"Cultural" crime and the blinding dust of prejudice

The CPS says forced marriage "disproportionately affects" Travellers. So why don't they refer to paedophilia as a "White British" crime? Damian Le Bas considers the contradictions in the criminal justice system

(left: Mr Nazir Afzal, pictured on the Crown Prosecution Service website)

“Keep your eyes and your ears open and your mouth shut.” That's what my granny used to tell me: a Gypsy knows how to use their eyes and ears.

If our ancestors hadn't had eyes in the back of their heads then none of us would be here today. From the mountains of Romania where noblemen enslaved Romanies and cut their tongues out for speaking their language, to the ovens of Auschwitz where babies were incinerated for being born Romany, we've had to have the eyes of a hawk and the ears of a shushi to survive.

But there's something in the air right now, and it's blinding people to the truth about Gypsies and Travellers. It's stopping them hearing the quiet voice of the truth, and making their ears deaf to everything but the brainless voice of scapegoating.

What is this magical substance that for hundreds of years has been able to take the dying embers of hatred and fan them into an inferno of suspicion and prejudice? This mythical powder in a box marked “DANGER: GYPSIES” that can take any sensible, decent person and turn them into a standpipe of bigotry, willing to tar everyone with the same brush?

It can't be the dust that hangs in the air over the ruin of Dale Farm, laced with asbestos and a danger to those who still live there. No: that dust is real, and it was made by smashing through Travellers' homes and into contaminated ground. Because it's real, the world is happy to ignore it.

The magic powder that takes respectable people and turns them into anti-Gypsy weapons is something altogether different. It is the knowledge that whether or not there's any truth to what they say, everyone will believe them anyway, because the Gypsies always dunnit. There's no smoke without fire, right? And there's no fire in the woods unless the Gypsies are sitting round it, eating your stolen children and worshipping the devil.

Nazir Afzal is “Britain's most senior Asian prosecutor,” writes Jonathan Brown in The Independent. His fame has grown in recent weeks following the breakthrough convictions of nine men for grooming teenage girls for sex and, in a highly organised and abhorrent practice, passing them around to be raped by other men. Two more men were arrested on the weekend.

These convictions are a crucial milestone in the battle against sexual assault and exploitation, and Mr Afzal deserves the highest praise for his role in this process.

Mr Afzal has now been reported as saying that "There are some communities where we [the Crown Prosecution Service] have feared to tread ... The last bastion for me is the Traveller community." But what crimes is he speaking about here?

Afzal is talking about the practice of forced marriage and, by extension the issue of honour-based violence, which are targeted together by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Clearly both issues are and must be priority targets for the criminal justice system, as these practices are a blight on the conscience of a world that should shun all forms of domestic violence and enemies of women's rights. So what exactly is my problem with Mr Afzal?

Here's an extract from the CPS website's section dealing with honour-based violence: “It is currently understood that within a UK context honour-based violence and forced marriage disproportionately affect Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and Refugee women and young people. This includes, but is not limited to, Latin American, Traveller, African, South Asian, South-East Asian, Middle-Eastern, Turkish, Kurdish and Caribbean communities.”

Well, if Travellers have a special problem in this respect, it's good to know we're not the only ones to blame, since cultures from every continent on earth (with the exception of Australasia) are implicated in these vile practices by the CPS. Clearly domestic violence isn't a problem in white communities, unless you're a Traveller.

"Compared with the massive record of murder, theft, kidnapping and other crimes by non-Gypsies against Gypsies throughout history, Gypsy crime against non-Gypsies pales almost into insignificance, so that to prioritize the study of the latter over the former shows a twisted sense of values."

  -Dr. Thomas Acton, Professor of Romani Studies, University of Greenwich

Afzal is less clear on exactly what he means by “Travellers”. In the UK, the rules of common parlance would suggest he means Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers, but we can't be sure he's speaking with due reference to judicial precedent, which has afforded both groups ethnic minority status.

Perhaps Afzal means New Travellers, but that reference would be difficult to justify due to the open nature of the New Traveller community, where people from many different ethnic backgrounds find they're welcome. Or perhaps, at a stretch, he means Romani people from Eastern Europe: the most confusing possibility yet, since most Roma from the East haven't been “Travellers” since the 17th Century.

The entire CPS line of identifying 'cultural' or 'ethnic' crime, rather than simply crime, sets a dangerous precedent, and one that Afzal himself is certainly not happy to follow when it comes to other 'cultures'. When it comes to predatory paedophilia, he changes his tune, and it's alarming to see one of the country's top prosecutors display such a total lack of consistency when dealing with different ethnicities.

Here's what Afzal said to Jonathan Brown: “The vast majority of paedophiles and child abusers in this country are white British – 95 per cent. The one thing these men have in common with the vast majority, with virtually all paedophiles, is that they are men. We have got to focus on what the real issue is.”

So what is the “real issue” then, Mr Afzal?

“This is a gender issue. It is about men and their attitudes to women: men thinking they can control women in any way they want. Men determining what is feminine, what is womanly ... that somehow they can be manipulated and controlled.”

Hey presto: sexual crime committed by white British people is a gender issue, but in other communities it's a cultural issue. In the same vein, presumably a white Englishman who steals a car is stealing it because he's a car thief, irrespective of his background; but a Gypsy who steals a car is stealing it because he's a thieving Gypsy car thief with a cultural desire to steal.

Nobody is complaining of a double standard here: I am quoting a senior prosecutor who personifies the double standard-making typical of the UK justice system; who, when deciding whether or when to link ethnicity to crime, is at least as confused as Scooby Doo. I agree with Afzal 100% on the issue of men manipulating, controlling and abusing women. So why is he unable to extend his logic of gender issues across all ethnic groups? We do not need senior legal personalities who operate according to the half-baked anthropological principles of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings.

Romany people have been convicted en masse of 'cultural' crimes before, and in the past the result has been genocide. I make no apologies for mentioning it. I have met the children and grandchildren of integrated, honest people who were gassed, shot and incinerated by the Nazis and their collaborators because their race was deemed “asocial”, “work-shy” and a “menace”. What the Nazis refused to see is that crimes are not committed by ethnicities, but by individuals, and no amount of propaganda or ethnic cleansing is able to change that fact.

Everyone is perfectly able to see this truth when it comes to the majority culture, which in the UK is not seen as some sort of 'cultural' breeding ground for paedophiles. But turn the tables to minority ethnic groups and the rules of the game are changed without explanation. Nazir Afzal may not be able to see this, but the Gypsies can. As a Romany colleague of mine, who champions equal rights for all ethnic minorities, said to me this morning, “Who wants a Gorjia education when they can't even see racism if it smacks them in the face? I'd rather have a Gypsy education, because at least we can see prejudice when it's right there in front of us.”

All over Europe, from Turin to Turkey, Romany people are being burned from their homes, murdered by right wing vigilantes, and chased from their villages by neo-Nazi activists. This is not some faraway problem of the wild and lawless Balkan mountains: Roma were violently chased from their homes in Belfast in June 2009. The European Union and United Nations have just reported that Romany people in Western Europe may face the same inequalities as our counterparts in the East, where the situation is worse than desperate.

Victimised because of their ethnicity by those who operate outside the law, Gypsies and Travellers are now being accused of an ethnic predisposition to crime by those who represent the law. The dust of fear is rising all around us, and we need to keep it out of our ears and eyes; as for those who care more about their prejudices than they do about the truth, perhaps they just don't want to.