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In the comment to which David responds I refer to two areas of criminality in the UK that for a long period of time were allowed to proceed unchecked because of ‘cultural sensitivities’ and the dread of people working in protective agencies that they might be labelled ‘racist’.

Firstly I mentioned the abject failure to effectively enforce the British law that has prohibited female genital mutilation since 1985, a practise that an exasperated House of Commons committee rightly described as ‘an extreme form of violence against women’.

Who comprise the overwhelming majority of the victims of this practise? Young girls ‘of colour’, of course, especially from Islamic communities. The scale of FGM in the UK is extraordinary – the NHS reports fifteen new cases a day! There has been almost no effort to enforce this prohibition, until very recently – the first successful prosecution was last year.

The second area was the proliferation of sexual slavery gangs, euphemistically labelled ‘grooming gangs’, over several decades at multiple localities around the UK. There involved ‘Asian’ men preying on young white girls from poor and/or dysfunctional families.

The abuse of these girls was utterly horrendous, as documented in the report by the chief social worker of Scotland, Alexis Jay, and other official reports. The executive summary of Jay’s report says:

‘It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.’

Again, as clearly documented by two official reports and the excellent work of Times reporter Andrew Norfolk, this activity was allowed to proliferate with minimal or no intervention by the protective agencies – indeed in some cases with their active connivance.

With both types of criminality, cultural and religious ‘sensitivities’ and fear of being labelled racist paralysed all arms of the state that should protect these girls. Check out the links in my comment above.

But David thinks anyone bringing these matters up must be a race-baiter or a bigot. A seriously derelict moral compass there, I have to say.