The Foreign Office (FO) on Wednesday took exception to British Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s “discriminatory and xenophobic” remarks on Pakistani men, saying that they painted a “misleading picture”.
A day earlier, Braverman said that British-Pakistani men “hold cultural values at odds with British values”.
During a Sky News interview about plans to tackle child sexual abuse, she spoke about “the predominance of British-Pakistani males who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values”.
“[British-Pakistani men] see women in a demeaned, illegitimate way, and pursue an outdated and frankly heinous approach to the way we behave,” Braverman commented after she was informed that a Home Office report in 2020 concluded that most child sexual abuse gangs are made up of white men under the age of 30, and that there was not enough evidence to suggest members of grooming gangs were disproportionately more likely to be Asian or black.
Braverman instead pointed to reports from Rotherham, which was rocked by a child sexual exploitation scandal in which five British-Pakistani men were convicted of grooming, raping and exploiting young girls. The home secretary also cited a 2015 report penned by Dame Louise Casey CB, which ironically noted how the British-Pakistani community had been “harmed by association” in the scandal.
Her comments were largely criticised by political commentators and children’s charities as “inflammatory” and akin to initiating “race wars”.
Responding to Braverman’s remarks in a press briefing today, the FO spokesperson said that the remarks painted a “highly misleading picture signalling the intent to target and treat British Pakistanis differently”.
Baloch stated that the UK home secretary had “erroneously branded criminal behaviour of some individuals as a representation of the entire community”.
“She fails to take note of the systemic racism and ghettoisation of communities and omits to recognize the tremendous cultural, economic and political contributions that British Pakistanis continue to make in British society,” she added.
