from Rationalwiki
Role of Islam
Nick Griffin pointed to the religion of the rapists: "the common denominator is not their Asian ethnicity, it’s the fact that they are Muslims", he said. "Their 'good book' tells them that that's acceptable. If you doubt it, go and buy a copy and you will find verse after verse saying you can take any woman you want as long as they're not Muslim."
"These gang members select their victims from communities which they believe to be 'unbelievers' -- non-Muslims whom they view with disdain and hostility", commented Melanie Phillips. "You can see that this is not a racial but a religious animosity from the fact that, while the vast majority of the girls who are targeted are white, the victims include Sikhs and Hindus, too."
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Muslims in UK: 15-year-old victim told to 'Bring your younger friends next time'
Five vulnerable victims aged 13 to 15 were made to have sex with several men a day, several times a week, jury is told
Helen Carter
Guardian
Tuesday 21
February 2012 13.11 EST
A group of 11 men plied girls as young as 13 with alcohol and drugs so they could use them for sex, a court has heard.
The five victims, who were aged between 13 and 15 when the alleged abuse began, were passed around by the men "who acted together to sexually exploit the girls", a trial at Liverpool crown court was told.
All the girls were vulnerable as they were from broken homes and one was in the care of a local authority. Rachel Smith, opening the case for the prosecution, warned the jurors: "Some of you may find what you are about to hear distressing. The events and circumstances described by the girls are at best saddening and at worst shocking in places. No child should be exploited as these girls say they were."
The court heard that some of the girls were raped and physically assaulted, with some forced to have sex with "several men in a day, several times a week", in and around Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 2008 and 2009. Some of the defendants allegedly paid the girls and took payments from other men to whom they supplied the girls for sex.
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 on trial at Liverpool crown court charged with conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children under the age of 16. They have all pleaded not guilty along with a 59-year-old man who cannot be named for legal reasons, who also denies two rapes, aiding and abetting a rape, one sexual assault and an allegation of trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation.
Hassan, from Oldham, and Shahzad, from Rochdale, also deny rape. Aziz, of Rochdale, denies two counts of rape and one allegation of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Khan and Rauf, of Rochdale, have also pleaded not guilty to trafficking for sexual exploitation. Sajid, also of Rochdale, denies trafficking, two counts of rape and one allegation of sexual activity with a child. Amin, from Rochdale, denies sexual assault. Shah and Safi, both of Rochdale, each denied two counts of rape and Safi has also pleaded not guilty to trafficking.
One 13-year-old victim became pregnant by Adil Khan and had an abortion, the jury was told. She said Khan attacked her when she refused to have sex with "two of four men" who were waiting at a house in Rochdale. He later denied knowing her, despite DNA proof he was the father of the baby, the court heard.
One girl said she was raped by Abdul Aziz in his taxi in December 2009 and afterwards he told her she no longer needed to pay the fare. She was also raped by Liaquat Shah while Safi watched, the jury was told. She claimed two men raped her while she was so drunk "she was vomiting over the side of the bed" after drinking spirits and beer.
She told police: "They were just having it in turns sort of thing … there was nothing I could do, I was throwing up, I just kept throwing up … And I felt like I couldn't move." When the men left, she said, she cried herself to sleep.
Another alleged victim, who was 14, said she would get "proper hammered" and, the court heard, "lost count of the number of times she had had sex with men when she did not want to do so".
The prosecutor said: "She was unable to describe all of the men but said she would regularly find herself drunk to near-unconsciousness, waking up with men having sex with her."
The court was told that in about August 2008 Abdul Aziz "took over" from the 59-year-old and started taking girls to various locations – including a flat in Rochdale where Sajid and Shahzad lived – where a "group of men" would always be waiting to have sex with them.
"Abdul Aziz was being paid by the various men to whom he delivered the girls for the purposes of sex," Smith said. One girl estimated that she was "having sex with several men in a day, several times a week", she said.
The court heard that on one occasion the 59-year-old man met two girls at a takeaway where they were given food and vodka.
He allegedly told a 15-year-old that he wanted sex, saying: "It's part of the deal because I bought you vodka, you have to give me something." When the girl refused, he allegedly raped her. The court was told that when the girl started crying, he said: "Don't cry, I love you."
On another occasion, the jury heard, he took one of the girls to Oldham where she was raped by another man, who told her: "Don't tell anyone. I'll give you money. I'll give you anything you want."
One girl, who was 15 when she met the defendants, told police she had been flattered by the attention. She said she thought it meant she was attractive and they thought she was pretty. However, she quickly began to drink heavily, became depressed and incapable of getting herself out of the situation, the court heard.
"At first I was scared," she told police. "Then after that it … just didn't bother me any more … At first I felt dead bad and horrible but then I didn't feel anything any more." The girl was persistently coerced or forced into submission by the men, Smith said.
"When she was told that she had to have sex with the particular defendant or other men, she would submit to them, although she describes herself as lying impassively with her eyes shut or looking at the wall. She was given alcohol, which she drank heavily, not least because it numbed her thoughts to what was happening to her."
It was "common knowledge", Smith said, among the defendants that the girl was 15 and that Aziz would give her lifts to school while Rauf asked the other older girl if she "knew anyone younger". Smith told the jury that one of the older girls, who was 16 at the time, recruited younger girls for the men as well as having sex with them for money.
The 16-year-old introduced a 14-year-old girl "to a number of different men who wanted to have sex with her, with or without her consent". The younger girl was raped at a takeaway and taken by the man to other places where she was provided to other men for sex.
One girl, who was 13 when the alleged abuse began, told police that the men she met were "friends" who looked after her and "her number would be passed around amongst the Pakistani men in her area".
She told police: "When you've got Asian friends, [your] number gets passed and they pass it to their friends. And they pass it to their friends, end up with a massive circle … everyone's got it."
"There were also occasions on which one or more of the girls were so incapacitated by alcohol and/or drugs that they were incapable of having any control over whether or with whom they had sexual intercourse," Smith said.
The court heard the men knew each other and that two of them worked in the takeaways Tasty Bites and the Balti House, both in Heywood. Four of the other men worked as cab drivers at local taxi firms, one was a student and four were jobless.
The men were known to the girls by nicknames such as "Master" and "Tiger", the court was told. The girls would often spend their days "unsupervised by responsible adults", were not in school regularly and drank and smoked and hung around with little to do.
Smith said they were the "sort of children who were easy to identify, target and exploit for the sexual gratification of these men".
The trial continues.
24th February 2012
Daily Mial (UK)
A member of an alleged child abuse ring told his teenage victims to supply him with even 'younger girls', a court heard today.
The witness, who cannot be identified, was giving evidence in the trial of 11 men accused of being part of a sexual exploitation ring operating in and around Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 2008 and 2009.
Kabeer Hassan, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid, Adil Khan, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Amin, Qamar Shahzad, Liaquat Shah, Hamid Safi and a 59-year-old man who cannot be named all deny conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with five girls under the age of 16.
The jury at Liverpool Crown Court were today shown a third day of police interviews with one alleged victim, recorded when she was 15 years old.
Questioned by a female police officer the witness, now aged 19, said she had had sex with defendant Abdul Rauf, a taxi driver, 'about 10 times' before she turned 16.
'Did he know how old you were?' the officer asked.
'He knew my age because my friend told him,' the girl replied.
'We were in his taxi and he just asked us how old we were.
'She told him I was 15 and she was 16 and he asked if we knew anyone younger and she said she did.
'He told us to bring them next time.'
The police officer asked the girl: 'What did you think about that?'
The witness said she 'would have been glad' because the younger girls would take attention off her. But she went on to say those feelings had made her feel 'tight'.
'Because it would happen to them and I would feel bad,' she explained.
She said Rauf would pay her friend about £20 if he had sex with one of them and £40 if he had had sex with them both.
Around half that money would then go to co-defendant Abdul Aziz, accused of 'taking over' the exploitation ring, she said.
The girls were abused by the men who used alcohol, money, drugs and threats of violence to force them to have sex, the court heard earlier.
Four were from broken homes and one was in care, and they would often spend their days 'unsupervised by responsible adults', the prosecution said.
The jury were told the girls were not in school regularly and 'drank and smoked and hung around with little to do'.
Hassan, 24, Aziz, 41, Rauf, 43, Sajid, 35, Khan, 42, Qayyum, 43, Amin, 44, Shahzad, 29, Shah, 41, and Safi, 22, all live in the Greater Manchester area.
In further police interviews, recorded when she was 18, the witness said she never discussed her age with Aziz but he had dropped her off at school in his car.
