Last month, Rochdale’s Pakistani community gathered in its hundreds outside the former mill town’s police station to express discontent. Furious chants alleged deep injustice on the part of law enforcement. Some men among the crowds were so inflamed by their passions that they directed fireworks at the building’s main entrance.

These riot-like scenes followed an incident at Manchester Airport, in which police were seen to have been heavy-handed with one of the community’s own whilst he allegedly resisted arrest. However grave the circumstances, the same protesting groups were noticeably more muted in their response to a yet more disturbing case in Rochdale.

In Pakistan, and many other countries, rape is often used as an extrajudicial punishment rather than admonished as a crime

This was the 2022 killing of 11-year-old Falaq Babar after 23-year-old Suhail Mohammed, her half-brother, punched her in the head. Police recently confirmed that no further action was being taken, despite powerful evidence of the impact of what Senior Coroner Joanne Kearsley called an “unprovoked, indefensible punch” having been forwarded to the Crown Prosecution Service. While the inquest found that Barbar had an underlying condition predisposing her to a brain bleed, similar scenarios have prompted charges and convictions for manslaughter, and other violent offences, in the past.

News that Suhail Mohammed would not go to court for his actions came only days after the annual National Police Chiefs’ Council report revealed that violence against women and girls had soared by 40 per cent across the United Kingdom —  and that this amounted to an “epidemic”. Naturally, the potential link between these shocking trends and high immigration from places where women are regarded as barely human was implied to be “far-right” and “racist” by the chattering classes.

In Pakistan, and many other countries, rape is often used as an extrajudicial punishment rather than admonished as a crime. It is this same culture that sees villages razed to the ground over false blasphemy accusations, widespread mob justice and corruption, along with hundreds of Christian and Hindu girls kidnapped each year, forcibly converted to Islam, and married off to adult husbands under whom they suffer a lifetime of mental and sexual torture.

Such phenomena are thankfully alien to mainstream British culture, but these attitudes linger among poorly integrated communities in Britain. Just last year, 59-year-old Hussein Alinzi, who battered his 15-year-old daughter unconscious with an iron bar after accusing her of planning to meet a boy on the morning of her GCSE English exam was, like Mohammed, spared jail.

Across communities, the state is failing to enforce the law, or impose tough sentencing on people who commit violent crime, including domestic violence and sexual abuse. Charities warn that rape has been effectively decriminalised. This situation is a consequence of modish ideas about rehabilitating violent criminals, which have filtered into politics and the legal profession. There has been virtually no real public debate about these theories, nor is there evidence they work. Nevertheless, they long ago became our justice system’s ruling doctrine.

Our inert authorities are incentivising criminals across all walks of life, but it would be silly to ignore cultural problems in minority communities. There has never been any serious plan to encourage their integration, and in fact, one former adviser to Tony Blair, Andrew Neather, admitted that mass immigration was deliberately intended to make the country “truly multicultural” and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. We all know by now that multiculturalism is not a call to unify different groups. It is the relativist dogma that all cultures are equally valuable and the flip side of which is to denigrate those who would wish to integrate new arrivals into western ideals as deplorable little Englanders.

The “grooming gangs” scandal is a clear example of the state failing to confront festering misogyny

It is also questionable as to whether many immigrant groups would even wish to assimilate to the degree of abandoning their perspectives on gender. These views are generally highly influenced by devout religious and cultural presumptions. In any society, people who abandon the norm are exceptional, and this is even more so the case in cultures like that which dominates Pakistan and its diaspora. There are severe social and religious penalties for defying — or being suspected of defying — one’s family or sect, including death.

The “grooming gangs” scandal is a clear example of the state failing to confront festering misogyny. There is also, as we saw with the recent Leeds riots and the approach to knife-wielding Muslim men in Birmingham, hesitancy to intervene in immigrant dynamics where police may fear (a) cultural/linguistic barriers which they may find difficult to surmount and (b) community backlash.

A great deal of speculation around rising crime against women and girls, and our failure to punish it, centres on the risks of incel forums, and “red pill” influencers such as Andrew Tate. Yet these are the blistering sores symptomatic of a broken society.

Just as how the sensible commentariat imagines that Nigel Farage and a bus emblazoned with “We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead” duped people into backing Brexit, it is far easier to pin all one’s woes on a few divisive figureheads rather than address complex and uncomfortable forces at play. Nor is immigration the only taboo when it comes to violence against women, with the proliferation of free hardcore pornography being tolerated without serious debate, even when we know it is warping young people’s view of themselves and their peers. Who are we to dare suggest that viewing such material from childhood might be damaging to one’s view of the opposite sex?

Many social conservatives are — in my view wisely — keen to focus on how family breakdown and erosion of cultural taboos helps to ferment the social instability sparking higher violence against women and girls. However, there will always be a minority of people, usually men, prone to violence. How we protect innocent people from abuse, be it violent or psychological, will be a problem in any society that falls short of utopia. This does not mean all societies equally reward or punish such people. Sadly, Britain is fast becoming a society which would rather ignore, than prevent and punish, abhorrent perpetrators of this violence.