Shabir Ahmed is a symptom
Deporting the grooming gang leader, while just, will not solve our problems
Aspokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan has given the country’s first official public statement regarding the status of Shabir Ahmed, a ringleader of the rape gangs in Rochdale. As expected, the Pakistanis are firmly rejecting the idea that they will accept the return of Mr Ahmed, and are emphasising the fact that he spent his entire adult life in Britain, where he committed his crimes and was convicted.
Many, particularly those on the Right, are likely to react angrily to the Pakistani position on this, and there has been much talk already about punitive measures that can be taken against Pakistan, such as the cutting off of British aid and the refusal of visas, unless they consent to his return. However, it is hard to deny that their spokesman made some reasonable points, and his comments insinuated the clear assumption of the Pakistanis — with which many British observers will no doubt agree — that the punishment imposed by the British justice system came nowhere matching the severity of his crimes. In Pakistan, he would have been hanged.
The more controversial point that the spokesman Tahrir Andrabi made was that it was Britain where Ahmed was “groomed and, unfortunately, spoiled”, and that his crimes demanded “serious introspection” on the part of the British. The rape gang phenomenon is a profoundly embarrassing stain against Pakistan’s image of Islamic probity, and attempting to pin it on the corruption and immorality that these individuals were exposed to in Britain is the only face-saving explanation available to Paksitani diplomats. It obviously leaves unanswered the question of why this pattern of criminality seems to have emerged almost everywhere Pakistanis clustered in Britain, and not among other major diaspora groups in the country.
As a rhetorical device, blaming Britain for the behaviour of the Pakistani diaspora here is likely to rub salt in the wound, and the idea that it was something inherent about Britain that corrupted these naturally pious and chaste men is clearly nonsense. Nevertheless, there is a grain of truth in Mr Andrabi’s words which are worth considering. The crimes that Ahmed committed and the criminal culture that he came to exemplify were a result of his being in Britain, and he would not have committed them had he remained in Pakistan.
At the outset, I will say that rape and sexual offences against children in Pakistan are prevalent, regardless of what the official statistics say. The country holds to a mutually reinforcing mixture of Islamic law and rigid tribal codes around intersexual relations that mean that there is zero practical outlet for consensual sexual activity outside of arranged and often co-sanguinious marriage. But men’s proclivities will find their outlet, and the primary victims will inevitably be those with the least recourse to seek protection or justice. In any case, the prospects of any individual who reported such a crime against themselves by a family member or elder in Pakistan would be exceedingly bleak. The same is undoubtedly true within the Pakistani community in Britain itself.
With that said, the pattern of criminality which has become known as ‘grooming gangs’ is of a specific type, and is particular to the British context. In an article for the Critic last year, I analysed the historical and sociological origins of this type of crime. My theory is that this phenomenon is the horrifying outcome of two groups living in close proximity with mutually incompatible approaches to rights and justice, along with alien approaches to personal and sexual morality. This was exacerbated by the depressed economic and social circumstances of the English inhabitants in the towns where the Pakistanis settled, as well as by severe political failures in British institutions.
The Pakistanis, mainly ethnic Mirpuris from Kashmir, brought with them an extremely tight-knit clan based social structure, reinforced by very high rates of co-sanguinious marriage. Their social structure had emerged during centuries of relative isolation in a hostile geographic location, remote from the authorities of the states under which they nominally lived. As a result, they were accustomed to resolving their own disputes internally without recourse to laws or courts.
Their social customs revolve around avoiding in-group disputes, particularly with regard to family honour. The close-knit structure provided by first cousin marriage means that individuals can refer to common elder relatives to resolve disagreements within the extended family, and provide restitution in cases of wrong-doing. Marriage and courtship are overseen by agreement within the family, and unmarried younger women are subject to tight control by their relatives in order to protect the honour of the family.
