“You must never [again] refer to Asian men,” and your “awareness of ethnic issues” needs to be raised. This chastisement was given to a UK Home Office researcher who, apparently, was thought guilty of “racism.” Her offense?

She blew the whistle on a pedophilia ring in the English town of Rotherham.

One in which the girl victims were white — and the abusers Muslim Pakistanis.

The New American, in its initial coverage of this story last Friday, quoted an Associated Press description of the abuse:

About 1,400 children were sexually exploited in a northern England town, a report concluded Tuesday....

Report author Alexis Jay cited appalling acts of violence between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, a town of some 250,000.

... The report described rapes by multiple perpetrators, mainly from Britain's Pakistani community, and how children were trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated.

"There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone," Jay said. "Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators."

Yet, as we noted in last Friday's article, “These crimes continued for 16 years not because authorities were unaware of them, but, rather, because of an apparent ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’ attitude in government.” We then quoted OneNewsNow.com’s Charlie Butts who wrote:

Colin Hart, director of The Christian Institute in New Castle, says social workers warned authorities that something was wrong.

"But they continually ignored the concerns that were raised," says Hart, "and in one case a social worker was disciplined for raising concerns."

The Associated Press and BBC have reported the perpetrators were Pakistani, and political correctness trumped law enforcement action.

And now more details have emerged about the kind of discipline meted out, and they illustrate well why police and other officials were intimidated into silence. Just consider the document below (courtesy of Twitchy.com), which outlines what befell the unnamed Home Office researcher after she reported the child sexual abuse:

This doesn’t mean that no Britons are speaking up. As also reported by Twitchy, eloquent UK politician and Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan weighed in on Twitter, writing,

("O tempora o mores!" is Latin for “Oh, what times! Oh, what customs!”)

Yet Hannan is in the minority — and not just among high-profile figures. While a recent BBC poll showed that 95 percent of Britons believe multiculturalism is a failure, few will speak up without anonymity’s protection. Under UK “hate speech” laws, citizens can be charged with a “racial offense” for criticizing Islam and may suffer punishment. As a result, reports Roger Scruton at Forbes, it doesn’t matter that white girls were specifically targeted by Muslim perpetrators in Rotherham who do not treat them "with the respect that they treat girls from their own community" and who see "English society not as the community to which they belong, but as a sexual hunting ground."

“Let slip the mere hint that Pakistani Muslims are more likely than indigenous Englishmen to commit sexual crimes and you will be branded as a racist and an Islamophobe, to be ostracised in the workplace and put henceforth under observation,” writes Scruton. In fact, when one father went to the police demanding justice for his abused daughter, the writer tells us, he was “arrested for obstruction and charged with wasting police time.”

And the political correctness extends to our shores, too. While the New York Times did report on the Rotherham scandal, it only mentioned in passing that some “officers and local officials told the investigation that they did not act for fear of being accused of racism.” The paper then immediately sloughed this over, implying that the ignoring of the child victims was the result of an “undeniable culture of institutional sexism” and stating that the “police referred to victims as ‘tarts’ and to the girls’ abuse as a ‘lifestyle choice.’” Critics would point out, however, that these negative characterizations were simply used as excuses for political-correctness-inspired inaction. As Scruton explained:

[British] police forces lean over backwards to avoid the accusation of racism, while social workers will hesitate to intervene in any case in which they could be accused of discriminating against ethnic minorities. Matters are made worse by the rise of militant Islam, which has added to the old crime of racism the new crime of ‘Islamophobia’. No social worker today will risk being accused of this crime. In Rotherham a social worker would be mad, and a police officer barely less so, to set out to investigate cases of suspected sexual abuse, when the perpetrators are Asian Muslims and the victims ethnically English. Best to sweep it under the carpet, find ways of accusing the victims or their parents or the surrounding culture of institutionalised racism, and attending to more urgent matters such as the housing needs of recent immigrants, or the traffic offences committed by those racist middle classes.

Of course, there likely is one area of agreement between the politically correct authorities and their critics: that institutionalized “racism” certainly exists. After all, is justice in much of the West today at all blind — or just deaf and dumb?