgender people under the age of 18.

Poilievre is trying to strike a delicate balance here: he has indicated to his base that he’s on the same page as them about parents’ rights and gender ideology, but he doesn’t want his party to be associated with unsavoury characters. It might threaten his current lead over Trudeau in the polls. Poilievre tweeted in support of parents’ rights without explicitly mentioning the protests, which have continued across cities in Canada. Trudeau meanwhile came out firmly in opposition to the march, claiming it was promoting hate against “2SLGBTQI+ Canadians across the country”. It seems that for now, parents are going to have to fight it out with local governments, teachers’ unions and school boards, without the explicit backing of a national party.

The march, for all its issues and contradictions, has managed to unite a huge range of Canadians to come together in support of a common cause: a right to have a say in their children’s education. Most of the participants are trying to stay laser-focused on this cause, putting aside their differences to help pass legislation that will protect kids from being exposed to what they see as inappropriate content — and, in some places, from irreversible surgeries. Public opinion is on their side, but it remains to be seen whether party politics will catch up.

If it were true that people were escaping to Canada from the US because they feared being deported under Trump’s harsh immigration policies, then the flow of immigrants heading north would have slowed when President Biden took office. According to government data, in the period between the tweet going out and the pandemic, which slowed crossings to a trickle, almost 60,000 people made “irregular border crossings” into Canada. But afterwards, the influx returned, reaching over 20,000 in 2022, Biden’s first year in office. By February of this year, more than 10,000 people had already crossed over into Canada.

Nor were refugees put off America by President Trump. Since 2020, the number of migrants going the other way — crossing into the US from Canada — has also shot up. Last year, Homeland Security apprehended more than 100,000 migrants crossing from Canada. (For context, in 2018 US authorities arrested only 558 people on the northern border.) There is no end in sight to these “irregular crossings”, and the public has been expressing its dissatisfaction with lax immigration controls on both sides of the border.

According to the two nations’ Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which has been in effect since 2004, refugees have to apply for status in the first “safe country” they reach. So, they cannot apply for asylum in Canada at official border crossings with the US. However, a loophole in the agreement enables migrants crossing at unofficial border points to claim asylum after they cross. And along the 9,000km-long border, there are many places to do so, the most infamous being Roxham Road, where New York state meets Quebec.

That is, until March 25, when Roxham Road was shut down by the Canadian government. Trudeau made the announcement on the afternoon of March 24, and the policy took effect at 12:01am the next day: “To address irregular migration, we are expanding the Safe Third Country Agreement to apply not only at designated ports of entry, but across the entire land border, including internal waterways, ensuring fairness and more orderly migration between our two countries.” Biden was in Canada at the time, on his first official visit since winning the presidency. It later transpired that the neighbouring countries had signed an amendment to the STCA a year earlier, but hadn’t made the news public because officials feared untold numbers of migrants might rush to cross the border before the changes could be enacted. Now, both countries can turn away asylum seekers, no matter where they cross.

More from this author

Joyland is not a trans love story

By Hina Husain

This was a shock to Canada’s reputation as an immigrant-friendly country. Here, eligible refugees receiving generous welfare benefits including government-assisted housing, healthcare, work permits, and financial support. A path to citizenship is available to anyone who can secure permanent residency in the country. But there is a feeling, among some Canadians, that migrants have started exploiting vulnerabilities in the system. Almost 70% of Quebec residents — the province that Roxham Road leads into — said they wanted this irregular entry point closed. With social services in the province overwhelmed by asylum-seekers, the federal government started transferring migrants to Niagara Falls in Ontario, which saw welfare services pushed to the brink as well. Since 2021, the Immigration Department has paid $94 million to book out entire hotels for months, in order to accommodate asylum-seekers.

The ease with which people could illegally enter through Roxham Road, according to analysts, was “almost an invitation for undocumented migrants to try their chances at obtaining asylum in Canada”. Specifically, migrants from Nigeria, who make up a big chunk of all those who cross over from Roxham Road. The majority actually possess a valid US tourist visa, flying into New York before making their way to Canada. “I went to search Google and I figured out this is what everybody is doing,” one Nigerian migrant said while crossing the border. A “disproportionate” number of Nigerians claiming asylum are doing so on the grounds of LGBT persecution, which is met with more sympathy in Canada than in the US. But concerns have been raised about the similarities in such applications, and one investigation by a Nigeria-based publication revealed how some Nigerians make up stories in an attempt to secure asylum. This has left some aid organisations worrying that legitimate claims are now more likely to be doubted.

