Terry Firma

A child-sex ring in the greater Manchester area whose members raped young teenage girls for two decades is no more, with most of its regular participants now behind bars.

Nine Asian men were yesterday jailed for a total of 77 years for raping and abusing up to 47 girls — some as young as 13 — after plying them with alcohol and luring them to takeaways. …The [court] heard that the men — who are all from Pakistan, apart from one who is from Afghanistan — groomed and ‘shared’ the young white girls because they [the girls] were vulnerable.

One of those convicted is Islamic preacher Abdul Rauf.

To protesters who thought that the charges betrayed racism against the U.K.’s Asian population, Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood of Greater Manchester Police said:

“It is not a racial issue. This is about adults preying on vulnerable young children. It just happens that in this particular area and time the demographics were that these were Asian men.” However, the gang’s ringleader yesterday branded the judge a “racist bastard” after he and eight other men were jailed. The extraordinary outburst came after Judge Gerald Clinton accused the gang of targeting white girls because they were not part of their “community or religion.”

With experts on paedophilia insisting street grooming by Muslim men was a real problem, the judge made it clear he believed religion was a factor. Police have played down the racial backgrounds of the men, saying the girls — mostly from broken or ‘chaotic’ homes — were targeted because they were vulnerable, not because they were white.

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Note: Moral Compass launched in February of this year. Roughly 90 percent of our posts are tied to current news events, but we occasionally feature media reports from 2012 or earlier. The sex-ring story, above, is from May of last year.

But here’s a report from just yesterday, similar in many ways:

Three men who abducted a vulnerable 13-year-old girl from the streets of London and forced her to become their sex slave have been jailed. The girl, who was described as being from a broken and troubled family, was subjected to sexual abuse over four days after being persuaded to travel with the men to Ipswich in Suffolk in July last year.

The men plied her with drugs and alcohol to keep her subdued.

Mohammed Sheikh, Hamza Ali and Suran Uddin were all convicted of trafficking and sex offences following a trial. Uddin was jailed for 15 years, Sheikh will serve eight years and Ali five years. All three were placed on the sex offenders register and Sheikh and Ali could face deportation to Somalia, their home country.

[Images via the Daily Mail]