'He knew that I went to school. I don’t think he knew my age but obviously he knew I was under 16,' she said.
She was asked about her emotions during this period and replied: 'I wasn’t even bothered any more, I didn’t feel anything about it.'
Asked to explain further, she went on: 'At first I felt dead bad and horrible but then I didn’t feel anything any more.'
The officer asked: 'How did you cope?'
The girl replied: 'I don’t remember ... Most of the time I was just getting dead drunk so when it happened it didn’t feel that bad.'
Asked how she feels about it some years later, the teenager said: 'Horrible about myself that I didn’t do anything to stop it.'
The trial was adjourned until Monday at 10am.
A bomb alert at Liverpool Crown Court brought proceedings to a halt during the trial of the eleven men accused of grooming young children
A bomb alert at Liverpool Crown Court earlier this week brought proceedings to a halt during the trial of the eleven men accused of grooming young children
The sex gang accused of grooming underage girls
The Sun
26, Feb, 2012
(top left to bottom right) Abdul Rauf, Liaquat Shah, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Sajid, Kabeer Hassan and Mohammed Amin
Six of the accused ... (top left to bottom right) Abdul Rauf, Liaquat Shah, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Sajid, Kabeer Hassan and Mohammed Amin
Phil Richards/ Mercury Press
By GUY PATRICK
Last Updated: 22nd February 2012
GIRLS as young as 13 got pizzas and booze for having sex with a gang of men — whose nicknames included The Ugly One, Master and Tiger, a jury heard yesterday.
Victims were chatted up and groomed by the men who then passed them around so fellow Asians could satisfy their lust, the court was told.
Prosecutor Rachel Smith said as 11 men including a 59-year-old went on trial for child-sex crimes how schoolgirls would be plied with drink until they were in a stupor.
Ms Smith said of one 14-year-old: "She was unable to describe all of the men but said she would regularly find herself drunk to near-unconsciousness, waking up with men having sex with her."
The youngster told cops how she was so "hammered" on one occasion that two men even had sex with her while she was being sick over the side of a bed. The girl said: "They were just having it in turns sort of thing. There was nothing I could do — I was throwing up. I felt like I couldn't move." The prosecutor said: "Afterwards they left and she cried herself to sleep."
On another occasion a man watching her being raped begged: "I want a turn, I want a turn."
The 11 men in the dock plead not guilty to plotting to have sex with underage girls in and around Rochdale, Gtr Manchester.
Several are charged with rape, which they also deny.
Four of the accused are taxi drivers and two are fast food workers.
The girls — often chatted up at kebab shops — were targeted because they were seen as having little parental supervision, Liverpool Crown Court heard.
They saw the men who seduced them as boyfriends. But before long a "pattern of abuse emerged".
Youngsters started out being rewarded for sex with treats such as food and free cab rides, it was claimed. Later they would be driven to various addresses where they were passed around to other men who would pay for sex in cash. Some of those in the dock are accused of sex trafficking, which they deny.
The charges against the 11 involve five girls — all aged between 13 and 15 at the time. The attacks are alleged to have happened between 2008 and 2010.
The jury heard that youngsters reluctant to have sex were held down and raped. Some deliberately drank themselves into oblivion to blot out what was happening.
One was said to have told police how after she was befriended a "massive circle" of Pakistani men ended up with her phone number.
Prosecutor Ms Smith described all the victims as "easy to identify, target and exploit for the sexual gratification of these men".
That was partly because they spent a lot of time off school.
An older girl — who cannot be named for legal reasons — moved on from having sex with the gang to finding fresh prey, it was claimed. Ms Smith said the former victim was paid for "procuring" others. One 15-year-old was said to have told police she was having sex with "several men in a day, several times a week".
The girl said she would get drunk so "it wouldn't feel as bad" when the men raped her.
The jury was told the first to abuse her was the 59-year-old. He cannot be named for legal reasons.
After repeatedly raping her he forced her to have sex with fellow defendant Kabeer Hassan, 25, it was alleged. The court heard she told cops but no charges were brought — and the abuse went on.
Two victims — one of them just 13 — were made pregnant by members of the gang, it was claimed.
Those on trial with the 59-year-old and Hassan are: Abdul Aziz, 43, 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.
The case continues.
Helen Carter
Guardian
Tuesday 21
February 2012 13.11 EST
 |
| Abdul Rauf |
A group of 11 men plied girls as young as 13 with alcohol and drugs so they could use them for sex, a court has heard.
The five victims, who were aged between 13 and 15 when the alleged abuse began, were passed around by the men "who acted together to sexually exploit the girls", a trial at Liverpool crown court was told.
All the girls were vulnerable as they were from broken homes and one was in the care of a local authority. Rachel Smith, opening the case for the prosecution, warned the jurors: "Some of you may find what you are about to hear distressing. The events and circumstances described by the girls are at best saddening and at worst shocking in places. No child should be exploited as these girls say they were."
The court heard that some of the girls were raped and physically assaulted, with some forced to have sex with "several men in a day, several times a week", in and around Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 2008 and 2009. Some of the defendants allegedly paid the girls and took payments from other men to whom they supplied the girls for sex.
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 on trial at Liverpool crown court charged with conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children under the age of 16. They have all pleaded not guilty along with a 59-year-old man who cannot be named for legal reasons, who also denies two rapes, aiding and abetting a rape, one sexual assault and an allegation of trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation.
Hassan, from Oldham, and Shahzad, from Rochdale, also deny rape. Aziz, of Rochdale, denies two counts of rape and one allegation of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Khan and Rauf, of Rochdale, have also pleaded not guilty to trafficking for sexual exploitation. Sajid, also of Rochdale, denies trafficking, two counts of rape and one allegation of sexual activity with a child. Amin, from Rochdale, denies sexual assault. Shah and Safi, both of Rochdale, each denied two counts of rape and Safi has also pleaded not guilty to trafficking.
One 13-year-old victim became pregnant by Adil Khan and had an abortion, the jury was told. She said Khan attacked her when she refused to have sex with "two of four men" who were waiting at a house in Rochdale. He later denied knowing her, despite DNA proof he was the father of the baby, the court heard.
One girl said she was raped by Abdul Aziz in his taxi in December 2009 and afterwards he told her she no longer needed to pay the fare. She was also raped by Liaquat Shah while Safi watched, the jury was told. She claimed two men raped her while she was so drunk "she was vomiting over the side of the bed" after drinking spirits and beer.
She told police: "They were just having it in turns sort of thing … there was nothing I could do, I was throwing up, I just kept throwing up … And I felt like I couldn't move." When the men left, she said, she cried herself to sleep.
Another alleged victim, who was 14, said she would get "proper hammered" and, the court heard, "lost count of the number of times she had had sex with men when she did not want to do so".
The prosecutor said: "She was unable to describe all of the men but said she would regularly find herself drunk to near-unconsciousness, waking up with men having sex with her."
The court was told that in about August 2008 Abdul Aziz "took over" from the 59-year-old and started taking girls to various locations – including a flat in Rochdale where Sajid and Shahzad lived – where a "group of men" would always be waiting to have sex with them.
"Abdul Aziz was being paid by the various men to whom he delivered the girls for the purposes of sex," Smith said. One girl estimated that she was "having sex with several men in a day, several times a week", she said.
The court heard that on one occasion the 59-year-old man met two girls at a takeaway where they were given food and vodka.
He allegedly told a 15-year-old that he wanted sex, saying: "It's part of the deal because I bought you vodka, you have to give me something." When the girl refused, he allegedly raped her. The court was told that when the girl started crying, he said: "Don't cry, I love you."
On another occasion, the jury heard, he took one of the girls to Oldham where she was raped by another man, who told her: "Don't tell anyone. I'll give you money. I'll give you anything you want."
One girl, who was 15 when she met the defendants, told police she had been flattered by the attention. She said she thought it meant she was attractive and they thought she was pretty. However, she quickly began to drink heavily, became depressed and incapable of getting herself out of the situation, the court heard.
"At first I was scared," she told police. "Then after that it … just didn't bother me any more … At first I felt dead bad and horrible but then I didn't feel anything any more." The girl was persistently coerced or forced into submission by the men, Smith said.
"When she was told that she had to have sex with the particular defendant or other men, she would submit to them, although she describes herself as lying impassively with her eyes shut or looking at the wall. She was given alcohol, which she drank heavily, not least because it numbed her thoughts to what was happening to her."