Some migrants still have their hearts set on America, however. Those from Mexico and India make up the bulk of illegal crossings from Canada to the States, with many flying into Canada for the sole purpose of getting across the world’s longest international border without detection. Mexicans, who since 2016 can fly visa-free to Canada, often spend thousands of dollars flying into Toronto and paying smugglers to get to the US — hence Biden’s motivation to renegotiate the STCA.

And this phenomenon burst into the public consciousness when, in January 2022, the bodies of four Indian nationals (two of them minors) were found frozen to death in Manitoba, near the American border. The Patel family had come to Canada on a tourist visa, but hoped to reach family in Chicago. A documentary last year suggested that, in Gujarat, the Patels had been a comfortable, upper-middle class family with no financial troubles or experiences of racial or religious persecution. Why, then, would they risk crossing illegally into the US in the middle of winter with two young children?

Migrant rights groups almost always lay the blame for tragedies at the feet of unscrupulous smugglers and harsh government policy. Few acknowledge that the people who decide to illegally cross an international border almost always have agency. And for middle-class migrants, it’s usually not about security; it’s about status. In developing countries, attaining the “American Dream” — or another Western nation’s equivalent — is still highly aspirational. And while everyone has the right to build a good life for themselves, migrants who can pay their way into one North American nation in order to cross over into the other, depending on their preference, undermine faith in the immigration system.

Which is a problem for Trudeau. His Liberal government plans to welcome half a million new immigrants into Canada every year till 2025. (Like most developed nations, Canada has an aging population, a low birth rate, and is facing a labour shortage.) Almost 50% of Canadians already think this target is too high. If Trudeau doesn’t want public opinion turning against his plans, he needs to reassure the electorate that his government has a strong handle on who is being welcomed across our borders.

Suggested reading

The end of Germany's open borders

By Maurice Frank

Amending the STCA is meant to signal that the government is aware of the growing unpopularity of irregular border crossers, who are seen as jumping the queue, leaving those without financial means further down the list — not to mention those waiting in refugee camps around the world. John Manley, one of the architects of the original STCA, supports the new changes, claiming that most migrants around the world are in much greater danger than those who have already found their way to the US. But there has been backlash from refugee rights advocates, with the Canadian Council for Refugees, among others, arguing that the STCA is unconstitutional. But last month, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously ruled otherwise.

The closure of Roxham Road sent a message to all those who want to migrate to Canada that the way to do so is through official channels. Two days later, the Government of Canada launched a survey to poll Canadians’ opinions. Trudeau was, apparently, ready to listen to how Canadians feel about this issue. While some advocates have been arguing that closing the loophole will have pushed people into the hands of smugglers, it’s still too early to tell what the effects of the new changes will be, though data on the past three months’ of irregular border crossings should be imminent. But whatever the outcome: the Prime Minister won’t be promoting Canada’s immigration policies on Twitter any time soon.

While one of the stars of Joyland is a trans actor, whose character has a budding romantic relationship, focusing on this aspect of the movie misses the larger themes its creators were looking to highlight: the soul-crushing demands made of women in Pakistan — particularly mothers — and the tragic choices some make to escape their desolate circumstances. Questions of masculinity, familial responsibility, and the struggles of working-class Pakistani families are all presented with care and nuance, as is the discrimination faced by transgender people. The latter, though, is not the crux of the story.

One wouldn’t describe John Wick as a movie about animal cruelty, or Jurassic Park as a tale of corporate negligence, even though those themes are present. But amplifying LGBT-related content in movies has recently become a trend in the West — partly fuelled by a marketing industry that has wholeheartedly adopted identity politics as a way to sell cinema tickets. It is, of course, encouraging that LGBT minorities in Western societies are increasingly accepted and visible in popular culture. But in nations where they are not, exaggerating their centrality to a storyline can spell disaster for struggling artists who are treading a line, carefully weaving overlooked narratives into their works.

Last August, Pakistan’s censor boards approved Joyland for release, but backtracked after receiving complaints from religious politicians that the film “contains highly objectionable material which do not conform with the social values and moral standards of our society”. It was banned until November, but was cleared for release after a government committee was set up to investigate the film. The hard work of local journalists, and a social media campaign in Pakistan with the hashtag #ReleaseJoyland, helped reverse the ban, and the film has enjoyed a successful run in cinemas. Still, the more sexual elements of the movie were censored for domestic audiences, and it is not being screened in the nation’s most populous province of Punjab.

