Both the left and the right need to stop using the victims of the Newcastle grooming scandal as political footballs

As happens so often in the current climate of political polarisation, a discrete case or issue becomes simply ammunition for a media and social media ruckus. Nuance is, as ever, the first casualty

After 18 individuals were convicted in Newcastle, a race row erupted (PA)

In sentencing the first of 17 men for their role in the grooming, drugging and sexual abuse of vulnerable girls in Newcastle, Judge Penny Moreland concluded on Tuesday that their crimes were not racially motivated. In doing so, she reopened a debate that has attracted virulence on both sides.

“In my view,” said the judge, “and speaking in broad terms, these defendants selected their victims not because of their race but because they were young, impressionable, naive and vulnerable.”

This declaration appears to strike a blow against remarks by the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, who suggested last month – after the men in the “Operation Shelter” case had been convicted – that Britain needed to confront the scourge of “profoundly racist” crime which the recent case exemplified.

It will also be presented as contradicting comments by MP Sarah Champion, in a column for The Sun, in which she wrote: “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?”

Champion initially sought to distance herself from the piece but subsequently resigned from the Shadow Cabinet over the ensuing row.

Plainly, the Newcastle case, following as it does the exposure of similar crime rings in Rotherham, Oxford, Aylesbury, Rochdale, Derby and elsewhere, raises a now familiar question about the role of race (or in some versions of the debate, religion).

It is unarguable that in all these grim instances, the perpetrators were overwhelmingly men of Asian (mostly but not exclusively Pakistani) origin and the victims were almost always white girls. It is also well-documented that on some occasions authorities have failed to investigate criminal activity with due haste for fear that they will be labelled racist.

Against this backdrop, it seems entirely appropriate to consider the question of whether these crimes have happened because of particular attitudes held by some Asian men in this country about some white girls. The notion is certainly not wholly baseless. In the present case, one of the abusers, Badrul Hussain, had previously called white women “trash” in a 2014 row with a ticket inspector on public transport. “All white women are only good for one thing,” he ranted. “For men like me to f*** and use like trash.”

Still, trouble arises when public figures (either directly or by inference) simplify the issue of race into no more than a direct question of causality and, crucially, motivation – especially when they do so in the broader context of denouncing political correctness. Such comments inevitably give succour to more extreme minds which believe in a much wider racial or religious divide in this country and who frame the crimes in Newcastle and elsewhere as a deliberate attempt by “Muslim” men to brutalise “our women”.

In that narrative, too, the “PC gone mad brigade” (eg lefty liberals) are as much to blame as the rapists for these appalling crimes.

By contrast, the sentencing remarks of Judge Moreland will in turn persuade some who are suspicious of what they see as racial stereotyping that public figures like Macdonald and Champion indeed jumped the gun in this case. It will also fuel their ire against controversialists such as Katie Hopkins who use crimes like those committed in Newcastle to further their broader, Muslim – or immigrant – bashing agenda. Needless to say, Hopkins et al will simply regard the judge’s remarks as further evidence of an out-of-touch elite.

As happens so often in the current climate of political polarisation, a discrete case or issue becomes simply ammunition for a media and social media ruckus. Nuance is, as ever, the first casualty.

Look more closely at the judge’s remarks and it is clear that she does not remove race from the equation altogether; she simply says that it was not, in her view, the immediate motivating factor. That does not mean it is necessarily unreasonable to posit that the victims’ whiteness made them more vulnerable – not least because it created a distance between them and the communities within a community to which the perpetrators were attached at the family or “heritage” level. That alone might make white girls an easier target.

The biggest problem in all this, however, is that the victims tend to get forgotten as individuals. Instead, they become political footballs – evidence of the evil influence of Islam in one narrative; in another, almost absent, as official voices consider where lies the line between political correctness and racism. Either way, the victims just get kicked – again.

In all of the cases of abuse noted above, at their heart are numerous young women and girls who have been debased, brutalised, shattered – perhaps irreparably – by men. It happens that in these instances that most of those men are of Asian origin, operating in gangs, and of course we need to figure out why. Just as we seek to understand the motives of other criminals who happen to be white or black.

But, for the sake of the victims, we should take as our starting point the reality that these are highly complex cases – sometimes with common threads, but not always. And we should understand that over-simplifying them – whether into rows about race and religion, or into debates about the prevalence of drugs, or into slanging matches about political correctness – is unlikely to prevent such crimes recurring.