Betrayed by the PC brigade: From the Mail writer who first revealed the scandal of Muslim sex gangs, a damning exposé of how politically correct police and social workers betrayed underage white victims



For 20 years or more, there has been a shameful silence about the sexual exploitation of young girls in this country. Hundreds of children — some of them still at primary school — have been groomed by street gangs and turned into sex slaves.



And it is still going on today.



When I have written about this subject after investigations in towns and cities in the North of England, I have been reviled as a hater of our immigrant communities in abusive emails, letters and phone calls by those who continue to deny such things are going on.



For there is an uncomfortable truth about this abhorrent crime which we must not flinch from: the majority of girls ensnared by the street gangs are white, while most of the perpetrators come from the Pakistani and South Asian communities.

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Abusers: The men who took part in a child sex ring which exploited vulnerable teenage girls (Top row left to right) Abdul Rauf, Hamid Safi, Mohammed Sajid and Abdul Aziz. (Bottom row left to right) Abdul Qayyum, Adil Khan, Mohammed Amin and Kabeer Hassan

Of course, the great majority of people from these communities are decent citizens, and people from all races are capable of evil.



But I believe the controversial issue of these street gangs has been swept under the carpet, regarded as a taboo subject by police officers and social workers terrified of being labelled racist in ever more politically correct modern Britain.



Worried parents alerting social services and police about gangs have been ignored. NHS health clinics, treating the girls for sexual diseases, injuries and pregnancies, have sounded the alarm. Yet nothing has been done.



Teachers who reported teenage girls with hangovers and bruises taking constant calls on their mobiles from older men during school hours have been met with a wall of silence from officialdom.

Frightening: Dozens of children in Rochdale, pictured, were abused despite the authorities being repeatedly warned about them being at risk

Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Lancashire-based Ramadhan Foundation, a charity working for ethnic harmony, has warned: 'The police are over-cautious because they fear being branded racist'

Shockingly, one middle-class father from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, who told social workers that his 15-year-old daughter had been lured into an underage sex ring based at a local kebab shop, was told by them that the girl was making a ‘lifestyle’ choice to be a prostitute.



The social services refused to help the teenager escape.



Meanwhile, the police told the father there was ‘no prospect’ of convicting the gang members, who drove his daughter to ‘cash-for-sex’ sessions with scores of Muslim men in rented houses or public car parks all over the North of England.

At the time, despite her parents raising the alarm and subsequent DNA swabs from the girl’s underwear directly linking her to one of the gang, the police did not act and the gang’s members remained free and continued to sexually abuse her — and many other girls in Rochdale — for another two years.



As this father told me just the other day: ‘The police were scared stiff of being called racist, so for years they didn’t go after these men.

One of many victims: Laura Wilson, 17, from Rotherham had been groomed by a string of British Pakistanis before she was stabbed and thrown into a canal to die for informing her abusers' families of the sexual relationships in June this year

Killer: Ashtiaq Asghar repeatedly stabbed Laura Wilson (pictured above) and left her to die in a canal, after she told her abusers families of the sexual exploitation

‘The social workers were just as bad. They were afraid of saying it is a crime against white girls.’



His is not a lone view. Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Lancashire-based Ramadhan Foundation, a charity working for ethnic harmony, has warned: ‘The police are over-cautious because they fear being branded racist. That is wrong. These gangs of men are criminals, and should be treated as criminals whatever their race.’



But I have discovered that it is not only the police and social workers who turn a blind eye. The very agencies set up to help the girls recover from the abuse are equally reluctant to admit there is a strong racial element to these hideous crimes.



One charity, Risky Business, operating in Rotherham, refused to answer any of my questions on the racial make-up of the men in the sex gangs.

South Yorkshire Police headquarters in Sheffield where details of the problem of sexual exploitation are revealed in internal reports prepared by the force

Evil: Abdul Qayyum (left), 43, was sentenced to five years for conspiracy. Mohammed Amin (right) 45, was handed five years for conspiracy and sexual assault



At another, the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping, in Leeds, the chief executive told me: ‘This is a crime committed by men. We are trying to work in certain communities to change their attitudes to women. I cannot comment on the race of the criminals involved.’



This week, at last, the full truth began to emerge about the cover-up of crimes Scotland Yard estimates have affected 5,000 British-born children, the majority girls.



At least ten towns and cities on both sides of the Pennines have been particularly plagued by the gangs. Their members get rich because they can reap four times as much money trading young girls for sex as they can trading in drugs.



I have established that in the small city of Blackburn alone, at least 385 girls were groomed by men in a recent two-year period. Sheila Taylor, chairwoman of the National Working Group for Sexually Exploited Children and Young People, has told me that this figure will be similar in any other town of the same size in the North of England or the Midlands.