It was "common knowledge", Smith said, among the defendants that the girl was 15 and that Aziz would give her lifts to school while Rauf asked the other older girl if she "knew anyone younger". Smith told the jury that one of the older girls, who was 16 at the time, recruited younger girls for the men as well as having sex with them for money.
The 16-year-old introduced a 14-year-old girl "to a number of different men who wanted to have sex with her, with or without her consent". The younger girl was raped at a takeaway and taken by the man to other places where she was provided to other men for sex.
One girl, who was 13 when the alleged abuse began, told police that the men she met were "friends" who looked after her and "her number would be passed around amongst the Pakistani men in her area".
She told police: "When you've got Asian friends, [your] number gets passed and they pass it to their friends. And they pass it to their friends, end up with a massive circle … everyone's got it."
"There were also occasions on which one or more of the girls were so incapacitated by alcohol and/or drugs that they were incapable of having any control over whether or with whom they had sexual intercourse," Smith said.
The court heard the men knew each other and that two of them worked in the takeaways Tasty Bites and the Balti House, both in Heywood. Four of the other men worked as cab drivers at local taxi firms, one was a student and four were jobless.
The men were known to the girls by nicknames such as "Master" and "Tiger", the court was told. The girls would often spend their days "unsupervised by responsible adults", were not in school regularly and drank and smoked and hung around with little to do.
Smith said they were the "sort of children who were easy to identify, target and exploit for the sexual gratification of these men".
The trial continues.
- Teenager told court she had sex with taxi driver 'about 10 times' before she was 16
- 11 men are accused of being part of a child sexual exploitation ring
24th February 2012
Daily Mial (UK)
A member of an alleged child abuse ring told his teenage victims to supply him with even 'younger girls', a court heard today.
The witness, who cannot be identified, was giving evidence in the trial of 11 men accused of being part of a sexual exploitation ring operating in and around Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 2008 and 2009.
Kabeer Hassan, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid, Adil Khan, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Amin, Qamar Shahzad, Liaquat Shah, Hamid Safi and a 59-year-old man who cannot be named all deny conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with five girls under the age of 16.
 |
| Qamar Shahzad and Mohammed Amin |
The jury at Liverpool Crown Court were today shown a third day of police interviews with one alleged victim, recorded when she was 15 years old.
Questioned by a female police officer the witness, now aged 19, said she had had sex with defendant Abdul Rauf, a taxi driver, 'about 10 times' before she turned 16.
'Did he know how old you were?' the officer asked.
'He knew my age because my friend told him,' the girl replied.
'We were in his taxi and he just asked us how old we were.
'She told him I was 15 and she was 16 and he asked if we knew anyone younger and she said she did.
'He told us to bring them next time.'
The police officer asked the girl: 'What did you think about that?'
The witness said she 'would have been glad' because the younger girls would take attention off her. But she went on to say those feelings had made her feel 'tight'.
'Because it would happen to them and I would feel bad,' she explained.
She said Rauf would pay her friend about £20 if he had sex with one of them and £40 if he had had sex with them both.
Around half that money would then go to co-defendant Abdul Aziz, accused of 'taking over' the exploitation ring, she said.
The girls were abused by the men who used alcohol, money, drugs and threats of violence to force them to have sex, the court heard earlier.
Four were from broken homes and one was in care, and they would often spend their days 'unsupervised by responsible adults', the prosecution said.
The jury were told the girls were not in school regularly and 'drank and smoked and hung around with little to do'.
Hassan, 24, Aziz, 41, Rauf, 43, Sajid, 35, Khan, 42, Qayyum, 43, Amin, 44, Shahzad, 29, Shah, 41, and Safi, 22, all live in the Greater Manchester area.
In further police interviews, recorded when she was 18, the witness said she never discussed her age with Aziz but he had dropped her off at school in his car.
'He knew that I went to school. I don’t think he knew my age but obviously he knew I was under 16,' she said.
She was asked about her emotions during this period and replied: 'I wasn’t even bothered any more, I didn’t feel anything about it.'
Asked to explain further, she went on: 'At first I felt dead bad and horrible but then I didn’t feel anything any more.'
The officer asked: 'How did you cope?'
The girl replied: 'I don’t remember ... Most of the time I was just getting dead drunk so when it happened it didn’t feel that bad.'
Asked how she feels about it some years later, the teenager said: 'Horrible about myself that I didn’t do anything to stop it.'
The trial was adjourned until Monday at 10am.
A bomb alert at Liverpool Crown Court brought proceedings to a halt during the trial of the eleven men accused of grooming young children
A bomb alert at Liverpool Crown Court earlier this week brought proceedings to a halt during the trial of the eleven men accused of grooming young children
The Sun
26, Feb, 2012
(top left to bottom right) Abdul Rauf, Liaquat Shah, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Sajid, Kabeer Hassan and Mohammed Amin
Six of the accused ... (top left to bottom right) Abdul Rauf, Liaquat Shah, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Sajid, Kabeer Hassan and Mohammed Amin
Phil Richards/ Mercury Press
By GUY PATRICK
Last Updated: 22nd February 2012
GIRLS as young as 13 got pizzas and booze for having sex with a gang of men — whose nicknames included The Ugly One, Master and Tiger, a jury heard yesterday.
Victims were chatted up and groomed by the men who then passed them around so fellow Asians could satisfy their lust, the court was told.
Prosecutor Rachel Smith said as 11 men including a 59-year-old went on trial for child-sex crimes how schoolgirls would be plied with drink until they were in a stupor.
Ms Smith said of one 14-year-old: "She was unable to describe all of the men but said she would regularly find herself drunk to near-unconsciousness, waking up with men having sex with her."
The youngster told cops how she was so "hammered" on one occasion that two men even had sex with her while she was being sick over the side of a bed. The girl said: "They were just having it in turns sort of thing. There was nothing I could do — I was throwing up. I felt like I couldn't move." The prosecutor said: "Afterwards they left and she cried herself to sleep."
On another occasion a man watching her being raped begged: "I want a turn, I want a turn."
The 11 men in the dock plead not guilty to plotting to have sex with underage girls in and around Rochdale, Gtr Manchester.
Several are charged with rape, which they also deny.
Four of the accused are taxi drivers and two are fast food workers.
The girls — often chatted up at kebab shops — were targeted because they were seen as having little parental supervision, Liverpool Crown Court heard.
They saw the men who seduced them as boyfriends. But before long a "pattern of abuse emerged".
Youngsters started out being rewarded for sex with treats such as food and free cab rides, it was claimed. Later they would be driven to various addresses where they were passed around to other men who would pay for sex in cash. Some of those in the dock are accused of sex trafficking, which they deny.
The charges against the 11 involve five girls — all aged between 13 and 15 at the time. The attacks are alleged to have happened between 2008 and 2010.
The jury heard that youngsters reluctant to have sex were held down and raped. Some deliberately drank themselves into oblivion to blot out what was happening.
One was said to have told police how after she was befriended a "massive circle" of Pakistani men ended up with her phone number.
Prosecutor Ms Smith described all the victims as "easy to identify, target and exploit for the sexual gratification of these men".
That was partly because they spent a lot of time off school.
An older girl — who cannot be named for legal reasons — moved on from having sex with the gang to finding fresh prey, it was claimed. Ms Smith said the former victim was paid for "procuring" others. One 15-year-old was said to have told police she was having sex with "several men in a day, several times a week".
The girl said she would get drunk so "it wouldn't feel as bad" when the men raped her.
The jury was told the first to abuse her was the 59-year-old. He cannot be named for legal reasons.
After repeatedly raping her he forced her to have sex with fellow defendant Kabeer Hassan, 25, it was alleged. The court heard she told cops but no charges were brought — and the abuse went on.
Two victims — one of them just 13 — were made pregnant by members of the gang, it was claimed.
Those on trial with the 59-year-old and Hassan are: Abdul Aziz, 43, 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.
The case continues.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
'Sexual predators': Gang of Pakistani men weep as they are jailed for total of 32 years for abusing white English girls as young as 12
By Paul Sims
6th November 2010
Daily Mail
A gang of Asian ‘sexual predators’ were jailed yesterday for abusing white girls as young as 12.
The five men preyed on their victims over several months and threatened them with violence if they refused their advances.
One of the men branded his victim a ‘white bitch’ when she resisted, while a second smirked: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.'
