Suella Braverman, the UK Home Secretary, has been urged by a large number of medical professionals to apologize to British Pakistanis for falsely accusing them of racism and Islamophobia and for putting them in risk by making such accusations.
The Home Secretary made racial and false accusations about Pakistanis, linking them to sex grooming gangs, despite the government’s own evidence, according to dozens of healthcare organizations, which collectively have thousands of members made up of medical professionals from various backgrounds. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been urged to take note of these allegations. National organizations of healthcare professionals have expressed to the PM their “profound disappointment” with the Home Secretary’s recent comments that stereotype, stigmatize, and discriminate against the British Pakistani community with baseless accusations.
They have questioned the Prime Minister who has supported Suella Braverman’s racist remarks, and it is crucial to look at the supporting documentation. The experts cited a report that the Home Office had commissioned in 2020, which found that “research has found that group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white” and that it was impossible to draw the conclusion that any one particular ethnic group was disproportionately overrepresented. “It is unacceptable for the Home Secretary to use inflammatory and divisive rhetoric that is sensational and contradicts the evidence from her own department,” the letter to the PM office stated. It is crucial to note that by emphasizing political exhibitionism rather than executing effective action that is evidence-based and calls for a systemic reaction rather than focusing on a particular ethnic group, it allows these horrible crimes to go unpunished.
As health and care providers, we are committed to collaborating with other agencies to safeguard young people who could be in danger or become the victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE).” We are also painfully aware of the detrimental consequences that the current government’s cuts to community services and the public sector have had on children and adolescents, especially how these modifications have increased their vulnerability and impeded their access to CSE support. The medical professional claimed that “discriminatory and racist scapegoating” is being used in their place in order to conveniently ignore these facts. Additionally, it insensitively ignores the significant contribution made by medical professionals from many racial and ethnic backgrounds, in this example British Pakistanis, to the NHS and other admirable British institutions. Recent events like COVID-19 made this very clear.
“We call for the Home Secretary to apologize and to make a clear statement of how she intends to address this urgent problem, which has ruined the lives of hundreds of young people. We must also remind the Home Secretary that words have consequences; in 2014, Boris Johnson’s remarks that women wearing niqabs looked like letterboxes contributed directly to a 375% rise in hate crimes directed against Muslim women, the letter continued. Language that encourages racial hate crimes has no place in contemporary British society. We implore the Home Secretary to reconsider how carelessly she has framed this complicated and important issue and to make a commitment to cooperating with people of all groups in order to address the pressing issue of CSE. We want an apology and a retraction of her statement.
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