When it comes to sex Alyas Karmani is extraordinarily plain-speaking. For a Muslim imam he is breathtakingly so. \u201cOral sex and anal sex are taboo in the British Pakistani community,\u201d he announces in a matter-of-fact way over gosht palak in his favourite curry-house just up the hill from Bradford University.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cSex is seen as only for procreation and only in the missionary position. More so if your spouse is from abroad.\u201d<\/p>\n
He is addressing the question of whether a disproportionate number of British Asian men are involved in grooming underage girls for sex. He thinks the answer is Yes \u2013 which is also very plain-speaking on a subject around which the British policing, political, academic and social work establishment dances with over-sensitive diplomacy.<\/p>\n
Yet Imam Karmani is no maverick. As well as being a Muslim imam, he is a psychologist with more than 20 years of practical experience in youth and community work. He is a former advisor to the Department of Education on youth empowerment, a one-time head of race equality for the Welsh Assembly and is now co-director of Street, a project whose name stands for Strategy to Reach Empower and Educate Teenagers.<\/p>\n
One of its key projects is running courses to change the attitude of young British Pakistanis which, Alyas Karmani believes, underlie the cultural assumptions which have led a number of Asians to become involved in the on-street grooming of schoolgirls for sex. Eight men of Pakistani heritage, and an Afghan, from Rochdale were convicted in Liverpool Crown Court<\/a> this week of offences including four rapes, eleven charges of conspiracy to engage children in sexual activity and six of trafficking children for sexual exploitation.<\/p>\n \u201cMany British Pakistani men live in two worlds,\u201d he begins. \u201cThe first is encompassed by family, business mosque. It is a socially conservative culture where there is no toleration of sex outside of marriage, and little emphasis on sexual gratification.\u201d Many are emotionally browbeaten into preserving their family honour by marrying a cousin from their family\u2019s village in Kashmir, the part of Pakistan from which the forefathers of Bradford\u2019s Asian community originally migrated. These new wives can bring with them \u201can unhealthy attitude towards sex and sexuality\u201d. It is not Islam which induces that, he says, but some clues can be found in the way traditional rural Kashmiri culture has been imported into Britain. The Chief Crown Prosecutor for Northwest England, Nazir Afzal, himself a British Pakistani, touched on the same phenomenon when \u00a0he spoke after the Rochdale trial of \u201cimported\u00a0cultural baggage\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe second world in which British Pakistani men live,\u201d he continues, \u201cis the over-sexualised material and lust-driven English lifestyle, where women are scantily clad, binge-drinking is a mainstream form of entertainment and porn is a massive factor.\u201d<\/p>\n You might have thought that, as time passed, British Asians would bring the two worlds together. But that\u2019s not happening. \u201cPatriarchs and matriarchs within families have huge influence,\u201d says the imam. \u201cConservatism is maintaining its grip. Around 60-70 per cent of British Asians, men and women, are still virgins when they marry.\u201d<\/p>\n For those Asians who work at night \u2013 like taxi-drivers and takeaway workers \u2013 these two worlds collide dramatically in their work-places which are filled with young women from a culture in which drinking to insensibility is commonplace.<\/p>\n \u201cMany of these men do not understand what is appropriate behaviour in wider society and what is not,\u201d he adds. \u201cThey are so lacking in social skills \u2013 because relationships between men and women in Pakistani culture are characterised by a real formality \u2013 that they can misconstrue an ordinary conversation with a white girl in their taxi and think she is indicating that she is open to a sexual advance when that is not what she means at all.\u201d Others cannot resist the temptation aroused by women \u2013 and young girls \u2013 whose cultural assumptions are so alien from the men\u2019s own.<\/p>\n Takeaways and taxi firms are two of the locations highlighted by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre last year, in a report on child sex abuse, as prime places where predators meet underage girls and begin the process of grooming. But that is leaping ahead.<\/p>\n There are a number of ways, says Alyas Karmani, in which second and third generation British Pakistani men cope with the cognitive dissonance induced by living with two conflicting cultures.<\/p>\n Some give in to the temptations of Western life. In an Asian urban context that celebrates values embodied in gangsta music and movies. \u201cIt links sexual violence with gang lifestyle and glorifies it through rap and videos which degrade a man to pimp and a woman to \u2018bitch\u2019,\u201d Karmani says.<\/p>\n Others turn their back on that and embrace religion, sometimes in a puritan or even jihadist way.