April 05, 2023, Islamabad: Pakistan’s foreign office has criticized British Home Secretary Suella Braverman for “discriminatory and xenophobic” comments after she said that British Pakistani men “hold cultural values at odds with British values.”
In an interview with Sky News on Monday, Braverman also alleged British Pakistani men worked in child abuse rings or networks that targeted “vulnerable white English girls.”
On Wednesday, Pakistan’s foreign office spokesperson Mehnaz Baloch condemned Braverman’s remarks which painted a “highly misleading picture signalling the intent to target and treat British Pakistanis differently.”
Baloch said Braverman had “erroneously branded criminal behaviour of some individuals as a representation of the entire community.”
“She fails to take note of the systemic racism and ghettoization of communities and omits to recognize the tremendous cultural, economic and political contributions that British Pakistanis continue to make in British society,” Baloch said in her weekly briefing in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
A British Home Office report on group-based child sexual abuse published in 2020 pointed out that research on offender ethnicity is limited and tends to rely on poor-quality data.
However, it did highlight studies that show white men as the majority of offenders compared to Asian or Black men.
The report’s findings were pointed out to Braverman during the interview, but she said that British Pakistani men “see women in a demeaned and illegitimate way and who pursue an outdated and frankly heinous approach in terms of the way they behave.”
Braverman’s comments have received a backlash on social media, with users saying the remarks will mislead the public and “incite violence against those with particular racial characteristics”.
