Katie Hopkins' tweets to Rochdale MP investigated by police

BBC News reports that tweets sent by Katie Hopkins to the Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk, are being investigated by the police for incitement to racial hatred after Danczuk reported the matter to the Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester, Tony Lloyd.

In a twitter exchange with Danczuk, who marked Pakistan National Day by raising the Pakistani flag in his constituency last week, Hopkins denounced Danczuk’s actions referring to men of Pakistani heritage convicted of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale saying: “Are these your friends too? @SimonDanczuk? Is this why you are raising the Pakistani flag in Rochdale? 77 years inside.”

She also suggested that the men convicted of the criminal offences were ‘friends’ of the Labour MP stating: “Your Pakistani friends saw young white girls as fair game when they abused them.”

A spokesman from the Greater Manchester police said Danczuk’s complaint against Katie Hopkins “has been passed onto the Rochdale division and will be reviewed,” BBC News reports.

The Guardian notes remarks by Tony Lloyd, who in an email to the newspaper wrote:

“Katie Hopkins’s comments are ridiculous, seeking to target the entire Pakistani community here in Greater Manchester. The comments on Twitter and in her column are ill-informed and offensive.”

“As the father of one of the victims in the Rochdale grooming case has rightly pointed out, using victims in this way to aid someone’s career is exploitative. Tarring an entire community with the label of child abuser is obviously both stupid and offensive.”

Danczuk insisted “our town will not take any lessons from Katie Hopkins on community cohesion. She has waded into something she doesn’t understand and her ignorance is extremely dangerous.”

He warned that characters like Hopkins are very damaging and encourage racist views, and worse, hate crime, in areas like Rochdale where child sex scandals have already created tension between communities. “To equate the Pakistan flag with child abuse, as she has done on social media over the last week, is absurd and it creates a dangerous environment where extreme intolerance becomes acceptable,” Danczuk said.

The media hysteria over the ethnicity of the abusers in child exploitation scandals in the North of England, Oxford and the Midlands has been pervasive with extensive coverage focusing on religion and cultural attitudes towards women as reasons explaining the phenomenon of exploitation and child sex grooming.

Journalists such as Paul Vallely in the Independent and Joseph Harker in The Guardian, have sought to unpick the easy correlation portrayed in the media between minorities and sex crimes by questioning the disproportionate attention given to ethnicity, religion or culture when discussing minority communities but not the white majority. The tendency to ‘racialise’ criminal behaviour when referring to minority communities privileges race and religion as explanatory factors while overlooking other relevant factors and often results in the stoking of racial tensions.

For example, a serious case review report into the child sex grooming scandal in Oxford, published in March, identified a number of failings on the part of child care services and police forces. The report highlighted the way in which victims were ignored because they were seen as “difficult’, or because their age inappropriate relationships with much older men were not inquired about by agencies that came to learn of them, or because there was a serious lack of awareness about the loss of “consent” by the girls and the central roll control plays in the grooming process.

In respect of the grooming scandal in Rochdale, Danczuk accused child care agencies and the police of actively ignoring the abuse arguing that “social services believed these girls were making lifestyle choices.”

These wider failings on the part of statutory agencies have often been neglected in favour of more facile arguments about “political correctness” or “cultural attitudes” towards women.

Far right groups have capitalised on the racialisation of the sex grooming scandals by targeting members of the same racial and religious communities.

Last year Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, raised the issue of young Asian girls in her constituency being “too scared to go into town for the past three months because when they do, they get threatened”. She added that threats of rape had been made by far-right groups against Asian girls as a way to “even things up”.

In Rochdale, after the prosecutions in 2012, protestors from far-right organisations, the British National Party and English Defence League, held demonstrations with slogans like: “Our girls are not Halal meat” and “Lock up the Muslim paedophile grooming gangs.”

Arguing that “this is how racism takes root”, Harker noted that media coverage of the Rochdale case in particular showed how appallingly easy it is to demonise an entire community such that “before long, the wider public will believe the problem is endemic within that race/religion”.

By protesting at Danzcuk’s raising of the Pakistani flag in his constituency and equating Rochdale’s Pakistani community with child sex abusers, Hopkins is indicative of how stereotypes about minorities are formed and steadily reinforced.