<\/p>\n But many are conflicted into living a double life.<\/p>\n They do that in a variety of ways. \u201cSome have a wife from Pakistan and an English girlfriend by whom they may also have children,\u201d he says. \u201cIn some cases the English girlfriend predates the wife; some relationships go back to schooldays. Sometimes the arrangement is open \u2013 the wife knows about the other family but says nothing. Sometimes even the man will marry the girlfriend under Islamic law, though not under British law, obviously. Some of these relationships are exploitative, others are consensual.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of these men with double lives, who lack the social skills to go out and chat up a white girl of their own age, use prostitutes for sexual gratification,\u201d he continues. \u00a0\u201cBut a few abuse the sexuality of vulnerable young girls they come across as taxi-drivers and in takeaways. It\u2019s important to stress that this grooming behaviour is not an endemic pattern among Pakistani men; overall there is only a very a small minority of Pakistani men involved in grooming and sex gangs.\u201d<\/p>\n Far from everyone in the Asian communities agrees with such an acknowledgement. Iftikhar Ahmad of the London School of Islamics Trust has complained that \u201cnative Brits have double standards and are hypocrites [who] don\u2019t mention the fact that the majority of men who go to countries in East Asia looking for under aged sex are white European men\u201d.<\/p>\n But generally condemnation from religious and community leaders in the Asian community has been slowly growing over the past two years as a succession of cases has reached the courts in which men from the Asian community have been convicted of crimes involving the sexual exploitation of underage girls.<\/p>\n Expressions of shame, however, have outnumbered attempts at analysing whether there are specific qualities in ethnic minority culture which nurture the attitudes from which abuse springs.<\/p>\n Six years ago Mohammed Shafiq, who runs the Ramadhan Foundation, a small Muslim youth organisation in Manchester spoke out about the involvement of British Pakistanis in underage sex abuse crimes. He was roundly vilified by his own community. \u201cI was accused of doing the work of the BNP, \u201c he recalls. \u201cI had excrement through my door. I received death threats.\u201d His offence was to insist that \u201cto say that ethnicity is not a factor in these crimes is a lie.<\/p>\n Members of Asian grooming gangs, he said, thought \u201cthat white girls are less valuable than girls from their own community which is sick and abhorrent.\u00a0It grew from an assumption among some members of the Muslim community, he declared, that \u201cwhite girls have fewer morals\u201d \u2013 and that was evidenced \u201cby their wandering the streets unaccompanied late at night wearing mini-skirts and belly tops\u201d.<\/p>\n More recently, up the road from Bradford in Keighley, a youth worker named Shakeel Aziz has spoken out, declaring sexual grooming to be \u201can extension of other criminal activity, specifically gang association and drug selling. It\u2019s really a jigsaw of different problems and issues in society that enforce one another,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n And last year the broadcaster Adil Ray, a DJ and comedian with the BBC Asian network, set out another hypothesis in a BBC Three investigation into on-street grooming. He asked whether there was something particular about the Kashmiri culture which nurtured abusive attitudes.<\/p>\n Ray, who is from a Pakistani community in Birmingham, interviewed Yasmin Qureshi, the former specialist sexual offences lawyer who is now MP for Bolton South East. He noted that most of the cases of grooming by Asians occurred in the North and Midlands, which is where in the main immigrants from Kashmir settled to work in the factories and mills.<\/p>\n The MP concurred. \u201cIn the south… there\u2019s more integration between communities,\u201d she said. \u201cYou very rarely find a school that has 80 per cent of one nationality. The people who came and settled in the south came from a much more educated literate background… You can\u2019t take away from the fact that a lot of people come from Kashmir where some of the communities are culturally quite traditional.\u201d This is not a far cry from the claim made in 2003 by Ann Cryer, then Labour MP for Keighley, that\u00a0 Pakistani men were exploiting local children because they had married, or been promised in marriage, \u201cto someone they\u2019ve never met, some cousin from their village in Mirpur who is almost certainly illiterate and hasn\u2019t got anything in common with them\u201d.<\/p>\n Alyas Karmani agrees with Mohammed Shafiq about the dissonance caused for British Pakistanis caught between two cultures. And he agrees with Shakeel Aziz that there can be an interplay between grooming and drug and gang cultures. But he does not accept the idea that Kashmiri culture is somehow more backward and thereby to blame.