Mohsin Khan, 21, left (jailed for four years)
Razwan Razaq, 30 (jailed for 11 years)
Mohsin Khan, 21, left (jailed for four years) and Razwan Razaq, 30 (jailed for 11 years) were convicted of a string of sexually related offences against girls as young as 12
Umar Razaq, 24, left (jailed for four and a half years)
Zafran Ramzan, 21 (jailed for nine years)
Umar Razaq, 24, left (jailed for four and a half years) and Zafran Ramzan, 21 (jailed for nine years), prowled the streets looking for girls, attacking them in parks and in the back of their cars
Adil Hussain, 20, was jailed for four and a half years
Adil Hussain, 20, was jailed for four and a half years
The men, all British-born Pakistanis, attacked the four girls in play areas, parks and in the back of their cars, Sheffield Crown Court heard.
They gave them gifts and introduced them to their friends. The girls were abused so frequently that after many months it ‘became a way of life’.
The girls, who were being monitored by social services, were eventually rescued by police and removed from their homes amid growing concerns for their safety.
Two of the men wept in the dock yesterday as they were jailed.
Judge Peter Kelson QC told them: ‘I’ve listened to the backdrop of some of you sobbing – I have to say your weeping cuts no ice with me at all.
‘You had what you regarded as your fun, now you will take your punishment.’
The five, Umar Razaq, 24, Razwan Razaq, 30, Zafran Ramzan, 21, Adil Hussain, 20, and Mohsin Khan, 21, were found guilty of a string of sexually related offences against the girls, one aged 12, two aged 13 and one aged 16.
Ramzan was found guilty of raping the 16-year-old girl in her own home, and the other four were found guilty of sexual activity with a child.
Umar Razaq was jailed for four and a half years, while the judge gave Razwan Razaq 11 years.
Ramzan was jailed for nine years, and Hussain and Khan both received four years. All five were placed on the sex offenders register. Three further men were cleared.
The attacks took place in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, during 2008, the court was told. Khan, a mortgage adviser who owned a BMW, described his victim as a ‘little stick’ who looked as if she had not reached puberty.
Despite this he told her he loved her and would spoil her like a ‘princess’.
During the seven-week trial the jury were told how the men drove around the streets looking for girls. The teenagers believed they were in relationships with the much older men.
On one occasion Umar Razaq tried to pull the clothes off one of the 13-year-olds.
When she resisted he pulled her hair and called her a ‘white bitch’.
On another occasion Umar introduced the girl to his brother Razwan who had sex with her in his car.
Afterwards he told her: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.’ When Ramzan was asked by police what age he was attracted to he later replied: ‘As long as they are not too young and they’re legal, that’s it.’
The authorities were alerted after some changes were noted in the behaviour of the victims and they were removed from their homes.
Joyce Thacker, director of Rotherham’s children and young people’s services, said the girls were under child protection plans following family breakdowns or other issues with their behaviour.
‘When we pieced together a map of what was happening we stepped in very quickly to move these girls to a place of safety outside Rotherham,’ she said.
‘It started off as a grooming exercise by the men who became friendly with the girls, gave them gifts and introduced them to their friends.
‘When they got used to being abused it just became a normal way of life for the girls. It is akin to self-harm.
‘It was very dangerous. The girls could have faced death if the men weren’t getting what they wanted.’
She said the girls’ parents bore some of the responsibility but they were in a difficult position and at a loss to do something about their children’s ‘alternative’ lifestyle.
Detective Sergeant Dave Walker, who led the inquiry, said: ‘One was only 12 when she met one of the men and started smoking cannabis and drinking and coming in late at night.
‘As it escalated the defendants were becoming more aggressive to the girls.
‘We basically have a group of young men who think it is all right to abuse young girls and they just groomed them and isolated them from their families.’
All four girls are now back in mainstream education. The three youngest are taking GCSEs and the eldest is at college.
Mr Walker added: ‘We don’t know what the future holds for them but it will be a lot better than it was.’
6th November 2010
Daily Mail
A gang of Asian ‘sexual predators’ were jailed yesterday for abusing white girls as young as 12.
The five men preyed on their victims over several months and threatened them with violence if they refused their advances.
One of the men branded his victim a ‘white bitch’ when she resisted, while a second smirked: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.'
Mohsin Khan, 21, left (jailed for four years)
Razwan Razaq, 30 (jailed for 11 years)
Mohsin Khan, 21, left (jailed for four years) and Razwan Razaq, 30 (jailed for 11 years) were convicted of a string of sexually related offences against girls as young as 12
Umar Razaq, 24, left (jailed for four and a half years)
Zafran Ramzan, 21 (jailed for nine years)
Umar Razaq, 24, left (jailed for four and a half years) and Zafran Ramzan, 21 (jailed for nine years), prowled the streets looking for girls, attacking them in parks and in the back of their cars
Adil Hussain, 20, was jailed for four and a half years
Adil Hussain, 20, was jailed for four and a half years
The men, all British-born Pakistanis, attacked the four girls in play areas, parks and in the back of their cars, Sheffield Crown Court heard.
They gave them gifts and introduced them to their friends. The girls were abused so frequently that after many months it ‘became a way of life’.
The girls, who were being monitored by social services, were eventually rescued by police and removed from their homes amid growing concerns for their safety.
Two of the men wept in the dock yesterday as they were jailed.
Judge Peter Kelson QC told them: ‘I’ve listened to the backdrop of some of you sobbing – I have to say your weeping cuts no ice with me at all.
‘You had what you regarded as your fun, now you will take your punishment.’
The five, Umar Razaq, 24, Razwan Razaq, 30, Zafran Ramzan, 21, Adil Hussain, 20, and Mohsin Khan, 21, were found guilty of a string of sexually related offences against the girls, one aged 12, two aged 13 and one aged 16.
Ramzan was found guilty of raping the 16-year-old girl in her own home, and the other four were found guilty of sexual activity with a child.
Umar Razaq was jailed for four and a half years, while the judge gave Razwan Razaq 11 years.
Ramzan was jailed for nine years, and Hussain and Khan both received four years. All five were placed on the sex offenders register. Three further men were cleared.
The attacks took place in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, during 2008, the court was told. Khan, a mortgage adviser who owned a BMW, described his victim as a ‘little stick’ who looked as if she had not reached puberty.
Despite this he told her he loved her and would spoil her like a ‘princess’.
During the seven-week trial the jury were told how the men drove around the streets looking for girls. The teenagers believed they were in relationships with the much older men.
On one occasion Umar Razaq tried to pull the clothes off one of the 13-year-olds.
When she resisted he pulled her hair and called her a ‘white bitch’.
On another occasion Umar introduced the girl to his brother Razwan who had sex with her in his car.
Afterwards he told her: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.’ When Ramzan was asked by police what age he was attracted to he later replied: ‘As long as they are not too young and they’re legal, that’s it.’
The authorities were alerted after some changes were noted in the behaviour of the victims and they were removed from their homes.
Joyce Thacker, director of Rotherham’s children and young people’s services, said the girls were under child protection plans following family breakdowns or other issues with their behaviour.
‘When we pieced together a map of what was happening we stepped in very quickly to move these girls to a place of safety outside Rotherham,’ she said.
‘It started off as a grooming exercise by the men who became friendly with the girls, gave them gifts and introduced them to their friends.
‘When they got used to being abused it just became a normal way of life for the girls. It is akin to self-harm.
‘It was very dangerous. The girls could have faced death if the men weren’t getting what they wanted.’
She said the girls’ parents bore some of the responsibility but they were in a difficult position and at a loss to do something about their children’s ‘alternative’ lifestyle.
Detective Sergeant Dave Walker, who led the inquiry, said: ‘One was only 12 when she met one of the men and started smoking cannabis and drinking and coming in late at night.
‘As it escalated the defendants were becoming more aggressive to the girls.
‘We basically have a group of young men who think it is all right to abuse young girls and they just groomed them and isolated them from their families.’
All four girls are now back in mainstream education. The three youngest are taking GCSEs and the eldest is at college.
Mr Walker added: ‘We don’t know what the future holds for them but it will be a lot better than it was.’
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Christian leader who styled himself 'Black Jesus' convicted of raping young 'flower girls'
The Independent (UK)
Tari had thousands of village followers, including a core of armed warriors to protect him, in what is commonly referred to in PNG as a 'cargo cult'.
As part of his 'culture ministry' Tari preached the young girls were to be married to him as it was God's prophecy.
One woman told police that she was present when Tari killed her young daughter by slitting her throat after which he drank her blood.
Interviewed in Madang's Boen Prison a year later after his dramatic capture, Tari defended his practice in the black arts and of sleeping with young girls who joined his cult, admitting that 'I got plenty - 430 girls'.
But he added: 'What I did is under and in line with my religion. It was religious and was not wrong.'
But when Tari appeared before Judge David Cannings this week he was convicted on four rape charges.
