JULIE BURCHILL: I thought I’d heard it all on the Rochdale grooming scandal. But these latest reports expose the dangerous Islamophilia of our police who failed to protect so many vulnerable girls at the hands of evil men

Just when you thought you’d heard the most horrific stories of the terror unleashed on thousands of girls by the Rochdale grooming gangs, yet more episodes emerge, complete with more heartbreaking details.

An aborted fetus was taken by police from a 13-year-old grooming victim without her or her parents’ consent for DNA testing, then left forgotten in a freezer at a police station. A child was arrested and released on bail to live with a man who had previously been arrested himself on suspicion of child abuse – and was subsequently named as a ‘co-conspirator’ in the trial against the abusers.

Another victim, whose story was published in a historical review yesterday, told police that her tormentors had kept her in a cage and made her behave like a dog or a baby. No action was taken against the men.

In all these cases, the cruelty and abuse was facilitated by the failure of Greater Manchester Police.

How could this bonfire of childhood and innocence have been perpetuated by agents paid – by us – to protect the weak from evil?

The first reason is what I call ‘Islamophilia’, as opposed to the ‘Islamophobia’ we hear so much about. Islamophilia is the practice of giving certain groups of Muslims a pass for behavior that would be rightly maligned if carried out by others. In Rochdale, police were clearly concerned about being labeled racist, but it is a widespread phenomenon. We have also seen it in the soft policing of the almost weekly hate marches in London, which openly call for “jihad” and “death to the Jews,” and display what appear to be ISIS flags and banners proclaiming “The fluttering of Muslim armies.” After one of these, the crack Quran team of the American newspaper With a Face announced that ‘jihad’ has ‘a number of meanings’, so that’s okay.

Meanwhile, women fill their social media feeds with virtue signaling in support of Hamas and its stated goal of “liberating” Palestine — cheering on an all-male, racial-supremacist terrorist group that uses rape as a weapon. Yet these same women would scream blue murder if a white bus driver called them “love.”

But above all, the effect of Islamophilia has been evident for years in the way various police forces in some northern towns and cities have turned a blind eye to the systematic rape, torture and trafficking of hundreds of female children by certain groups of Muslim men. . Clearly not all grooming gangs in Britain have been Muslim. A Home Office report found that ‘grooming gangs’ were ‘mostly white’. However, in the case of Rochdale, but also in other conurbations such as Telford and Oldham, people spoke of ‘Asian’ grooming gangs. But the gangs there were not Chinese Buddhists or Indian Hindus.

The report found that Greater Manchester Police and Rochdale Council had failed to properly investigate evidence of abuse in Rochdale, pictured

No: in these cases they were gangs made up of Muslim men – and millions of decent British Muslims reviled them. These gangs have benefited from the cowardly Islamophilia that has engulfed so many of our institutions, from the police to our universities and our state broadcaster.

The gripping 2017 BBC series Three Girls focused on the events surrounding the Rochdale child abuse ring

Yet there is a second, more pernicious reason why abusers have been able to get away with it for so long. They have also benefited from systemic police misogyny, which is industrial in scale.

Compare the child-glove treatment of angry Islamists during marches to the heavy-handed police action meted out to arrogant women during the vigil for Sarah Everard, who was raped and murdered by a white police officer in 2021. Miss Everard’s killer was jokingly known as ‘The Rapist’ by his colleagues on the force.

The police were happy to overlook the medieval misogyny of the grooming gangs, because they – like the gangs themselves – regarded these poor, unfortunate women as second-class citizens, unworthy of even the most basic care and protection.

Yesterday, the great British Muslim lawyer Nazir Azfal – a former chief prosecutor who specialized in cases involving violence against women and the sexual exploitation of children – put it starkly: ‘In Rochdale, ethnicity was a problem, but not THE problem. THE problem when it comes to rape and sex crimes is that authorities refused to listen to the victims, to women and girls. Misogyny is why offenders commit offenses and why those with a responsibility to protect them have failed to do so.”

Maggie Oliver, a former Greater Manchester Police detective turned whistleblower who now campaigns against child abuse

He was absolutely right. Has anything changed? Maggie Oliver, a heroic former Greater Manchester Police detective turned whistleblower and campaigner against child abuse, doesn’t believe so. She said yesterday that the ‘failures of that time are still happening’.

She told how a female officer working in the unit investigating child sexual exploitation in 2021 came to her only three weeks ago and said it was ‘business as usual’, with around 300 victims being fobbed off – and 96 men considered suspects. a risk for children who are still not prosecuted.

Until the police are forced to face the terrible truth – that they are blinded by Islamophilia and mired in misogyny – we will never have a force fit for purpose.

They must remember that their job is simple: protect the vulnerable from the vile, regardless of their class, color or creed.