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a flawed analysis. It\u2019s not about education. It\u2019s about access and opportunity,\u201d he says. \u201cThese men \u2013 and it\u2019s worth stressing that only a very tiny minority have deviated in this way \u2013 are not targeting white girls specifically but going for those who are most easily accessible and vulnerable, and that is by definition mainly white girls as young Asian teenagers are within the protection of the home at that time of night.<\/p>\n \u201cThe issues around ethnicity and sexuality are complex,\u201d he continues. \u201cSome powerful gangsta types have white girlfriends as status symbols. They would not dream of sharing them with anyone. But other \u201cbig men\u201d think it adds to their status and kudos if they pass their conquests around to their \u2018brothers\u2019 under biradiri<\/em> \u2013 the system of clan loyalty which has been brought here from Kashmir. That is often the case with those who abuse young girls. They involve brothers or cousins or friends from their clan.\u201d<\/p>\n That observation is confirmed by academic researchers working on child sex exploitation. Analysis by Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley at University College, London\u2019s Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science shows that abusers\u2019 networks were \u201ctightly-knit and characterised by strong social bonds predating the abuse, such as kinship\u201d. Gangs did not developing around a shared furtive interest in child sex abuse.\u00a0 Rather abuse was introduced into pre-existing social networks.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes money changes hands,\u201d says Imam Karmani. \u201cBut not large amounts. Most of the girls are enticed into relationships with the smallest of gifts \u2013 a \u00a35 top-up for their mobile phone, a free kebab or bag of chips. Any girl who is unprotected can be targeted. It\u2019s not racist; it\u2019s opportunistic. They are usually girls from damaged or dysfunctional backgrounds, who are out on the streets at all hours. Many of them respond because they have emotional needs as well as financial ones. They think of their abuser as their \u2018boyfriend\u2019 but he them puts pressure on her to have sex with other men.\u201d<\/p>\n So it is not about race, he insists, though it grows out of cultural presuppositions. \u201cThese men disrespect all women, but these white girls are more vulnerable.\u00a0 They objectify women, just as white footballer rapists do,\u201d he says. \u00a0\u201cPorn plays a big part in it. But where many porn films show three or more men simultaneously involved in sex acts with a woman in these cases there is still, bizarrely enough, a sexual reticence because of the men\u2019s cultural background \u2013 so they tend to go into the room where the woman is on the bed one after another. It is serial abuse, rather than a gang-bang.\u201d<\/p>\n What can be done about all this? \u00a0Wendy Shepherd of the children\u2019s charity Barnardo\u2019s is one of the UK\u2019s most experience on-the-ground experts on child sexual exploitation. She has a checklist of necessary improvements. It coincides almost entirely with that of Ella Cockbain and Helen Brayley from the Institute of Security and Crime Science.<\/p>\n It includes better policing training and strategies, so that prosecutions do not simply fail because there is no evidence beyond the word of the victim against the abuser. It demands greater co-operation and information sharing between police, social workers, doctors, nurses, teachers and charities like Barnardo\u2019s. It requires more need direct help for victims, including those who don\u2019t know they are being abused,\u00a0 and more work with children in schools to raise awareness of the risk.<\/p>\n But vital to the list, says Wendy Shepherd is that the younger generation of men needs to be educated in better attitudes towards women.<\/p>\n That is precisely what Alyas Karmani has begun to do. All across the country \u2013 but mainly in Bradford, Blackburn, Manchester and London \u2013 he runs courses aimed at three key groups. \u201cWe run From Boys to Men courses for 11-13 year olds to talk openly about puberty, bodily changes, sexual attraction and Islamic teaching on there being no sex before marriage,\u201d he explains. \u201cMany have had no conversation with their fathers, because sex is an embarrassing and even shameful activity in traditional Pakistani culture.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed a lot of the boys had been removed from sex education classes at school, on religious grounds, or complained that the classes were more about how to use a condom than about how to develop self-esteem and positive social skills to relate to members of the opposite sex. \u201cSex education in schools does not address real life issues and challenges,\u201d Karmani says. \u201cSo all their information is from their peers, the streets or the internet. They have no understanding of sex in a loving relationship, or any understanding of what is permitted and forbidden in Islam. They confuse Islam with conservative Pakistani culture.