Oxford Sex Grooming: A Muslim Problem or a White One?

Now that yet another band of men have been found guilty of the most appalling sexual crimes against young girls we are already being treated to discussions as to whether there is a problem with certain parts of the Muslim community in this country.

No longer the preserve of the Nick Griffins of this world this issue has now been taken up by more respectable commentators and public figures, most notably by Nazir Afzal OBE, head of the Crown Prosecution Service in the North West.

Afzal's fellow Muslim, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, has also written about some of the cultural assumptions apparently held by parts of Islamic Britain that may have motivated, or at least excused, the behaviour of the Rochdale grooming gang, whose actions were almost identical to those found guilty in Oxford.

However even if we accept that there is a certain type of young Muslim man out there, who would not dream of harming his co-religionists, but sees the white kaffir as fair game for the worst kind of exploitation, there is one thing we are forgetting. Sexually abusing children is illegal no matter what religion you are, something that ageing '70s TV stars are now finding to their cost.

It should not matter to the police or anyone else that criminals come from this ethnic group or that religion. One doubts that the victims would feel any better about the issue if their tormentors were white.

But if we're going to say we have a problem with a segment of the Muslim population we have to also look at the failings of what the charmless Mr Griffin would call the "indigenous population".

Its true then when one sees the words "sex grooming gang" in a headline, one might feel justified in assuming that the accused will have names like Mohammad, Hussein and Ahmed. What is guaranteed though is that you'll quickly find the words "plied with alcohol and drugs" in the story, while the word "parents" will most likely not appear very much, if at all.

This is not to blame the victims of these terrible crimes, rather it is to suggest that the girls involved were in many cases already victims of social and family breakdown, the consequences of which allowed them to fall into the hands of depraved men and become victims all over again.

Social services and the police have been condemned for their failure to protect these girls, yet almost no one in the media seems to be asking "Where were their parents?" It seems to be taken for granted that their parents had let them down and where nowhere to be seen.

Are there really parents out there who either don't know or don't care that their children have been enslaved, drugged, "plied with alcohol" and (assuming they go in the first place) don't come home from school? Well it seems there are.

While we only get a glimpse of this dysfunctional strata of society in the grooming cases we get a full on view in one of the more shocking cases the grace our TVs and headlines in recent times.

Mick Philpott is perhaps the most extreme example of this apparent subculture that exists in Britain. Mr Philpott may not have meant to kill his children but his sordid life shows exactly how low the standard of parenting can be in this country and how harmful this can be to children.

Not that the parents of groomed children are the same as Philpott. Some may even have done their best to help their children. But the fact that this crime has been committed against so many girls and for such long periods of time without anyone apparently noticing would suggest that quite a few mummy's and daddy's were not doing their job properly, if at all.

One cannot help but feel that the sex grooming cases are the inevitable outcome of an uneducated and chauvinistic strain of Islam coming into contact with some of the disastrous results of family breakdown among white communities.

In "My Fair Lady" Alfred Doolittle complains that he is so poor that he cannot afford to indulge in "middle class morality" and neither could Mr Philpott apparently despite a reported £60,000 a year from the British taxpayer. Money therefore is not the issue, rather social attitudes and behaviour needs to change across the board to prevent these crimes from recurring.

Perhaps rather than blame certain communities it's time we all had a good dose of middle class morality.