Back in August, a huge public inquiry into child sexual abuse in Britain lost its third leader when Judge Lowell Goddard resigned as chair. The Times reported her as having remarked that the reason Britain has so many pedophiles is “because it has so many Asian men.” That assertion (which she firmly denies making) has been condemned as racist. I wish people would use the dictionary a bit more.
Racism is a thesis — the single greatest ideological evil in human history, in my view. It holds that race membership determines human traits and capacities, and that some people are inherently superior to others by virtue of their race. I hate to see the name of this toxic doctrine applied loosely. What’s crucial is whether the intent was to claim that Asianness per se predisposes a person to pedophilia. Let me fill in some background that is highly relevant.
Judge Goddard has been replaced by Professor Alexis Jay, who in 2014, after a newspaper story accused a named man of child rape, conducted an official inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, a northern England town. Her report concluded that 1,400 children (that’s now thought to be an underestimate) had been raped and prostituted by gangs of Rotherham men between 1997 and 2013. The modus operandi was to flatter and befriend English girls between the ages of 12 and 15, ply them with vodka and crack, pressure them into sex or simply rape them, warn them never to tell anyone, and then pass them around for sexual use by large numbers of acquaintances.
In 2003 one brave young woman reported her rape (at age 13) to the Rotherham police. They mistrusted her, implying it was her fault. They failed to examine her clothes and ultimately lost them. They destroyed the tape of their interview with the man she named. Even after her family appealed to the British government they took no action. When the gang threatened to gang-rape the girl’s mother she withdrew her charges (the family eventually moved to Spain to get the girl away from her abusers).
Five Rotherham men were, at last, convicted on rape and assault charges in 2010: Zafran Ramzan, Razwan Razaq, Umar Razaq, Adil Hussain, and Mohsin Khan. Last February, four more: Arshid Hussain, Basharat Hussain, Bannaras Hussain, and Qurban Ali (plus two British women who helped with the pimping). And eight more were convicted last month: Sageer Hussain, Mohammed Whied, Ishtiaq Khaliq, Waleed Ali, Asif Ali, Masoued Malik, Basharat Hussain, and Naeem Rafiq.
Almost all the convicted men were from the Pakistani community (8.3 percent of Rotherham’s population in 2011). That fact had long discouraged local government representatives from taking action: Professor Jay’s report says, “Several councillors interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be ‘giving oxygen’ to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion.”
The remark Judge Goddard allegedly made, then, was alluding to well-documented contingent facts about an unpleasant subculture among certain South Asians. And Rotherham is not unique: Pakistani-dominated sex gangs have been prosecuted in Aylesbury, Banbury, Derby, Halifax, Keighley, Oxford, Peterborough, Rochdale, and Telford (the Wikipedia articles have links to newspaper reports; be warned, some details are horrific). Pakistanis predominate in almost all cases, though occasionally other ethnicities (including British) are involved. (Bristol had a case of a particularly nasty Somali sex gang.)
Notice that Islam explicitly proscribes alcohol, drugs, rape, and abuse. This was never about religion. The callous, vodka-swigging, drug-peddling pedophiles in the Pakistani sex gangs are not living a Muslim life. But many have speculated that something is wrong with male urban Pakistani-British culture. The strict parental regime imposed on Pakistani girls contrasts with the way British girls tend to be largely free to go out on their own, dress how they wish, socialize with boys, and marry if when and whom they choose. Maybe to unprincipled predators the freedoms of British girls suggest potential wantonness. Sageer Hussain (a Rotherham ringleader) certainly saw things that way. He once remarked: “All white girls are good for is sex, and they are just slags.” Now, that is a genuinely racist statement. It attributes being worthless and fit for sexual abuse simply on grounds of being white. That really does meet the definition. It would be like assuming some Indiana-born judge with Mexican parents couldn’t be impartial simply on grounds of his Mexicannness, if that’s not too implausible to imagine.
Don’t imagine that I would defend the remark Judge Goddard is alleged to have made (but I hope she didn’t): It’s unforgivably vague and statistically ridiculous. But we have to distinguish attributing essential characteristics to biologically defined subpopulations from commenting (even carelessly) on the behavior (perhaps culturally linked) of specific clusters of individuals who happen to be members of some biologically defined subpopulation. Racism is so serious and so toxic that the word “racist” should be used only with great care.