\u201d<\/p>\n He runs run similar courses for 14-19 year olds, which also deal with drugs, alcohol, gangs and violence. \u201cMany of these kids just want an adult male to talk frankly with them. They have to learn the importance of self-respect and not being susceptible to peer pressure or older men who offer them alcohol or want to take them to the brothel. Teaching respect for themselves and respect for women is part of that. The sessions also deal with social networking and internet, violence and sex, honour killings and domestic violence, sex offending, grooming, statutory rape, \u2018date rape\u2019 and indecent assault.<\/p>\n \u201cWe talk about what is abusive and what not \u2013 and about the need to respect white women and the damage that on-street grooming does to the victim, the man and the wider community,\u201d he says. \u201cWe look at famous case histories, like Britain\u2019s youngest rapist, who was 13. We don\u2019t flinch from hard cases and will answer any questions whatsoever. And we do some hard-hitting aversion therapy using the filmed testimony of women who have been raped \u2013 who are someone\u2019s daughter and sister.\u201d<\/p>\n For adults he runs a \u201cJoy of Muslim Sex\u201d course. \u201cI talk to the men and my wife talks to the women,\u201d he explains. \u201cWhat you have to understand is that these people are coming from a Pakistani culture in which no demonstration of affection is allowed between a married couple in public or in front of their children \u2013 not even a peck on the cheek or holding hands. That would be completely shameful behaviour. We try to teach them to overcome that and to be affectionate with one another, to create time and space. That\u2019s hard in a community where it\u2019s common for two brothers and their wives to live with the men\u2019s parents still.<\/p>\n \u201cWe talk about pre-play and foreplay, about the importance of hiring a hotel room once in a while for private space for prolonged pleasure, getting to know one another better. Sometimes the women, especially those who have come from Pakistan for an arranged marriage, need lessons on how to seduce their husbands. I told one woman that she needed to pay more attention to her husband and she paused and said: \u201cI\u2019ll iron more of his shirts then\u201d. I had to explain that wasn\u2019t quite what I meant.\u201d<\/p>\n The course uses material from the fifteenth-century erotic Arabic sex manual The Perfumed Garden<\/em>. \u201cThe men need to be told that sex for women is about emotional intensity more than the mere physical. The demand for all of these courses is huge,\u201d he concludes. \u201cI could spend all my time doing nothing else. The need is massive.\u201d<\/p>\n Men like Alyas Karmani are trying to get the British Asian community to address a problem from which, he admits, it has been in denial. But it is not enough, as Wendy Shepherd points out. Her long experience with Barnardo\u2019s shows that if you scratch the surface you\u2019ll find some pretty appalling attitudes towards women in the white community too.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not that long ago that a man could get drunk on a Sunday lunchtime and go home and give his wife a beating and people would accept that as normal,\u201d Wendy Shepherd says. \u201cThe danger with saying that the problem is with one ethnicity is that then people will only be on the look out for that group \u2013 and risk missing other threats.\u201d<\/p>\n Child sex abusers come from all backgrounds. Greater Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood said after the Rochdale convictions that his force was investigating other cases of on-street grooming which did not involve British Pakisatnis. \u201cOur experience shows us that all communities need to be vigilant to this issue.\u201d Without that many more children will suffer at the hands of such men.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When it comes to sex Alyas Karmani is extraordinarily plain-speaking. For a Muslim imam he is breathtakingly so. \u201cOral sex and anal sex are taboo in the British Pakistani community,\u201d he announces in a matter-of-fact way over gosht palak in his favourite curry-house just up the hill from Bradford University.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cSex is seen as only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,388,41,34,38],"tags":[154,423,425,489,426],"class_list":["post-5308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islam","category-morality-ethics","category-religion","category-sex-power","category-society","tag-child-abuse","tag-child-protection","tag-pakistani-community","tag-rape","tag-sexual-exploitation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5308"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5362,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5308\/revisions\/5362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grooming children for underage sex: Part One \u2013 the Asian question<\/a><\/h1>\n
Grooming children for underage sex: Part Two \u2013 Muslims and sexuality<\/a><\/h1>\n
A problem not only for Rochdale<\/a><\/h1>\n
Rochdale street grooming; a minefield of racial, religious and political sensitivities<\/a><\/h1>\n
The real truth about child sex grooming<\/a><\/h1>\n