'Xenophobic': Islamabad on UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman's remarks on British-Pakistani men

Pakistan on Wednesday rejected UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman's “discriminatory" and "xenophobic” remarks targeting British-Pakistani men.

Braverman told Sky News in an interview last week that British-Pakistani men “hold cultural values at odds with British values”.

Responding to Braverman’s remarks, Foreign Office (FO) spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said that they painted a “highly misleading picture signalling the intent to target and treat British Pakistanis differently”.

She said the British home secretary had “erroneously branded criminal behaviour of some individuals as a representation of the entire community”.

“She (Braverman) fails to take note of the systemic racism and ghettoisation of communities and omits to recognise the tremendous cultural, economic and political ontributions that British-Pakistanis continue to make in British society,” Baloch said at a press conference here.

In an interview about the UK government's plans to tackle child sexual abuse, Braverman 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“[British-Pakistani men] see women in a demeaned, illegitimate way, and pursue an outdated and frankly heinous approach to the way we behave,” Braverman commented after she was informed that a Home Office report in 2020 concluded that most child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 pointed to reports from Rotherham town, which was rocked by a child sexual exploitation scandal in which five British-Pakistani men were convicted of grooming, raping and exploiting young girls.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday unveiled plans for a new task force to go after grooming gangs.

The new Grooming Gangs Taskforce will involve specialist officers parachuted in to assist police forces with live child sexual exploitation and grooming investigations for stricter action against those who groom children for sexual abuse.

Sunak’s announcement came a day after his Indian-origin Home Secretary, said that the perpetrators of such crimes are “groups of men, almost all British Pakistani” but authorities have turned a “turn blind eye to these signs of abuse out of political correctness, out of fear, of being called racists, out of fear, of being called bigoted”.

Britain is home to the largest Pakistani community of about 1.5 million, most of them as second-generation citizens who were born and brought up in the UK.