A year or so ago a friend involved professionally in the Rochdale sex case, where a gang of Asian men traded white girls for sex, told me, "Of course there's a lot more of this stuff out there, you know". So it has proved, with cases in Derby and Telford topped yesterday by the conviction of a gaggle of unsavoury looking blokes from Oxford.
Some BBC news bulletins mentioned the Defendants were Asian; some didn't. A very difficult call to get right. What bearing, if any, does race have on this?
Well firstly, the gang didn't rape the women for being white. They did it mainly because they were women. But did they rape them because they were white? To put it another way, would they have raped them if they had been Asian?
We'll never know; but I would guess not. For one, it's much easier to regard someone without empathy (as legions of white racists have shown), if they have a different-coloured skin. But secondly Asian families, with their powerful and rigid structures, would probably never have allowed their daughters to wander the streets in search of drugs, fags and take-aways, as did the victims in the Oxford case.
Parental indifference and chaotic family structures are much more likely to be characteristics of the white underclass, and it's surely these qualities that left the girls vulnerable to the depredations of the gang. And for men brought up in the Islamic tradition, the easier morals and laissez-faire individualism of white post-Christian society must seem as alluring as they do utterly contemptible.
In other words, it's a cultural thing rather than a racial one.
For the Guardian, of course, the dramatic over-representation of Asian men in this type of case (which the newspaper admits) is nothing to do with either race or culture. It is because girls playing truant or running away from home are much more likely to be out and about in the evenings, where Asians, active in the night-time economy of the taxi and the corner shop, are free to befriend them. I am not making this up.
Amidst this sorry story of wickedness, social services stupidity and police incompetence, a sad vignette. "Social services let me down", the Guardian reports one of the girls as saying. That's certainly true. It's probably true of the police as well, and perhaps of her parents. I wonder whether she feels she might have made some bad decisions herself along the way.
PS Writing in the Torygraph one Sean Thomas, a novelist, suggests that it might all be the BNP's fault. If only the Fascists hadn't come out years ago and said there was an Asian sex gang in Oxford (their leader being interviewed by the police on suspicion of inciting racial hatred as a result), the prosecutions would have taken place much earlier. You see, because the BNP were saying it, everyone thought it couldn't possibly be true. If this is right, it's an object lesson in the nostrum that even sometimes people you don't like are worth listening to. But it probably isn't. You might just as well argue that because the BNP were against immigration, successive governments decided to do nothing about it.
