Missbrauchsskandal von Rochdale

Vorlage:Use dmy dates Vorlage:Npov The Rochdale sex trafficking gang was a group of men who preyed on under-age teenage girls in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. They were convicted of sex trafficking on 8 May 2012; other offenses included rape, trafficking girls for sex and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child. 47 girls were identified as victims of child sexual exploitation during the police investigation. The men were all British Pakistanis (except for one from Afghanistan) and the girls were white; this has led to national discussion of whether the crimes were racially motivated, or, conversely, whether the early failure to investigate them was linked to the authorities' fear of being accused of racism.

Gang members

12 men were originally charged, of the nine men convicted eight were of British Pakistani origin and one was an Afghan asylum-seeker. Of the three others who were not convicted, one was cleared of all charges, the jury was unable to reach a verdict in the case of the second, and the third was not present at the trial after going on the run while on bail. Most of them were married and well-respected within their community. One gang member convicted of sex trafficking was a religious studies teacher at a mosque and a married father-of-five. The men were aged between 24 and 59 and knew each other in various ways. Two worked for the same taxi firm and another two worked at a takeaway restaurant; some came from the same village in Pakistan and another pair shared a flat. The gang worked to secure underage girls for sex.

Abuse

The abuse began in 2008 centered around two takeaways in Heywood near Rochdale. Despite one of the victims going to the police in 2008 to report the grooming, and the detectives involved giving her their support, the Crown Prosecution Service controversially decided not to prosecute two of the men at the time, invoking the witnesses's credibility. This decision was overturned in 2011 when a new chief prosecutor for the region, Nazir Afzal (himself a first generation British-Pakistani), was appointed.

The victims were vulnerable teenagers from deprived, dysfunctional backgrounds who were targeted in "honeypot locations" where young people regularly congregated, such as takeaway food shops. One of the victims, a 15-year-old known as the Honey Monster, acted as a recruiter for the gang, procuring girls as young as 13 for the gang's use. The victims were coerced and bribed into keeping quiet about the abuse through a combination of free alcohol and drugs, food, small sums of money and other gifts.

The oldest member of the gang to be eventually convicted, Shabir Ahmed, was for a while the main trafficker of the victims: on one occasion he ordered a girl, then 15, to have sex with a member of the gang, Kabeer Hassan, as a "treat" for his birthday - Hassan then raped the girl. Abdul Aziz, a married father of three, took over from Shabir Ahmed as the main trafficker and was paid by various men to supply underage girls for sex.

Although some of the victims willingly had sex with their abusers, others were physically assaulted and raped by as many as five men at a time, or obliged into having sex with "several men in a day, several times a week". The victims were plied with drugs and alcohol and were passed around to friends and family, being taken to various locations around the north of England, including Rochdale, Oldham, Nelson, Bradford and Leeds. The abusers paid small sums of money for these encounters, one 13-year old victim recounting that, after being forced to have sex in exchange for vodka, her abuser immediately raped her again and then gave her £40 to not say anything about the incident. Among the incidents that police recorded were: a 15-year old victim too drunk to recall events being raped by 20 men, one after the other; another victim so drunk that she was sick over the side of the bed as she was being raped by two men. One thirteen-year-old victim had an abortion after becoming pregnant.

Trial

Some gang members told the court the girls were willing participants, and happy having sex with the men. Their ring-leader, 59-year-old Shabir Ahmed, claimed the girls were "prostitutes" who had been running a "business empire" and it was all "white lies". He shouted in court, "Where are the white people? You have only got my kind here." Shabir Ahmed's threatening behaviour and calling Judge Gerald Clifton a "racist bastard" resulted in his being banned from the court for the sentencing hearing. Judge Clifton told the convicted gang members: "All of you treated your victims as though they were worthless and beyond any respect – they were not part of your community or religion."

