I recently came across a work of anthropology which, more than anything else I’ve read, explains the context in which the predominantly Pakistani (and most notoriously, Mirpuri) grooming gangs developed in Britain. The work is Professor Alison Shaw’s 1980s fieldwork on the Pakistani community of Oxford, which she wrote up in A Pakistani Community in Britain (1988), and subsequently revised in Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani Families in Britain (2000). Like most academic books, it is absurdly expensive to buy, but the revised edition, which is the one I have, is available to download on Anna’s Archive.

Reading it brought home to me how rare it is to see high-quality social scientific investigation into the consequences of Britain’s experiment with mass, unselective immigration. We are only now really coming to terms with the reality of the grooming gangs, perhaps better termed mass rape and abuse gangs, and it is clear that a large contributor to how they were – and likely still are – allowed to operate with relative impunity was an aversion to truly appreciating what was going on from an ethnic perspective.

Read more: Grooming Gangs and the Failure of Social Science