British grooming gang

A British court has rejected appeals against deportation filed by Pakistani-origin members of a South Asian gang of child ‘groomers’, setting the stage for their return to the country of their birth under recent bilateral agreements between London and Islamabad regarding deportees. Although most of the Pakistani-origin convicts had acquired British citizenship by the time they were caught, their citizenship was revoked based on their past criminal conduct.

In the case of the two convicted child molesters whose appeals were recently turned down, both had the audacity to claim that deporting them would be a violation of their human rights, never mind the rights of the children whose lives they ruined and who they continue to harass by returning to live near some of their victims. One of the men even had the gall to claim that sending him to Pakistan would deprive him of the ability to be father to the son one of his victims bore. In this monster’s mind, the child would benefit by having a relationship with the man who raped his mother when she was 13.

However, while the actions of these men were beyond vile and they can consider themselves lucky to have been released after only a few years of jail time, it is notable that the British press, especially right-leaning outlets, used the crime as a means to direct racist attacks at Pakistanis, accusing them of being behind a nationwide increase in child sex crimes. Sadly, none of those outlets followed up after the British government found the increase in crimes against children did not have an ethnic basis. The home office explicitly said “group-based offenders are most commonly white,” and a cursory analysis of the reporting on the issue shows media attention largely focused on crimes in areas with large Pakistani or other migrant populations.

We also hope that, unlike a few British-Pakistani sex criminals who fled to Pakistan in the past and began living it up, these men will actually face the social ostracisation that their crimes deserve.