More from this author

Pakistani child sex abuse is an open secret

By Hina Husain

In all this, Western discourse has probably been more of a hindrance than a help. Pakistan’s traditionalist circles tend to be biased against anything given the stamp of approval by Western progressives. Maria Butt, for instance, one of the nation’s most influential and successful fashion designers, has vehemently spoken out against the promotion and screening of Joyland in Pakistan, accusing it of promoting a “trans agenda”. Given that she supports boycotting the film, we can safely assume that she hasn’t actually watched it. But her response is still useful, in that it reveals what happens when Western ideology is imposed on works of art set in more socially conservative nations. Here, the labels of “trans” and “LGBT” can easily discourage a local audience from engaging with a work’s more subtle themes, potentially prejudicing moviegoers before they’ve had a chance to watch it.

The implications of this are profound. It’s not a big deal for Disney if Thor: Love and Thunder is blocked for release in Malaysia due to its blink-and-you-miss-it allusions to bisexuality. But for indie production companies such as Khoosat Films — creators of Joyland — local audiences being put off their work can prevent a project breaking even, as well as discourage up-and-coming directors from pursuing more risqué stories. Filmmakers in Pakistan know this, which is why Joyland’s official trailers don’t mention the Queer Palm awarded to the film, instead only highlighting its Jury Prize at Cannes. (News of the award still made its way to Pakistan, with one politician responding: “Obviously if it’s received the Queer Palm award what kind of film must it be?”)

But where reviews in the West consistently describe the film as a “trans-cis” love story or a “trans drama”, Pakistani viewers rarely single out this plot point, focussing instead on its more universally accessible themes of loneliness and despair. Meanwhile, not all films with LGBT characters are met with condemnation in Pakistan. In 2019, Joyland’s director, Saim Sadiq, and trans star, Alina Khan, worked together on Darling. It’s possible that Sadiq was testing the waters with this 16-minute short film, which follows Khan as she tries to make it as an erotic dancer in Lahore, but faces pushback and discrimination. It was the first Pakistani film to be screened at Venice Film Festival and won the award for Best Short Film, but otherwise received little attention in the West. In Pakistan, however, it was heralded as a “landmark moment for queer cinema”.

More from this author

The hijacking of Pakistani feminism

By Hina Husain

The myopia of Western critics also ignores some of Joyland‘s more tragic themes, which involve its non-trans female characters: the pressure to produce a male heir; the discouragement to pursue meaningful work outside the domestic realm; the feeling of powerlessness as the men in your life are free to explore and “find themselves”, sexually or otherwise. The despondency and desperation that millions of Pakistani women experience in their daily lives is not relatable for the average North American or European moviegoer. What Western audiences are well-acquainted with, however, is the claim that transgender people face discrimination in society. And as a result, the film’s layered exposés of Pakistani society are reduced to the latest progressive cause: trans activism. The mistreatment of women in Pakistan, meanwhile, is largely glossed over. 

This is part of a wider and worrying cultural trend. Last month, I wrote about how Pakistan’s annual International Women’s Day march, due to take place in Lahore today, had been hijacked by causes more palatable to Western progressives. The Aurat March organisers’ foregrounding of trans issues made it more controversial in its country of origin, to the point where, over the weekend, it was banned. Here, surely, is a sign that those seeking change in Pakistan must reach out to social conservatives — the nation is home to so many, both male and female — or face being outlawed. It may be unfortunate that some of the LGBT lifestyles presented by the Western media would be viewed as scandalous to the average Pakistani, but that is the reality. Pushing a unipolar idea of what “progress” looks like won’t remedy this. What’s needed are films such as Joyland — films which are doing the hard work of trying to change hearts and minds by presenting subtle, nuanced stories that encourage the viewer to come to a different understanding of what it means to be gay or transgender.

Despite the negative press and attempts at censorship, Joyland has received enormous support from Pakistanis who recognise how necessary the film is, not just for the country’s struggling movie industry, but also for its social culture. It deftly handles domestic challenges that devastate the lives of far too many in the country — men, women and transgender people. It’s a movie by Pakistanis for Pakistanis that reflects back to us a more complete representation of our society than we’re used to seeing on screen. By the time the credits roll, your heart swells — and, when viewed as its creators intended, it doesn’t occur to you that what you’ve just watched is an award-winning “trans romance”.

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.

Suggested reading

Sex positivity's hidden victims

By Mary Harrington

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”?

More from this author

The hijacking of Pakistani feminism

By Hina Husain

Unfortunately, the Pakistani community is still not ready to talk about CSA — a fact recognised by those few British Pakistanis who have spoken out against it. Shame and honour codes hold too much power, and those codes are hard to change. Shafiq, of The Ramadhan Foundation, notes that “for years some British Pakistanis have deliberately buried their heads in the sand about these predatory grooming gangs”. When family members of perpetrators were interviewed, they described white girls as “filthy”, commenting on their clothing, and saying, “they have no shame, no fear of Allah”. When asked how she would feel if her own daughter were abused, the Pakistani wife of one of the predators replied: “It can’t happen to our children because they are not in the streets. We look after them.”