This could not have been more different from the English, amongst whom consanguineous marriage has been forbidden — other than for royalty or the aristocracy — since before the emergence of the nation itself, specifically in order to prevent the emergence of such tight-knit clans. English people and English women have held a high degree of individual autonomy over their choice of spouse for many centuries, and our approach to justice is based on individual recourse to universally applied laws administered by civil authorities. A revolution in personal morality during the mid to late 20th century saw a wave of family breakdown, which was accompanied by economic changes which triggered outward migration from industrial towns in the north and the midlands of England. Many of those who remained were afflicted with unemployment, chaotic family lives and social dysfunction. These were often the places where the Pakistani diaspora settled.
The Pakistanis came to view the English, and particularly English girls, effectively as outlaws
The result was two groups of people sharing the same spaces — one with ideas about rules and authority based on internal harmony within their group upheld by a rigid family structure, and another with a highly individualistic approach based on universal rights and laws upheld, theoretically, by the police and courts. The Pakistanis came to view the English, and particularly English girls, effectively as outlaws — people who did not enjoy the protection that would, in their own culture, have derived from their family’s honour and been upheld by male relatives. This perception was reinforced by the fact that they appeared to be bound by no moral rules — they could drink alcohol and engage in sexual intercourse outside of marriage. As far as the Mirpuris could see, the English girls had no honour, and were thus incapable of being dishonoured. They had no standing before the elders, and were out of scope of Mirpuri customs around intersexual relations.
As for the police and the courts, not to mention any of the other institutions that were supposed to uphold the rights of these individuals, they were completely inadequate. Firstly, the obvious ethnic and religious dimensions to the criminality was too upsetting to the universalist principles of these institutions to bear consideration. And perhaps more importantly, the size and nature of the practices were beyond anything which the British authorities were designed to cope with.
What the British authorities were effectively confronted with was an ethnic mafia along the lines of those established by Sicilians and other Italians
As Mary Harrington has noted, what the British authorities were effectively confronted with was an ethnic mafia along the lines of those established by Sicilians and other Italians in the United States in the 20th century. It was by no means limited to sexual crimes, though that is the most unconscionable element of it. The fact is that a tightly-knit extended family structure in which the individual is tied by mutual bonds of absolute obligation to their kin, far above and beyond any loyalty to the state or its laws, is an ideal platform for any kind of illicit activity. Where they evolved naturally, kinship structures provide a reliable basis for cooperation in societies with low levels of trust between non-relatives — but transplanted into high trust societies, they are very powerful means of evasion and protection from the law.
But the British are primed to think about people above all as individuals, and group dynamics like this get ignored. We are inclined to think of Shabir Ahmed as a wicked individual (which he no doubt is), and his crimes as a poor reflection on his character. Our legal system is only capable of punishing him as an individual, and now that he has been released, our preoccupation is with getting him as an individual out of our country.
Regardless of the quite reasonable protestations of the Pakistani government that Shabir Ahmed’s crimes had nothing to do with them, there is a powerful impulse to want to be rid of him because we can see that allowing him here at all was clearly a mistake, and we want it reversed. There is also a need to establish a precedent that such people can be sent back to wherever it was that they came from, regardless of how long they have been in the country for. But a public diplomatic spat with their Pakistani counterparts offers our government a distraction from arguments that they are desperate to escape about the practicality and ethics of multiculturalism.
Britain’s criminal justice system is not designed to uphold the basic social norms and customs of British society — it is only there to deal with the relatively small number of marginal cases where those customs and norms are flouted to the point of criminality. But in the rape gangs, it was confronted by a group of people with a completely different set of assumptions about what was permissible and impermissible, and who presented a threat to the rights and safety of a section of the public. They were wholly unprepared for the task, and our national leaders lack the language or the intellectual frameworks even to think about the nature of the problem. We will be stuck with this regardless of what happens to Shabir Ahmed.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan has given the country’s first official public statement regarding the status of Shabir Ahmed, a ringleader of the rape gangs in Rochdale.
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