He will be sentenced later this month and police said they expected him to receive a long term in jail.
Tari had gathered more than six thousand 'disciples' as he travelled through villages in jungle-clad mountains,.
He dressed in long white robes and stood on boulders declaring that he was the modern Jesus.
But when word spread that he had sacrificed three young women, drinking their blood and eating part of their flesh as part of his bizarre ceremonies, the devotion of his followers began to turn to fear.
Added to concerns were claims by the relatives of a mother who was said to have fallen under his spell and drank her own daughter's blood.
A Mail investigation in the remote villages of Papua New Guinea heard claims from relatives of 13-year-old Rita Hemen that she had been stripped naked, tied to a crude bed and raped by Tari before having her throat cut.
Her relatives said her blood had been drained into a coconut shell and drunk by Tari and his evil henchmen - and in a final horrific act they had eaten strips of her flesh.
Tari's wickedness came to an end when he reached the village of Matepi, where he was overpowered while sleeping in a hut.
A church pastor, Paul Makura, said it had been difficult for police to catch Tari as he never stayed long in one place.
'When he came here we heard that he had killed young women so we put a plan into action. We encouraged him to stay on and when he went to a hut to rest a group of eight villagers broke in, pounced on him and tied him up.'
Heavily armed police who made their way to Matepi found Tari tied to a tree. There was no sign of his bow-and-arrow-carrying bodyguards who, on a previous occasion, had engaged in a fight to the death with police.
Tari was still in possession of what he called his 'magic rod' - a knife - and a battered Bible, many of the teachings of which he had denied in his own sermons.
A spokesman for the Lutheran church, which is strongly represented in Papua New Guinea, said: 'We hope that the passage of time will erase memories of what this evil man has done.'
Friday, April 30, 2010
Female sex tourism in Senegal
Senegal draws tourists with sun, sea and sex
By Anne Look - GlobalPost
Published: April 29, 2010
Female sex tourism: for love or money? In a series of stories, GlobalPost looks at the women of means who find "romance" on vacation from Jamaica to Jordan to West Africa.
DAKAR, Senegal — Women — often white, European and "of a certain age" — flock solo to Senegal's shores year-round for what one hotel manager called "the three 'S's: sun, sea and sex."
The growth of Senegal's female sex tourism has its roots in poverty and the lack of jobs for the country's young men. Senegal's unemployment for youths is estimated at 30 percent, according to the International Labor Organization, and the average person in Senegal earns about $3 a day, according to the World Bank.
“It’s a question of survival. Life is hard. If I didn’t have these women, I’d be struggling," said Moussa, a 31-year-old dreadlocked drum player who has been "dating" female tourists since 2003.
“The women come here alone. They hit on you, and you go with it,” Moussa said. “They like men with rastas who play the djembes [drums]. It’s part of the ambiance.”
"Besides," he added with a sly smile, "they know men who play the drums are powerful in bed."
Moussa flipped through a stack of photos. In one image, an overweight, Spanish woman — his first "girlfriend" — has her arms around his small frame. She gave him $500, he said, before heading home. Another photo is a self-taken shot of him with an Italian woman who he said gave him the $650 to open his souvenir shop in Dakar where we now sit, drinking spicy Touba coffee.
He pointed out the gifts tourists send him: CDs, USB drives, a guitar, an MP3 player and a DVD player.
“I don’t ask for money," he said. "We go out. They pay for everything. We have sex. Before they leave, they give me a bit cash to help me out."
Some call it male prostitution, while others say it's just women doing what middle-aged men have been doing for centuries: Taking up with someone half their age and giving that new friend an all-expenses-paid ride in exchange for sex and a new lease on life.
Moussa meets tourists primarily through referrals and friends of friends. He sees himself as “a tourism guide who offers some extra services,” that include sex and at times helping male tourists negotiate evenings with female prostitutes.
But, others in Senegal say it is not that innocent. It's exploitation on both sides, they say, and sex tourism has sullied the country's reputation and corrupted its youth.
But, closing up his shop back in Dakar to head off to drum practice, Moussa said he's not worried about what other people think.
"I haven't met her yet," he said, "The woman who's not so old, who loves me, who's willing to do anything. The woman who will get me a visa and a plane ticket out of here."
The resort town of Saly, on the Atlantic coast, 55 miles south of Dakar, bears the dubious distinction as the epicenter of sex tourism in Senegal.
Middle-aged and elderly female tourists are a quick payday for young men — often called gigolos or antiquaires, originally souvenir vendors — who work out shirtless on the beaches and preen in the nightclubs. It's a hustle, locals said, and the older the woman, the better.
Last spring, the French news program, "66 Minutes," investigated female sex tourism in Saly and the growing number of marriages between European women and local men, often with vast age differences.
Going undercover, female reporters recorded via hidden camera the young men propositioning them on the beach. They later translated discussions the men had with each other in Wolof, Senegal's main ethnic language.
"You found yourself some clients ... When I got here, I saw immediately that you had spotted these two white ladies," said one guy walking past a friend who is chatting up the reporters.
"Get a move on. Leave me alone. Let me work," he snapped back.
Needless to say, Saly's residents were not pleased with the story's release and have become rather wary of the media.
It was a Saturday around 1 a.m. — Valentine's Day, no less — when I first ventured into Les Etages, a nightclub that opened two years ago and has become a veritable hunting ground for tourists — male and female — on the prowl.
Inside, female prostitutes, some wearing more makeup than clothes, ringed the club's perimeter. The club's strobe lights skittered across a stout, middle-aged woman's smiling face, pressed against a young Senegalese man's chest.
Similar couples moved on the packed dance floor.
A petite woman, her dry chin-length bob bleached almost the same color as her tan tube top, inched out on the dance floor with a stiff side-step.
A tall, dapper Senegalese man in a blue dress shirt and pressed jeans approached and they began to dance, palms pressed together between them. The DJ switched to salsa, and the man pulled her in. Over the course of two songs, his hands drifted from her shoulder blades to the small of her back.
They were swaying in unison, pelvises pressed together. The only thing separating them now was about 25 years.
Locals aren’t sure if sex tourism has actually increased in Saly or if it has simply become more visible in recent years.
Senegalese tourism has grown from modest numbers in the 1970s when the first Club Med opened on the coast. More than 500,000 tourists came to Senegal last year, according to government statistics. It is a key economic activity for the country of 12 million with a GDP of $13 billion.
Emphasizing the importance of tourism in Senegal, President Abdoulaye Wade set a goal of attracting 1.5 million tourists in 2010. However, those working in the tourism industry say that figure is still far-off and blame the world economic crisis and rising airfare costs for a recent downturn in visitors.
But the female tourists looking for romance are still coming. There are no figures about how many indulge in sex tourism, but there are enough to support nightclubs like Les Etages.
Hotel manager Cheikh Ba said arriving guests ask him where Les Etages is before asking about the beach or even getting their room keys.
“That gives you an idea of why they’re here,” Ba said. “Some people say the sex brings Europeans to Saly. They don’t want to say anything bad about it, but I say it is ruining this town.”
Peak season in Saly is between November and April. Hotel managers complain of the downturn in business. They say some tourists now prefer to rent vacation homes where they can go about their business in private.
Female sex tourism is often referred to as “love tourism,” and becomes a lifestyle for some women who make frequent trips to see a regular boyfriend or simply play the field.
Some see it as companionship with the promise of a pay-off at the end, but Ba and other Saly residents said it’s just plain old sex for money.
“You have no job, no nothing, and you see your friend living in a house and driving a car that his European girlfriend bought him,” Ba said, “She comes every month or so to visit and sends him money. You say to yourself, well, I could do that too."
Pape does not live in luxury.
The 30-year-old has a job in Dakar that pays him $250 a month. Half his paycheck goes to rent and he stretches the other half to cover his living expenses and to send funds to his elderly mother in Ivory Coast. Pape's friends and family don’t know about his 52-year-old Dutch girlfriend. They also don’t know about the gifts and $250 cash infusions she sends him, sometimes three times a month.
"I'm a thing, her object, her toy, her property," he said. "If I had the choice financially, I wouldn't date her. I would never have started this."
Chain-smoking and downing two beers, Pape, started from the beginning.
He met the Dutch woman while working in Senegal’s southern Casamance region last January. She was there on vacation. They were staying in the same hotel.
"When I came back and went to sleep, she would knock on the door,” he said. “One night, she invited me into her room. I refused. It was weird. It was my friends who explained to me that she was interested."
When he returned to Dakar, she cried. Though hesitant, Pape agreed to meet her the next weekend in Zigunchor, a coastal city in Casamance.
