Are British-Pakistani men raping White girls? What Suella Braverman said on grooming gangs and why has it irked Pakistan

The Rishi Sunak government has vowed to take action against grooming gangs in Britain and Home Secretary Suella Braverman has been at the forefront of this initiative. On Monday, the government also unveiled a task force to tackle this growing menace in the country.However, Braverman’s comments on the matter and the need for a task force have now snowballed into a diplomatic spat with Pakistan. She’s also been urged to apologise and has drawn criticism from around the world.But what exactly did Braverman say that has caused outrage? Is this a case of Braverman’s anti-migrant stand coming to the fore again?What did Braverman say? On Monday during an interview with Sky News, British home secretary Suella Braverman asserted the need to crack down on grooming gangs in Britain.For the unaware, grooming is when someone, a stranger or someone you know, builds a relationship, trust and emotional connection with a child or young person so they can manipulate, exploit and abuse them. An inquiry launched in 2019 had found that since the 1970s, more than 1,000 children have been abused by grooming gangs in Shropshire’s Telford. It stated that crimes such as rape, sexual abuse, brainwashing, and drugging had “thrived unchecked” and that sexual exploitation of children “still exists today, and is prevalent across the country as a whole”.In the interview, Braverman speaking about the dangers of grooming gangs said, “(We see) a practice whereby vulnerable white English girls — sometimes in care, sometimes in challenging circumstances — being pursued, raped, drugged, and harmed by gangs of British Pakistani men, who work in child abuse rings or networks.”Mentioning that organisations and law enforcement had been mum on the issue owing to political correctness, she added, “We've seen institutions, social workers, state agencies, cops, and social workers turn a blind eye to this — out of political correctness and out of fear of being called racist. There are many perpetrators running wild and behaving in this way, and it is now time for authorities to track these perpetrators down without fear or favour and bring them to justice.”Why is Pakistan angry?Soon after the interview, critics called out the Tory MP for her comments, saying it stoked racial tensions and perpetuating harmful stereotypes.Robina Qureshi, CEO of the refugee charity Positive Action in Housing (PAiH), condemned Braverman’s language, asking her to apologise for her “gross misrepresentation”, describing her language around British Pakistani men as “unacceptable”.“The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has reached a new low. She is openly parroting far-right myths about racial groups and amplifying them into national trends. Her commentary is unacceptable, and I call on her to apologise for her gross misrepresentations of our communities,” Qureshi was quoted as saying.But it wasn’t just Qureshi that called out Braverman for her comments. The Pakistan Foreign Office also waded into the matter, with Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, the spokesperson for the office, saying Braverman had painted a “highly misleading picture signalling the intent to target and treat British Pakistanis differently”.Baloch said Braverman had “erroneously branded criminal behaviour of some individuals as a representation of the entire community”.“She fails to take note of the systemic racism and ghettoisation of communities and omits to recognise the tremendous cultural, economic and political contributions that British Pakistanis continue to make in British society,” Baloch said in her weekly briefing in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.Also read: Why only Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman could call out the grooming gangsAre all grooming gangs Pakistani?Many critics of Braverman’s comments said that the leader had ignored data released by the Home Office.One of them was Pakistani-origin Nazir Afzal, who was a prosecutor within the Crown Prosecution Service. In a tweet, he wrote, “Suella Braverman knows that 84 per cent of child sex offenders are white British, but chooses to focus on those who are not.”So, what does the data reveal?In its 2020 report, the Home Office found that, while there had been several high-profile grooming and child sexual exploitation cases in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford involving men of Pakistani ethnicity, “links between ethnicity and this form of offending” could not be proven.It claimed that there were “some studies suggest an over-representation of black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations”, but it was not possible “to conclude that this is representative of all group-based child sexual exploitation offending”.A previous research on the same in 2015 had found that of 1,231 perpetrators of group and gang-based child sexual exploitation, 42 per cent were White, 14 per cent were Asian or Asian British and 17 per cent were Black.Braverman anti-migrant?The remarks made by Home Secretary Suella Braverman were also deemed as vile and bigoted, a claim that she has fought in the past too.Suella Braverman, an Indian-origin Tory MP, has been chastised earlier for her anti-migrant stance. In the past, she had courted controversy when she said that Indians overstay their visa in the UK.Also read: The India-UK trade deal and why it is on the ‘verge of collapse’Earlier in an interview Braverman had said that she opposed the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with India as she believed that it would further increase the number of Indian migrants to the UK. “I do have some reservations. Look at migration in this country — the largest group of people who overstay are Indian migrants,” she had then said.She had also attributed the September 2022 riots in Leicester following the India-Pakistan match to uncontrolled migration of the people from subcontinent who failed to integrate into the host country.With inputs from agenciesRead all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.