Ringleader: Shabir Ahmed was convicted of 30 counts of rape following a two week trial at Manchester Crown Court

What is most shocking is the fact that a series of new reports show police and social services have missed hundreds of opportunities to protect the child victims.



Yesterday, an official review of sexual exploitation of girls in Rochdale — ordered after the jailing of nine men aged between 22 and 59 for multiple child sex offences in the town — revealed that 50 children, the vast majority aged ten to 17, were identified [by the authorities] five years ago as having ‘clear links to take-away food businesses and to associated taxi companies’.



The girls, repeatedly raped, were treated by social workers as ‘wilful’ young teenagers ‘engaging in consensual sexual activity’.



‘When complaints reached the police, their investigations were inadequate,’ the review said.



From South Yorkshire, confidential documents told the same sorry story. A police intelligence report compiled in 2010 says thousands of sexual exploitation crimes against young white and mixed race girls have gone on in the county.



‘There is a problem with networks of Muslim offenders both locally and nationally,’ it reported. ‘This is particularly stressed in Sheffield, even more so in Rotherham, where there appears to be a significant problem with Asian males exploiting young white females.’



Yet local police, social workers and councils ignored the growing crisis.



One white girl in Rotherham, who was sexually abused by one such gang, was — incongruously — offered lessons in Urdu and Punjabi by social services to help get her over her ordeal.



According to the documents, 54 girls in Rotherham were sexually exploited by three brothers from a ‘British Pakistani’ family. Eighteen of the girls identified one of the brothers as their ‘boyfriend’, and he had made several of them pregnant.



Three brothers from another ‘British Pakistani’ family and 41 associates were linked to the sexual abuse of another 61 girls in the same area. Denis MacShane, the local Labour MP, says the serial sexual abuse of young girls should be a wake-up call for the police, local authorities and Britain’s Asian community. He is demanding an independent public inquiry, and blames a ‘misplaced racial sensitivity’ for the crisis.



So how are such vile crimes taking place in so-called civilised Britain, and why have such gangs been allowed to flourish so they now believe they can act with impunity?

Monsters: Abdul Aziz (left), 41, was given nine years for conspiracy and trafficking for sexual exploitation. Mohammed Sajid (right), 35, received 12 years tor conspiracy, trafficking, one count of rape and one count of sexual activity with a child



Scum: Hamid Safi (left), 22, was given four years for conspiracy and trafficking but not guilty of two counts of rape. Adil Khan (right), 42, was found guilty of conspiracy and trafficking for sexual exploitation



‘They are laughing at the police,’ one youth worker in South Yorkshire told me this week. ‘These men may get called into the police station for a dressing down, but so few are taken to court.



‘They now think they are invincible, and, of course, they’re not frightened of accusing the police of racism themselves if things get tricky for them. Then everything is dropped.’



At the heart of the scandal are uncomfortable cultural issues. Many men of Pakistani heritage believe white girls have low morals compared to Muslim girls.



The same youth worker explained to me: ‘These girls wear what the men call “slags’ clothing” and show too much of their bodies.’



To add to this cultural divide, the men are often in loveless arranged marriages with wives from Pakistan who speak no English. They want to have sex, and a young virgin free of sexual diseases is the perfect victim.



Victim: A vulnerable 13-year-old white girl wrote a letter to herself saying Asian men took her dreams and life away from her (posed by model)

Gang members are often unemployed, so have time to groom girls — luring them into a trap which is nearly always sprung in the same way.



The girl might be out with her friends in the town centre, often on a Saturday afternoon. She is bored, and when a group of smiling men pull up in a flashy car with blaring rap music, she is flattered.



Tanya’s story illustrates their modus operandi. In 2001, Tanya, a 13-year-old, became Britain’s youngest mother after she was coerced into becoming the sex slave of a gang in Yorkshire.



Tanya went to the local secondary school and lived with her single mother in a neat terraced house.



At the shops one day, a group of men came up to her. They took her off in their car and plied her with vodka. They gave her a mobile phone to receive calls from them, and bought her gifts and meals.



After a week or two, they said they wanted to have sex with her in return. Frightened of them, she agreed. She became pregnant, but by then she had slept with so many men from the Pakistani community that she did not know who the father was.



DNA tests by police on five of the most likely candidates did not prove paternity. Two of the gang members who were tested confessed to sleeping with Tanya when she was 12.



Shockingly, they were never charged with any offence for having sex with an under-age child.



The birth was hushed up, and the gang got off scot-free. The local council and social services department then went to the High Court in London and secured an injunction stopping anyone — including Tanya and her family — ever talking about the matter again. They have never done so.



The terrifying question is just how many other girls like Tanya have been let down by a system that does not dare tell the truth?



Lessons need to be learnt. And they need to be learnt with great urgency.