"We went out that night. When we got back to the hotel, what was going to happen happened,” he said with a shrug. "She's well-preserved, considering her age.”
"I've never asked her, but I think she was there for sex," he said. "I'm afraid to ask.”
Since then, they Skype and talk on the phone. During her most recent visit last month, they traveled along the coast, passing through Saly.
"I saw quite a few young men there with old, white women. I began to question my morality. What are you doing with this old woman? She could be your mom. You've become a gigolo, someone who doesn't have ambition, someone who is ready to do anything for money,” he said.
When she left, Pape said he felt only relief.
"I'm not attracted to her,” he said. “I tried to avoid sex but she insisted. She complained. She says she loves me. She has helped me a lot, so now I feel like I have to give her something."
"We fight. I tell her I can't continue like this. She offers me money. She knows she can keep me,” he said.
The woman says she has found him an internship in Holland and offered to buy him a plane ticket. It's just grim reality, he says, that all the shame and guilt in the world won’t stop him from going if his visa is approved.
Years ago at a club in the Gambia, Pape saw a young man gyrating sexily in front of three old white women. One of the women reached out and patted his butt before shaking her head no, like it was a piece of fruit in the market.
"That memory comes back to me often lately," he said, stamping out one cigarette and lighting up another. "Once I find a good job, I will get my dignity back. But for now, I'm a prostitute."
By Anne Look - GlobalPost
Published: April 29, 2010
Female sex tourism: for love or money? In a series of stories, GlobalPost looks at the women of means who find "romance" on vacation from Jamaica to Jordan to West Africa.
DAKAR, Senegal — Women — often white, European and "of a certain age" — flock solo to Senegal's shores year-round for what one hotel manager called "the three 'S's: sun, sea and sex."
The growth of Senegal's female sex tourism has its roots in poverty and the lack of jobs for the country's young men. Senegal's unemployment for youths is estimated at 30 percent, according to the International Labor Organization, and the average person in Senegal earns about $3 a day, according to the World Bank.
“It’s a question of survival. Life is hard. If I didn’t have these women, I’d be struggling," said Moussa, a 31-year-old dreadlocked drum player who has been "dating" female tourists since 2003.
“The women come here alone. They hit on you, and you go with it,” Moussa said. “They like men with rastas who play the djembes [drums]. It’s part of the ambiance.”
"Besides," he added with a sly smile, "they know men who play the drums are powerful in bed."
Moussa flipped through a stack of photos. In one image, an overweight, Spanish woman — his first "girlfriend" — has her arms around his small frame. She gave him $500, he said, before heading home. Another photo is a self-taken shot of him with an Italian woman who he said gave him the $650 to open his souvenir shop in Dakar where we now sit, drinking spicy Touba coffee.
He pointed out the gifts tourists send him: CDs, USB drives, a guitar, an MP3 player and a DVD player.
“I don’t ask for money," he said. "We go out. They pay for everything. We have sex. Before they leave, they give me a bit cash to help me out."
Some call it male prostitution, while others say it's just women doing what middle-aged men have been doing for centuries: Taking up with someone half their age and giving that new friend an all-expenses-paid ride in exchange for sex and a new lease on life.
Moussa meets tourists primarily through referrals and friends of friends. He sees himself as “a tourism guide who offers some extra services,” that include sex and at times helping male tourists negotiate evenings with female prostitutes.
But, others in Senegal say it is not that innocent. It's exploitation on both sides, they say, and sex tourism has sullied the country's reputation and corrupted its youth.
But, closing up his shop back in Dakar to head off to drum practice, Moussa said he's not worried about what other people think.
"I haven't met her yet," he said, "The woman who's not so old, who loves me, who's willing to do anything. The woman who will get me a visa and a plane ticket out of here."
The resort town of Saly, on the Atlantic coast, 55 miles south of Dakar, bears the dubious distinction as the epicenter of sex tourism in Senegal.
Middle-aged and elderly female tourists are a quick payday for young men — often called gigolos or antiquaires, originally souvenir vendors — who work out shirtless on the beaches and preen in the nightclubs. It's a hustle, locals said, and the older the woman, the better.
Last spring, the French news program, "66 Minutes," investigated female sex tourism in Saly and the growing number of marriages between European women and local men, often with vast age differences.
Going undercover, female reporters recorded via hidden camera the young men propositioning them on the beach. They later translated discussions the men had with each other in Wolof, Senegal's main ethnic language.
"You found yourself some clients ... When I got here, I saw immediately that you had spotted these two white ladies," said one guy walking past a friend who is chatting up the reporters.
"Get a move on. Leave me alone. Let me work," he snapped back.
Needless to say, Saly's residents were not pleased with the story's release and have become rather wary of the media.
It was a Saturday around 1 a.m. — Valentine's Day, no less — when I first ventured into Les Etages, a nightclub that opened two years ago and has become a veritable hunting ground for tourists — male and female — on the prowl.
Inside, female prostitutes, some wearing more makeup than clothes, ringed the club's perimeter. The club's strobe lights skittered across a stout, middle-aged woman's smiling face, pressed against a young Senegalese man's chest.
Similar couples moved on the packed dance floor.
A petite woman, her dry chin-length bob bleached almost the same color as her tan tube top, inched out on the dance floor with a stiff side-step.
A tall, dapper Senegalese man in a blue dress shirt and pressed jeans approached and they began to dance, palms pressed together between them. The DJ switched to salsa, and the man pulled her in. Over the course of two songs, his hands drifted from her shoulder blades to the small of her back.
They were swaying in unison, pelvises pressed together. The only thing separating them now was about 25 years.
Locals aren’t sure if sex tourism has actually increased in Saly or if it has simply become more visible in recent years.
Senegalese tourism has grown from modest numbers in the 1970s when the first Club Med opened on the coast. More than 500,000 tourists came to Senegal last year, according to government statistics. It is a key economic activity for the country of 12 million with a GDP of $13 billion.
Emphasizing the importance of tourism in Senegal, President Abdoulaye Wade set a goal of attracting 1.5 million tourists in 2010. However, those working in the tourism industry say that figure is still far-off and blame the world economic crisis and rising airfare costs for a recent downturn in visitors.
But the female tourists looking for romance are still coming. There are no figures about how many indulge in sex tourism, but there are enough to support nightclubs like Les Etages.
Hotel manager Cheikh Ba said arriving guests ask him where Les Etages is before asking about the beach or even getting their room keys.
“That gives you an idea of why they’re here,” Ba said. “Some people say the sex brings Europeans to Saly. They don’t want to say anything bad about it, but I say it is ruining this town.”
Peak season in Saly is between November and April. Hotel managers complain of the downturn in business. They say some tourists now prefer to rent vacation homes where they can go about their business in private.
Female sex tourism is often referred to as “love tourism,” and becomes a lifestyle for some women who make frequent trips to see a regular boyfriend or simply play the field.
Some see it as companionship with the promise of a pay-off at the end, but Ba and other Saly residents said it’s just plain old sex for money.
“You have no job, no nothing, and you see your friend living in a house and driving a car that his European girlfriend bought him,” Ba said, “She comes every month or so to visit and sends him money. You say to yourself, well, I could do that too."
Pape does not live in luxury.
The 30-year-old has a job in Dakar that pays him $250 a month. Half his paycheck goes to rent and he stretches the other half to cover his living expenses and to send funds to his elderly mother in Ivory Coast. Pape's friends and family don’t know about his 52-year-old Dutch girlfriend. They also don’t know about the gifts and $250 cash infusions she sends him, sometimes three times a month.
"I'm a thing, her object, her toy, her property," he said. "If I had the choice financially, I wouldn't date her. I would never have started this."
Chain-smoking and downing two beers, Pape, started from the beginning.
He met the Dutch woman while working in Senegal’s southern Casamance region last January. She was there on vacation. They were staying in the same hotel.
"When I came back and went to sleep, she would knock on the door,” he said. “One night, she invited me into her room. I refused. It was weird. It was my friends who explained to me that she was interested."
When he returned to Dakar, she cried. Though hesitant, Pape agreed to meet her the next weekend in Zigunchor, a coastal city in Casamance.
"We went out that night. When we got back to the hotel, what was going to happen happened,” he said with a shrug. "She's well-preserved, considering her age.”
"I've never asked her, but I think she was there for sex," he said. "I'm afraid to ask.”
Since then, they Skype and talk on the phone. During her most recent visit last month, they traveled along the coast, passing through Saly.
