2 "Asian" men convicted of sexual activity of a child.

I guess "Asian" is another word for "Pakistani Muslim".

Mothers of prevention - Times Online

A t the crown court in Preston on August 10, a trial involving two Asian men caused unusual interest across a number of cities in the north of England. The defendants, Zulfqar Hussain and Qaiser Naveed, were each sentenced to five years and eight months for abduction, sexual activity with a child, and the supply of a controlled drug.

They had both pleaded guilty, and they were placed on the sex offenders’ register for life.

It seemed a shabby, seedy episode, probably typical of many cases down the years that have involved exploitative men and naive women. Yet, until these convictions, the police in over a dozen towns and cities, including Leeds, Sheffield, Blackburn and Huddersfield, had appeared reluctant to address what many local people had perceived as a growing problem – the groups of men who had been preying on young, vulnerable girls and ensnaring them into prostitution.

It was a very uncomfortable scenario, not least because many of these crimes had an identifiable racial element: the gangs were Asian and the girls were white. The authorities, in the shape of politicians and the police, seemed reluctant to acknowledge this aspect of the crimes; it has been left to the mothers of the victims to speak out.

Maureen’s daughter Jo was one of Hussain and Naveed’s victims, having been groomed by them and a number of other Asian men when she was 14. Jo went missing from her Blackburn home 90 times during the six-month period in 2005 that she was in Hussain and Naveed’s clutches.

“I was told by one police officer that he did not ‘want to start a race riot’ by arresting Pakistani men for sexual offences,” Maureen said. During the six months that Jo was in the clutches of these men, they raped, beat and abused her to the point where, says her mother, she did not even know who she was any more. Eventually, after she was attacked by Hussain and Naveed with an iron bar, Jo somehow found the courage to report them to police, and they were arrested. The case took 16 months to come to court. In the meantime, other pimps, undeterred by the impending trial, continued to go about their business.

“Police seem to be very cautious about this. They fear being branded racist,” says Mohammed Shafiq, the press spokesman for the Ramadhan Foundation, a Muslim youth education charity based in Rochdale. Shafiq recently tried to address some imams and community leaders, but did not get very far. “They all had a ‘no comment’ policy,” says Shafiq, “but our organisation is clear that it is going on, and that it is linked to drug dealing. We can’t simply blame the BNP.”

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