When Rahim’s uncle was finally arrested, following the revelation that he had abused other children in the neighbourhood, the Pakistani community came together to do damage control. By this point, the abuser had two young children of his own. Rahim’s parents were advised by other Pakistani immigrants not to talk about his crimes because “they didn’t want the family’s image to be tarnished in the community”. They put pressure on Rahim to write a letter to the judge asking for a lighter sentence, their logic being that his cousins shouldn’t be made to grow up without a father.

“I was young at the time,” Rahim reflects. “I just did whatever the adults told me to do, so I wrote it.” His uncle went to prison for two years. When he was released, he and his family moved to Alberta. “His wife never left him, and his kids have no idea,” Rahim says. Rahim’s father forgave his brother, and even flew across the country to meet with him. “When he was in prison, everyone asked where he was, and we just lied and said he got a job up in the Northwest Territories and he’s making a lot of money up there. It was the community convincing my parents to cover it up.”

Suggested reading

Sexual assault is the great leveller

By Tanya Gold

Tragic as it is, Rahim’s story is not unusual. It illustrates how sexual abuse goes unchecked within Pakistani communities. Rapists know that the community will not ostracise them. They’ll never be without a home or a job. Their mothers, siblings, wives and friends will actually cover for them. Even if they are convicted, they will most likely spend only a few years behind bars before they’re free to re-offend. They may even be encouraged to see themselves as victims of a racist criminal justice system that treats minorities unfairly. In Shafiq’s words: “They believe it is they who are victims of a racist witch-hunt — despite the fact that Pakistani gangs were allowed to rape their way around Rotherham for so long because, in part, politically correct officials were terrified of being accused of racism. They see any of us who try to tackle this problem as siding with the white ‘enemy’.”

Sadly, there is little hope of justice for the victims of grooming gangs in the UK without the cooperation of the Pakistani community. And unless Pakistanis find the courage to shine a light on what is an atrocious open secret within our communities, I fear what happened in Rotherham will continue to happen, devastating the lives of countless children and women, immigrant or otherwise. It pains me to think that what has recently been discovered is just the tip of the iceberg. Right now, there is plenty more abuse taking place across the UK within insular Pakistani communities. And change can only come about if we set aside the tribal instincts that have enabled one of the worst cases of child sexual exploitation in modern history.

*Name changed to protect the identity of the victim.

Aurat March is set to take place on International Women’s Day, March 8th, across the country — for the sixth year running. It has been riven with controversy ever since its first iteration in 2018, when slogans like “Mera Jism, Meri Marzi” (“My body, my choice”) caused public outcry, the event being deemed un-Islamic. It’s common to hear Aurat March and the ideology it supports described as “foreign funded”, to advance “Western interests” in Pakistan. Over the years, there have been many accusations that the organisation only represents the first-world problems of the country’s bourgeois class, while offering lip service to the issues of poverty, illiteracy, and domestic abuse suffered by millions of working- and middle-class Pakistani women. Aurat March claims that this is misinformation to discredit the movement. 

While it’s not the most sophisticated way of framing the issue, there is a grain of truth in the “foreign funded” claim. Aurat March, and its sister movement Aurat Azadi (Women’s Freedom) March, are progressive Left organisations dominated by Western-educated women who skew heavily upper- and middle-class. Many of these women completed their post-secondary education in the UK or the US, majoring in gender studies, South Asian studies, and political science. Armed with Fulbright and Rhodes scholarships, these “resistance feminists” pick up the rhetoric of anti-capitalist and, ironically, anti-imperialist activism and transport it wholesale to Pakistan. It is these Western progressive orthodoxies fuelling the Aurat March movement. It’s hardly surprising that trans rights — the fad du jour in American colleges — would show up in Aurat March’s communication channels, couched in the language of intersectionality and Critical Theory.

Why bend over backwards to champion the rights of Pakistan’s transgender community (a mere 0.24% of the population), instead of trying to extend an olive branch to the majority of the country’s 220 million citizens, men and women, in language they can understand? In her 2017 book, The New Pakistani Middle Class, Ammara Maqsood argues that, since the Nineties, “progress” in Pakistan has been defined by connections to the outside world. It is only when “an imagined audience, an outsider that needs to be addressed and convinced” believes that Pakistan is modern that Pakistanis will see themselves as modern, she writes. Concerned about how they’re portrayed on the global stage, elite Pakistani feminists want to signal to their comrades in the West: Look, we’re not the backwards and uncivilised country that we seem to be, we believe trans women are women. This tactic seems to be working, looking at the glowing coverage Aurat March gets from mainstream news media in the West, which frames the movement as an “Us versus Them”, zero sum game for which Pakistani feminists are risking their lives. But who exactly is “them”?

