Pakistan on Wednesday refuted UK’s home secretary Suella Braverman’s allegations that British-Pakistani men are part of grooming gangs that “pursue, drug, rape, and harm vulnerable English girls”, calling them as “discriminatory” and “xenophobic.”
Islamabad’s foreign office (FO) spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said that she painted a “highly misleading picture, signalling the intent to target and treat British Pakistanis differently”.
Also read | UK PM Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman heckled: ‘Go away’
“She (Braverman) fails to take note of the systemic racism and ghettoisation of communities and omits to recognise the tremendous cultural, economic, and political contributions that British-Pakistanis continue to make in British society,” Baloch was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
Braverman reportedly told Sky News in an interview last week that groups of men, almost all British Pakistanis, are involved in the sexual abuse of children and young women.
“What’s clear is that what we’ve seen is a practice whereby vulnerable White English girls, sometimes in care, sometimes in challenging circumstances, are being pursued and raped, drugged, and harmed by gangs of British-Pakistani men who work in child abuse rings or networks,” she said.
She further said the authorities have turned a “blind eye to these signs of abuse out of political correctness, out of fear, of being called racists, out of fear, of being called bigoted”.
“We’ve seen institutions, social workers, state agencies, cops, and social workers turn a blind eye to this-out of political correctness and out of fear of being called racist. There are many perpetrators running wild and behaving in this way, and it is now time for authorities to track these perpetrators down without fear or favour and bring them to justice,” the home secretary reportedly said.