"I saw quite a few young men there with old, white women. I began to question my morality. What are you doing with this old woman? She could be your mom. You've become a gigolo, someone who doesn't have ambition, someone who is ready to do anything for money,” he said.
When she left, Pape said he felt only relief.
"I'm not attracted to her,” he said. “I tried to avoid sex but she insisted. She complained. She says she loves me. She has helped me a lot, so now I feel like I have to give her something."
"We fight. I tell her I can't continue like this. She offers me money. She knows she can keep me,” he said.
The woman says she has found him an internship in Holland and offered to buy him a plane ticket. It's just grim reality, he says, that all the shame and guilt in the world won’t stop him from going if his visa is approved.
Years ago at a club in the Gambia, Pape saw a young man gyrating sexily in front of three old white women. One of the women reached out and patted his butt before shaking her head no, like it was a piece of fruit in the market.
"That memory comes back to me often lately," he said, stamping out one cigarette and lighting up another. "Once I find a good job, I will get my dignity back. But for now, I'm a prostitute."
Friday, December 11, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Race in America (cont) a familiar pattern
July 24, 2009
Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again
Stanley Fish (NY Times Blog)
I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.
As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.
The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?
At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.
The Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.
The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.
Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.
Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again
Stanley Fish (NY Times Blog)
I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.
As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.
The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?
At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.
The Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.
The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.
Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.
Race in America (cont)
July 30th 2009
Two recent incidents that have come under public scrutiny are symptomatic of what many white Americans think but know better than to say on record:
Justin Barrett, a national guardsman in Boston referred to Professor Gates as "a banana-eating jungle monkey" in an email that came to light: “If I was the officer (Gates) verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent noncompliance,” the e-mail reads.
Boston Globe
Lee Landor, until recently deputy press secretary to Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, posted comments on her personal Facebook page criticizing Henry Louis Gates and the President, and defending racial profiling"
I beleive Ms Landor speaks for many white people in America. Ms. Landor wrote in one post, “O-dumb-a, the situation got ‘out of hand’ because Gates is a racist, not because the officer was DOING HIS JOB!”
In response to one Facebook user who voiced disagreement, Ms. Landor referred to Professor Gates using a vulgarity and added: “And racial profiling does exist, but for good reason. Take a look at this country’s jails: who makes up the majority of inmates? Exactly.”
In another Facebook post, Ms. Landor wrote, “You know what, I am really getting SICK of hearing about how white people are evil racists.” She added: “I get it — white men have dominated for hundreds of years and there’s a lot of anger there. But HOW MUCH MORE can the white people do to correct past injustices of their ancestors?”
New York Times
Two recent incidents that have come under public scrutiny are symptomatic of what many white Americans think but know better than to say on record:
Justin Barrett, a national guardsman in Boston referred to Professor Gates as "a banana-eating jungle monkey" in an email that came to light: “If I was the officer (Gates) verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent noncompliance,” the e-mail reads.
Boston Globe
Lee Landor, until recently deputy press secretary to Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, posted comments on her personal Facebook page criticizing Henry Louis Gates and the President, and defending racial profiling"
I beleive Ms Landor speaks for many white people in America. Ms. Landor wrote in one post, “O-dumb-a, the situation got ‘out of hand’ because Gates is a racist, not because the officer was DOING HIS JOB!”
In response to one Facebook user who voiced disagreement, Ms. Landor referred to Professor Gates using a vulgarity and added: “And racial profiling does exist, but for good reason. Take a look at this country’s jails: who makes up the majority of inmates? Exactly.”
In another Facebook post, Ms. Landor wrote, “You know what, I am really getting SICK of hearing about how white people are evil racists.” She added: “I get it — white men have dominated for hundreds of years and there’s a lot of anger there. But HOW MUCH MORE can the white people do to correct past injustices of their ancestors?”
New York Times
Monday, July 27, 2009
Race in America (cont)
Drama in the People's Republic of Cambridge: Boston Has Two Faces
July 22, 2009 0
Richard M. Benjamin
in the Huffington Post
Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD?
A: Nigger
Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge
These two jokes come to my mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest. The Harvard scholar was handcuffed having been accused as a thief on his own property.
The first joke reveals an age-old truism: All the credentials in the world do not protect black men from police abuse.
The second joke, well -- that's the New York take on Cambridge. My friend Chester, a white, cutting-edge architect who had a cushy professorship at Harvard's graduate school, nevertheless fled Cambridge, since he feared he would die of either boredom or conformity. Chester complained that Cambridge's upscale, vanilla lifestyle would condemn him to a life-sentence of smug liberal orthodoxy. Chester noted that Cambridge is the most socially conservative politically liberal bastion in America: The town's p.c. doctrinaire ways of thinking and living -- oh, the dull dinner parties discussing The Nation -- exact a stifling, conservative effect.
"Cambridge is where fancy white people go to spiritually die," Chester likes to say.
Having lived in Cambridge for six months in the mid-1990s, and visited several times in later years, I have similar opinions of Cambridge.
Liberals in Cambridge, in my experience, like to make big statements about improving the status of black people. But they don't have much use for ordinary blacks themselves. Hands down, Cambridge is one of the most racially hostile places I've ever lived.
And I am not exactly imagining things.
Sudhir Venkatesh, the William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and bestselling author of Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press), named Boston, in 2008, "America's Most Racist City."
"The city puzzled me. I knew about the strong liberal sentiment among the populace, but I didn't have to look far to see that racism was part of its historical core. For example, school integration was violently resisted by many of its white ethnic residents. In sports, the city has been home to some of the most extreme forms of racism -- check out Howard Bryant's terrific book, Shut Out, in which he explores the longstanding bigotry in the Red Sox baseball organization."
A paradox reigns: Next to the racism of theTom Yawkey Red Sox syndicate is the forward-thinking, inclusive racial legacy of Red Auerbach's Celtics.
Even sports expose the two faces of Boston.
Cambridge was ranked "The Most Liberal City in America" by a 2005 national study. Residents even call it "The People's Republic of Cambridge." Yet Skip Gates got reported by a neighbor and arrested by the police in an apparent bit of racial profiling.
Gates's arrest revives Cambridge's, and greater Boston's, two faces: the bastion of liberalism and the fortress of prejudice. After all, Cambridge's mayor, E. Denise Simmons, is a black woman who even grew up there. Before that, Cambridge was the first city to elect an openly gay black man as mayor, Kenneth Reeves. What gives?
Aggravating Boston's racial turmoil, of course, are class divides. The Cambridge police force that arrested Skip Gates is charged with keeping the upscale enclave "safe" from some decidedly downscale neighborhoods nearby. Wealthy communities abutting poor ones often produce a class anxiety that borders on paranoia. Gates' white neighbor who failed to recognize him works at Harvard magazine. This "neighbor" so evidently suffers from said class anxiety, at least as much as racism. Such community anxiety - every "outsider" is a suspect - often demands "tough" policing, which curdles into abusive policing.
Poor Skip Gates. He likely experienced racial profiling.
July 22, 2009 0
Richard M. Benjamin
in the Huffington Post
Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD?
A: Nigger
Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge
These two jokes come to my mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest. The Harvard scholar was handcuffed having been accused as a thief on his own property.
The first joke reveals an age-old truism: All the credentials in the world do not protect black men from police abuse.
The second joke, well -- that's the New York take on Cambridge. My friend Chester, a white, cutting-edge architect who had a cushy professorship at Harvard's graduate school, nevertheless fled Cambridge, since he feared he would die of either boredom or conformity. Chester complained that Cambridge's upscale, vanilla lifestyle would condemn him to a life-sentence of smug liberal orthodoxy. Chester noted that Cambridge is the most socially conservative politically liberal bastion in America: The town's p.c. doctrinaire ways of thinking and living -- oh, the dull dinner parties discussing The Nation -- exact a stifling, conservative effect.
"Cambridge is where fancy white people go to spiritually die," Chester likes to say.
Having lived in Cambridge for six months in the mid-1990s, and visited several times in later years, I have similar opinions of Cambridge.
Liberals in Cambridge, in my experience, like to make big statements about improving the status of black people. But they don't have much use for ordinary blacks themselves. Hands down, Cambridge is one of the most racially hostile places I've ever lived.
And I am not exactly imagining things.
Sudhir Venkatesh, the William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and bestselling author of Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press), named Boston, in 2008, "America's Most Racist City."
"The city puzzled me. I knew about the strong liberal sentiment among the populace, but I didn't have to look far to see that racism was part of its historical core. For example, school integration was violently resisted by many of its white ethnic residents. In sports, the city has been home to some of the most extreme forms of racism -- check out Howard Bryant's terrific book, Shut Out, in which he explores the longstanding bigotry in the Red Sox baseball organization."
