The missing link in the grooming gangs report: cousin marriage

Times

7 days ago

When the US Department of Defence set up an interrogation unit at Guantanamo Bay after 9/11, it conducted a detailed study on the suspected terrorists it held. Agents wanted to understand the links between them, the way they had worked together, the better to infiltrate their wider networks. They found nothing. Diddly squat. They conducted audits, led themselves on a merry dance, but achieved zilch.
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Then they hired someone who understood the culture of the people they'd apprehended; someone steeped in Arabic mores. She instantly spotted a pattern in the names of the suspects. A startlingly high proportion were from two clans: the Qahtani and the Utaybi. When she mentioned this to her DoD colleagues, their first question was: what the hell is a clan? Only after she explained the significance of these social institutions, the subtle pattern of names that indicate clan affiliations and the codes of honour and secrecy that make them powerful vehicles for group action did they see the point. The agents were then able to infiltrate the networks and prevent future atrocities.
Why am I telling you this? Well, because I read Baroness Casey of Blackstock's report on the rape gangs scandal with rising levels of frustration — indeed much the same emotion with which I read her 2016 report on social integration. I don't doubt Casey's work rate or integrity. But I think that, somewhat like the DoD at Guantanamo, she couldn't see what was before her eyes because she lacked the appropriate analytical lens.
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You see, to understand many of the most urgent failures of integration, you need to understand the clan. These groups are held together not just by ideology or religion; they are cemented by cousin marriage, a common practice in Arabic cultures and, in the UK, many Pakistani immigrant communities, particularly those hailing from Kashmir. By marrying within small, tightknit groups, they ensure everything is kept within the baradari, or brotherhood — property, secrets, loyalty — binding clan members closer together while sequestering them from wider society.
In her 2016 report Casey rightly talked about the failure to speak English, honour beatings and the like, but she missed the point that many of these problems are a function of marriage practices that isolate communities. The academic Patrick Nash of the Pharos Foundation has written of baradari life 'concentrated in small geographical areas spread across a few streets or nearby neighbourhoods where there is little need or opportunity to have much to do with wider society or practise the English language'. To write a report on failures of integration without seeing the link with cousin marriage is, I suggest, like writing on the power grid without noting the significance of electricity.
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Casey's report on the rape gang scandal was flawed for the same reason. It was a strange experience to read her words as she edged ever closer to grasping the point without quite getting there. She noted that the problem is disproportionately concentrated among British Pakistanis. She even noted that 'two thirds of suspects offended within groups' that were 'based on pre-existing relationships — mainly brothers and cousins'. But then, stunningly, she suggested that these links were 'unsophisticated' and 'informal'. Anyone who studies these things — one thinks of Michael Muthukrishna at LSE — could have told her that this is the unmistakable pattern of clan-based crime: groups whose links are anything but informal and unsophisticated.
Charlie Peters, who has investigated this problem for GB News, told me: 'The deeper you probe, the more you see the presence of clans. We know that such communities are more likely to see others as outsiders, of less moral value and, when it comes to young white girls, fair game. The perpetrators also knew that they could commit crimes without getting dobbed in since loyalty is owed to the clan but not victims. In some cases, abusers were aided by relatives in authority.'
Nash put it this way: 'Cousin marriage sustains close-kin networks which incentivise clan members both to dehumanise out-group victims and to suppress knowledge of criminal activity to preserve family honour.'
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A couple of examples. Last year, Shaha Amran Miah, 48, Shaha Alman Miah, 47, and Shaha Joman Miah, 38, were convicted at Preston crown court of horrific abuse perpetrated in Barrow-in-Furness and Leeds. Yes, these were Pakistani men, but they were also brothers within an overarching baradari. In Rotherham in 2016, Arshid, Basharat and Bannaras Hussain groomed and raped children for nearly 20 years while Qurban Ali was found guilty of conspiracy to rape. Three of these men are brothers and Ali is their uncle.
I have long advocated a ban on cousin marriage but should perhaps say that I've never regarded it as a panacea. Improving integration requires so much more: ending mass uncontrolled immigration, amending legal frameworks to stop the boats, deporting foreign criminals, not to mention other policies supported by large majorities but serially ducked by politicians. A ban on consanguinity would, though, be of huge value. American states with bans tend to be more prosperous and faster-growing. Nations with bans are richer and more integrated, with less corruption and lower rates of crime. A ban would also reduce the prevalence of the congenital diseases causing untold suffering in Kashmiri immigrant communities from Bradford to Luton.
The good news is that Kemi Badenoch has adopted this as Tory policy after campaigning by her colleague Richard Holden, and a poll for YouGov last month showed that 77 per cent of the British people are in favour of a ban (only 9 per cent oppose it). But here's what astounds me: Labour remains against prohibition, despite (I am told) having read the evidence. Why? How? Permit me to suggest that I glimpse through the façade of prevarication a party still terrified of criticising any cultural practice out of fear of appearing racist. Isn't that why it was mute for so long on female genital mutilation and honour beatings and still can't bring itself to describe the burqa as a pernicious symbol of institutional misogyny?
In other words, the reason the grooming scandal was not confronted for so long by both main parties (not to mention the police and social services) — namely, the fear of seeming bigoted for investigating ethnic minorities, even while they were gang-raping young girls — is still alive and well in the British government. As the son of a Pakistani immigrant who integrated into this nation (not least by marrying my mum) and came to love it, I find this sickening. One can perhaps forgive Casey for missing the significance of cousin marriage, given that it is a custom with which she is unfamiliar (although, frankly, she should have done her homework), but there can be no excuse for politicians who put cultural sensitivities before basic decency.
So I say to Starmer, Hermer, Cooper et al: examine your consciences. Did you really go into politics to be apologists for the worst kind of moral relativism, to acquiesce in the nihilistic pretence that all cultural practices are of equal value, when they emphatically are not?
If not, find your backbone, confront the Muslim bloc vote and ban cousin marriage. The alternative is betrayal of the most heinous kind. For here's a thought to focus minds: girls today, even as you read these words, are being abused by ethnic clans operating in this country. Fail to act now, and this is on you.