The Aurat March would have it that “they” are “radical, Right-wing Islamists”. But the truth is, “they” are the millions of women who — having ascended to middle-class life since the Nineties — reject the idea that modernity in Pakistan must operate in lockstep with the West. These women instead embrace “Islamic feminism” and aspire to be part of the global Muslim community, turning to countries like Turkey for inspiration. They advocate for women’s rights within an Islamic framework, encouraging women to interpret the Quran and highlight the teachings of equality in the religion. 

These members of the “new” Pakistani middle class — in contrast to the “old” middle class that came into its own during the sixties and seventies — don’t relate to Aurat March’s narrative about living in an “oppressed, patriarchal” society, because they believe their emancipation lies in applying the wisdom of the Quran to their daily lives. They do not respond kindly to the idea that they need privileged elites to free them from the obligations of caring for their children and in-laws. The “dismantle the family” feminism of Aurat March goes against everything the new middle-class women seek out for themselves: they take pride in being supportive wives, for instance, or attending female-only religious study circles (dars).

Suggested reading

How the West enables Islamism

By Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Whether Pakistani women turning to the Quran to understand their rights is a good thing is up for debate. But the fact remains that large swathes of educated Pakistani women do not feel that Aurat March represents them or their values, and the March’s leadership has done diddly-squat to change this perception. Instead, the established middle class, whose beliefs Aurat March champions, has been actively hostile towards such women, lumping them in with Taliban-sympathisers, and painting religious-minded critics as being brainwashed by Saudi-style Wahhabism. Accusing those who you claim to speak for of internalised sexism and stripping them of agency is hardly a winning strategy.

Nor is practically ignoring the working-class, rural population of Pakistan. 75% of women and girls are employed in the nation’s unregulated agriculture sector. But in the inter-middle-class battle of Pakistani feminism, working-class issues hardly get any airtime. These are the women who don’t have access to medical care. Hundreds of thousands die during maternity labour every year. Others are subjected to superstitious wedlock, underage marriage, and denied education. Aurat March has little to say about how to help any of these vulnerable women. Slogans to “dismantle the patriarchy” and “decolonise gender” don’t do much to affect real change.

But if Aurat March were to abandon this language, and incorporate terminology and manifesto demands more in line with the growing Islamic feminist movement in the country, its international brand would be irreparably damaged. Fighting for environmental justice, demanding to defund the police, and putting transgender politics at the centre of one’s activism — all part of Aurat March’s 2022 manifesto — is much more palatable to readers of the New York Times than engaging in “backward” practices like debating what rights women have in Islam. If Pakistan’s elites dared do such a thing, the West would write off the nation as another “shithole country” overrun by Islamists. Feminism’s status as a “luxury belief” would fall away — and so too would the Pakistani elite’s sense of itself.

Suggested reading

The year the West erased women

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

As Maqsood writes in her book, it is from “a global stage which recognises only the language of development… that the progressiveness of the established groups becomes imbued with a moral purpose that distinguishes them from other classes”. In the absence of economic factors separating the old middle class from the new, their own sense of moral superiority is all that Pakistan’s elites can cling to. It’s why Aurat March only wants volunteers who will list their pronouns in their bios, and have no qualms about excluding millions of women from their vision of feminism. By this point, it doesn’t even matter what their 2023 manifesto demands are (I wouldn’t be surprised if self-ID is a prominent topic) — Aurat March has alienated most of the population, and seems uninterested in winning them back. As one representative tweet argues: “So many amazing feminist organisers I know have distanced themselves from Aurat March, which is fair, but also alarming. The march organisers need to be able to take criticism, esp if its coming from those who’ve supported them from the beginning.”

Judging from their volunteer form and most recent social media activity, Aurat March is comfortable with its solid position on the “lifestyle Left”. It promotes questions of identity, consumption, and moral attitudes over tradition and community. The annual event has become nothing more than an exercise in intellectual gatekeeping: a reminder to the upwardly mobile masses that the definition of modernity in Pakistan is a way for the established elite to preserve their dominant position in society. There is no room for either the new and growing middle class, or concern for the working-class women who can’t even read — let alone win a Rhodes scholarship.