COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

Today we revise again our exam strategy.
We add the case study about the Rochdale convictions.
Here, news reports offer different takes on debates surrounding the issues related to the part that collective identity, collective values and collective representations play in this story. 

This is the case:
Nine Muslim men, mainly of Pakistani origin, were found guilty last week of plying girls as young as 13 with drink and drugs so they could use them for sex. After the trial, Greater Manchester police sought to play down suggestions of any racial element to the case, as did Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the home affairs select committee. Speaking on the day the men were sentenced, Vaz said: "It's quite wrong to stigmatise a whole community."

Lady Warsi, who is Muslim, told the London Evening Standard newspaper: "There is a small minority of Pakistani men who believe that white girls are fair game. And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first. This small minority who see women as second-class citizens, and white women probably as third-class citizens, are to be spoken out against." She urged the authorities to have the confidence to tackle allegations involving minorities. "Cultural sensitivity should never be a bar to applying the law."

What we note is Warsi's carefully nuanced articulation of the Rochdale sex grooming gangs and the wider questions it raises. Language is key if we want to highlight a particular problem within a community without demonising the whole community.

In an interview with the Evening Standard Warsi, who is Tory Party chair stated that,

'A small number of men of Pakistani heritage believe white girls are fair game for sexual abuse.'

The point Warsi is making is that there are particularly questions that need to be raised in often relatively closed Muslim communities in which some vulnerable non-Muslim young women are being targeted by some men precisely because they are all of the above and often easy to exploit.

Racial reference quickly leads to racial profiling: ‘We are looking for a young black man aged between 14-18’, translates to all young Black men are potential criminals. ‘Asian male sexual deviants’, equally translates to all Asian men are potential sexual deviant.
 Operation Black Vote website comments HERE.

How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation. (Dyer, 1993)