As the head of the Muslim Women’s Network, Shaista Gohir is determined to give a voice to those who need it to fight against abuse, persecution and inequality

“We had a lady call because her neighbour’s daughter kept coming round to her house,” Shaista Gohir, chair of the national charity Muslim Women’s Network UK (MWN), tells me. “She couldn’t understand why this 13-year-old Muslim girl wanted to spend so much time with her. Finally, she had a long chat with the girl, who told her that when her parents went out her older cousins would come round. The cousins had been sexually abusing this girl for two years.”

Gohir says she convinced the neighbour, who was worried the parents might marry off their daughter if they found out about the abuse, to call social services. “But she still felt bad about not telling the girl’s parents herself. In the end, she told the father and he believed his daughter.

“But the next day the mother came round shouting abuse – she was angry at the neighbour, because the abusers were her sister’s children and she thought it made her family look bad.”

Cases like this, says Gohir, are why, on 15 January, the charity launched a national helpline for Muslim women. The charity – whose three part-time staff run a network of more than 700 organisations and members – offers specialised help and support to women on issues from mental health to abortion, taking into account their cultural and religious backgrounds. It also campaigns and provides training and workshops. The helpline, staffed by 10 trained volunteers, will allow it to reach more women than ever before, says Gohir, whose relentless energy fuels the small charity’s big ambitions. What motivates her? Dressed in smart businesswear, she replies calmly but bluntly: “Anger drives me.”

Brought up by a single mother who worked long hours in a clothing factory, Gohir says she understood from an early age the injustices women can face. “I had to come home from school and feed my brothers and cook and clean – an 11-year-old acting like an adult. Even in a single-parent family, I saw how women would take responsibility for men’s bad behaviour.”

After graduating with a science degree, she was pressured into marrying and ran away from home. “I didn’t know about women’s groups,” she says. “I went to the first place I could find: a rented room in a house full of strangers with no heating.”

Gohir began working in environmental health, and although she reconciled with her relatives, she still desperately wanted a stable family. “My goal was to get married and have children,” she says. “I just wanted to have a nice family unit.”

But after marrying “the best husband in the world” and having three children, something changed. “I don’t know what happened,” she laughs. “It was around 2004, and I kept seeing the Muslim Council of Britain on TV. They were the only [Muslim] voices on TV, the only ones talking to the government. It didn’t seem right that they were all men.”

In response, she set up an online poll, Muslim Voice, to try to gather a more representative sample of opinions; eventually, she was asked to join Muslim Women’s Network. Last year, the charity’s harrowing report into the sexual exploitation of Asian girls was cited in the Jay report into the Rotherham scandal. More than 1,400 victims, most of whom were white, were said to have been attacked in the town by men, the majority of whom were British Pakistani. But MWN’s report suggested Asian victims faced extra barriers to reporting abuse and had not been spotted by the services that worked with other abuse victims.

Gohir and her colleagues had collated case studies from charities across the country that detailed the experiences of girls and young women who had been repeatedly raped by multiple attackers, often beaten, and blackmailed into silence. The conclusion was that Asian victims were not only less likely to report abuse, thanks to cultural barriers, but they were also at risk of being “revictimised” if they did; forced into marriages, or disowned by their families for “shaming” them. Gohir says she was shocked by the scale and the brutality involved, but not by the fact there were more Asian victims. “After Rochdale [where nine men were jailed for abusing young girls], I was going to meetings and no one was taking me seriously, because [Asian victims] don’t show up in the statistics. I started looking for case studies – and they were there.”

Since the report, MWN has held meetings to raise the issue of Asian victims, and has created information packs for communities and schools. It has also run child sexual exploitation workshops for taxi drivers, training them in how to spot and report suspected abuse.

“Growing up, I heard tons of stories about abuse,” she says. “Women would retell these experiences as though it happened to someone else, but never admit it was about them.”

Gohir is outraged that offenders can go unpunished because of the cultural emphasis on “honour”, and women’s role in upholding it, that means someone reporting the abuse of a girl could be accused of bringing “shame” on her family. “I wish the words shame and honour could be deleted,” she tells me. “That is the root of our problems – from forced marriages to not reporting domestic violence.”

Interviewing victims, she admits, is taking an emotional toll and bringing up buried memories. “I have to space [the interviews] out,” she says. She tells me about one woman who was raped by six relatives and family friends when she was between the ages of nine and 12. “When I hear the stories, I can’t sleep at night.” But Gohir remains optimistic; she talks about the number of women who are speaking out, and puts this down to increasing independence – both social and financial – among the younger generation of Muslim women in the UK, as well as an increased media focus on the issue.

“A lot of these women are suffering in silence, and they aren’t strong enough to vocalise that they want help,” Gohir says. “I don’t mind taking the flak.”

To contact the Muslim Women’s Network UK helpline, call 0800 999 5786 or visit mwnhelpline.co.uk