Name	Conviction
Kabeer Hassan	Rape, Conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children
Abdul Aziz	Trafficking for sexual exploitation, Conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children
Abdul Rauf	Trafficking for sexual exploitation, Conspircay to engage in sexual activity with children
Adil Khan	Trafficking for sexual exploitation, Conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children
Mohammed Sajid	Rape, Sexual activity with a girl under 16, Trafficking for sexual exploitation, Conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children
Mohammed Amin	Sexual assault, Conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children
Hamid Safi	Trafficking for sexual exploitation, Conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children
Abdul Qayyum	Conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children
Shabir Ahmed	Rape, Aiding and abetting a rape, Sexual assault, Trafficking for sexual exploitation, Conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children

Second sex ring

Following the break up of the first sex ring, in May 2012 the police made arrests in relation to an earlier child sexual exploitation ring in Rochdale. Nine men between 24 and 38-years-old were arrested on suspicion of sexual activity with a child.

Public debate and analysis

The case raised a serious debate about whether the crimes were racially motivated. There were suggestions that police and social work departments failed to act when details of the gang first emerged for fear of appearing racist, and ignored vulnerable white teenagers who were being groomed by Pakistani men. Tim Loughton, the Minister for Children and Families, stated that while there was no evidence that any ethnic communities condoned child sexual abuse, he was concerned that some had been slow to report it to the police, and urged police and social workers not to allow "political correctness around ethnicity" to hinder their work to apprehend such crimes.

The Times report of 5 January 2011

A report compiled by The Times and published on 5 January 2011, related to convictions for a particular form of child sex grooming in the North and the Midlands: of the 56 offendors convicted since 1997 for crimes relating to on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16, three were white, 53 were Asian of which 50 were Muslim, most were from the British Pakistani community. Furthermore, The Times article alleged: "with the exception of one town there is scant evidence of work being undertaken in British Pakistani communities to confront the problem" of "pimping gangs" largely consisting of "members of the British Pakistani community".

These findings have been questioned by the researchers Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley, from whose work for the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science The Times report had drawn much of its evidence. "The citations are correct but they have been taken out of context," Cockbain told The Independent; "Nor do they acknowledge the small sample size of the original research, which focused on just two large cases." Cockbain and Brayley expressed concern that "findings were being overextended from a small, geographically concentrated sample to characterise an entire crime type".

Coalition for the Removal of Pimping

Hilary Willmer, representing the Leeds-based support group for parents of sexually exploited girls, the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping (Crop), was quoted as saying "The vast majority [of] perpetrators are Pakistani Asians", with sources inside Crop claiming a percentage as high as 80 per cent (although, The Independent noted, "Kurdish, Romanian and Albanian gangs were also involved"). Willmer added: "We think this is the tip of the iceberg", though she cautioned against treating the matter as a race crime. "It's a criminal thing." But by May 2012, according to The Independent, Crop had "gone suddenly silent" concerning the percentage of abusers of Asian origin who had come to the organization's attention: Willmer explained to the paper: "We've been accused of being a cover for the BNP".

Response from Muslim spokesmen

In a BBC documentary investigating the grooming of young girls for sex by some Pakistani men, Imam Irfan Chishti from the Rochdale Council of Mosques deplored the practice of sex grooming, saying it was "very shocking to see fellow British Muslims brought to court for this kind of horrific offence." Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, accused elders of the Pakistani community of "burying their heads in the sand" on the matter of sexual grooming. He said that of 68 recent convictions involving child sexual exploitation, 59 were of British Pakistani men and it was a significant problem for that community. He said the actions of criminals who thought "white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused" were "bringing shame on our community."

Sayeeda Warsi, the co-chairman of the Conservative Party, said in an interview with the Evening Standard, that "You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first," and added, "This small minority who see women as second class citizens, and white women probably as third class citizens, are to be spoken out against." She described the Rochdale case as "even more disgusting" than cases of girls being passed around street gangs, as the Rochdale perpetrators "were grown men, some of them religious teachers or running businesses, with young families of their own.”

Nazir Afzal, who as the newly appointed chief crown prosecutor decided to bring the case to trial, said that gender, not race, was the key issue: "There is no community where women and girls are not vulnerable to sexual attack and that's a fact."