A paradox reigns: Next to the racism of theTom Yawkey Red Sox syndicate is the forward-thinking, inclusive racial legacy of Red Auerbach's Celtics.
Even sports expose the two faces of Boston.
Cambridge was ranked "The Most Liberal City in America" by a 2005 national study. Residents even call it "The People's Republic of Cambridge." Yet Skip Gates got reported by a neighbor and arrested by the police in an apparent bit of racial profiling.
Gates's arrest revives Cambridge's, and greater Boston's, two faces: the bastion of liberalism and the fortress of prejudice. After all, Cambridge's mayor, E. Denise Simmons, is a black woman who even grew up there. Before that, Cambridge was the first city to elect an openly gay black man as mayor, Kenneth Reeves. What gives?
Aggravating Boston's racial turmoil, of course, are class divides. The Cambridge police force that arrested Skip Gates is charged with keeping the upscale enclave "safe" from some decidedly downscale neighborhoods nearby. Wealthy communities abutting poor ones often produce a class anxiety that borders on paranoia. Gates' white neighbor who failed to recognize him works at Harvard magazine. This "neighbor" so evidently suffers from said class anxiety, at least as much as racism. Such community anxiety - every "outsider" is a suspect - often demands "tough" policing, which curdles into abusive policing.
Poor Skip Gates. He likely experienced racial profiling.
Race in America
Are the Falsely Accused Required to be Polite to the Police?
Rich Rodgers
I hope we make the most of the national discussion and debate generated by the July 16th arrest of Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police.
If you've been under a rock for the past 10 days, here's the quick version: Gates returned to his house at noon after an overnight flight from China, with his driver, to find he couldn't get into his house. His white neighbor called the police and reported that two men were trying to break into the home. Crowley responds, and the police report is here. Gates tells his side of the story here.
While so much of the debate pretends that the key question is what Gates said to Crowley, it's actually not illegal to yell at a police officer in Massachusetts:
In several cases, the courts in Massachusetts have considered whether a person is guilty of disorderly conduct for verbally abusing a police officer. In Commonwealth v. Lopiano, a 2004 decision, an appeals court held it was not disorderly conduct for a person who angrily yelled at an officer that his civil rights were being violated. In Commonwealth v. Mallahan, a decision rendered last year, an appeals court held that a person who launched into an angry, profanity-laced tirade against a police officer in front of spectators could not be convicted of disorderly conduct.
So Massachusetts law clearly provides that Gates did not commit disorderly conduct.
So Gates appears to have been guilty of nothing illegal, but is there any doubt that he is being judged in the court of public opinion for his alleged statements to the officer? You can bet that a large percentage of white Americans find it easy to believe in the falsehood that Gates's verbal challenges or resistance justified his arrest. This belief--that this black man or anyone else is obligated to be submissive to police officers in speech--should be called out and rejected.
It's human nature for an employee to consider taking a customer's behavior into account when deciding what kind of service to give to them. Professionals do a good job of ignoring insults or slights, but no one is immune from the temptation. For police, though, the bar has to be higher. Too much rides on the outcome. To begin to change the dynamics at the heart of racial profiling and the distrust that many minorities feel toward the police, the training that officers receive has to meaningfully recognize the negative experiences that most minorities in our country share.
In his recent column in the New York Times, Charles Blow cites a NYT/CBS poll from July 2008 that asked this question:
“Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?”
66 percent of black men said yes, compared to 9 percent of white men. That's a shocking statistic, but to really try to absorb what this means, you have to think about what really happens on some of these stops.
Blow tells the story of being stopped in Louisiana when he was 18, the president of his college freshmen class, in a car with his friend Andre:
Andre insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason. It wasn’t true. Then he said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. Then he walked to his car and drove away.
I was raised to treat police officers with respect, and have always figured it was in my interest to do so. I can think of three times when I was stopped for speeding and let go with a warning, and guessed that the 'yes sirs' and 'no sirs' didn't hurt my cause. But being deferential has never implied for me that I needed to swallow a sense of profound injustice. I've never thought for a second that I was or might be threatened, arrested or even shot just because I'm a white guy. Our experiences are so different, we might as well be living in different countries.
It's clear that the experience of prejudice at the hands of the police is all too common for black men and other minorities in the United States. It's asking too much to insist that someone show respect to an institution that has treated them unfairly. It's asking someone to accept a diminished or tarnished standing in the eyes of an entity that has the power to take away their freedom or even their life. For that respect to come, it's going to have to continue to be earned.
It seems certain that submission or deference is sometimes used by police officers as a litmus test for whether they will make an arrest or issue a citation, even when the expectation of submission goes beyond the legal obligations of a citizen in interacting with a police officer. This emphasis on submission and compliance no doubt has some of its roots in attempting to ensure the safety of our police officers, who must be prepared for any possibility. But when race and ego are injected into the mix, an expectation of "submission or consequences" is unacceptable as standard operating procedure for police officers-- even, or perhaps especially, when people are upset and saying so.
Rich Rodgers
I hope we make the most of the national discussion and debate generated by the July 16th arrest of Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police.
If you've been under a rock for the past 10 days, here's the quick version: Gates returned to his house at noon after an overnight flight from China, with his driver, to find he couldn't get into his house. His white neighbor called the police and reported that two men were trying to break into the home. Crowley responds, and the police report is here. Gates tells his side of the story here.
While so much of the debate pretends that the key question is what Gates said to Crowley, it's actually not illegal to yell at a police officer in Massachusetts:
In several cases, the courts in Massachusetts have considered whether a person is guilty of disorderly conduct for verbally abusing a police officer. In Commonwealth v. Lopiano, a 2004 decision, an appeals court held it was not disorderly conduct for a person who angrily yelled at an officer that his civil rights were being violated. In Commonwealth v. Mallahan, a decision rendered last year, an appeals court held that a person who launched into an angry, profanity-laced tirade against a police officer in front of spectators could not be convicted of disorderly conduct.
So Massachusetts law clearly provides that Gates did not commit disorderly conduct.
So Gates appears to have been guilty of nothing illegal, but is there any doubt that he is being judged in the court of public opinion for his alleged statements to the officer? You can bet that a large percentage of white Americans find it easy to believe in the falsehood that Gates's verbal challenges or resistance justified his arrest. This belief--that this black man or anyone else is obligated to be submissive to police officers in speech--should be called out and rejected.
It's human nature for an employee to consider taking a customer's behavior into account when deciding what kind of service to give to them. Professionals do a good job of ignoring insults or slights, but no one is immune from the temptation. For police, though, the bar has to be higher. Too much rides on the outcome. To begin to change the dynamics at the heart of racial profiling and the distrust that many minorities feel toward the police, the training that officers receive has to meaningfully recognize the negative experiences that most minorities in our country share.
In his recent column in the New York Times, Charles Blow cites a NYT/CBS poll from July 2008 that asked this question:
“Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?”
66 percent of black men said yes, compared to 9 percent of white men. That's a shocking statistic, but to really try to absorb what this means, you have to think about what really happens on some of these stops.
Blow tells the story of being stopped in Louisiana when he was 18, the president of his college freshmen class, in a car with his friend Andre:
Andre insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason. It wasn’t true. Then he said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. Then he walked to his car and drove away.
I was raised to treat police officers with respect, and have always figured it was in my interest to do so. I can think of three times when I was stopped for speeding and let go with a warning, and guessed that the 'yes sirs' and 'no sirs' didn't hurt my cause. But being deferential has never implied for me that I needed to swallow a sense of profound injustice. I've never thought for a second that I was or might be threatened, arrested or even shot just because I'm a white guy. Our experiences are so different, we might as well be living in different countries.
It's clear that the experience of prejudice at the hands of the police is all too common for black men and other minorities in the United States. It's asking too much to insist that someone show respect to an institution that has treated them unfairly. It's asking someone to accept a diminished or tarnished standing in the eyes of an entity that has the power to take away their freedom or even their life. For that respect to come, it's going to have to continue to be earned.
It seems certain that submission or deference is sometimes used by police officers as a litmus test for whether they will make an arrest or issue a citation, even when the expectation of submission goes beyond the legal obligations of a citizen in interacting with a police officer. This emphasis on submission and compliance no doubt has some of its roots in attempting to ensure the safety of our police officers, who must be prepared for any possibility. But when race and ego are injected into the mix, an expectation of "submission or consequences" is unacceptable as standard operating procedure for police officers-- even, or perhaps especially, when people are upset and saying so.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)