Rochdale rape case shames all men
ON International Women’s Day, an update on the Rochdale rape case at Liverpool Crown Court.
Kabeer Hassan, 24; Abdul Aziz, 41; Abdul Rauf, 43; Mohammed Sajid, 35; Adil Khan, 42; Abdul Qayyum, 43; Mohammed Amin, 44; Qamar Shahzad, 29; Liaquat Shah, 41 and Hamid Safi, 22, are in court. They all deny conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children under the age of 16. Also a 59-year-old man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, denies the same charge and two, among other thing, two counts of rape.
The 11 accused are all men. That is the first thing we see.
In court, one of the men’s alleged victims tells strangers and a jury that when aged 15 she work form a drunken slumber to find a man raping her.
Another time:
“Something was mentioned about sex. He asked me if I wanted to and I said no and he said: ‘I will cut you.’ I said ‘cut yourself’ and he came up to me with the razor blade, put his face next to mine and he had the razor blade still in his hand and then he had sex with me.”
She told police: “I would rather that happen than have my throat slit.”
The trial continues.
Men might wonder that no-one is shocked that men are thought capable of such alleged crimes.
Earlier, one 15-year-old girl who had had an abortion at 13 “after allegedly becoming pregnant by another British Pakistani who is now aged 42”, reports the Times:
The jury has been told that, unlike other girls who are witnesses in the trial, the girl who became pregnant does not believe any of the men did anything wrong. She was in a six-month relationship with the “boyfriend” who made her pregnant and knew him as Billy, she said. The prosecution says he is 42-year-old Adil Khan.
The girl said that men would give her money, or vodka, which made her feel “loud and good”. She knew other girls who had sex with the same men. “But they didn’t get raped. They did it freely, willingly,” she said, insisting that a 59-year-old man accused of being a child pimp and rapist “was one of the nicest people you could ever meet”.
“He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He didn’t do anything wrong to anyone. I trusted him like my Dad,” she said.
The girl, who was 12 when she first met some of the men in two kebab shops in Heywood, near Rochdale, said she would often be phoned by “randomers” — Pakistani men she did not know who would “pay me to chill with them”. She regularly agreed to meet strangers in a supermarket car park. They would take her “to chill” in locations as far afield as Oldham, Bradford and Leeds: “Different people, different times, different places.”
Pakistani men “pass you round like a ball”, she said, “like they’re all in a massive circle”, and they “put a white girl in the middle”.
There were “thousands of Asians who had links with each other”, she said. “Most you don’t even know but you meet them anyway. If I gave a taxi driver my number, give it two weeks [and] then I’ll have about 10 Pakis in my phone and then by the next week I’ll have a phone book of Pakis in my phone.”
The race element looms large in the girl’s testimony. But don’t we first and foremost just see men..?
Posted: 8th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comments (27) | TrackBack | Permalink
