SNEAK PEEK: Britain's Nuerosis [sic]

Of course Britain’s Pakistani communities wanted to cover up their crimes: It’s what most societies have always done

Amid the tremendous outcry at the Casey Report into Britain’s grooming gangs, some common refrains have emerged. Many are indignant, rightly, but also puzzled. One thing I’ve noticed a lot of people saying on Twitter is, “Why did nobody in the Pakistani community speak out?” This has been going on for decades. Why did wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts—not to mention fathers, brothers, sons and uncles—not only stand by and do nothing, but actively conspire to hide and excuse the rapes and abuse and even the murder of young girls, simply because they were white and British?

I’ve seen various explanations advanced, from the peculiarities of cousin-marriage among South Asians to certain doctrines from the Quran, like the reprehensible “What the right hand possesses” (ma malakat aymanukum), which justifies, in no uncertain terms, the taking of sex slaves from among the women of non-Muslim groups.

There’s probably some truth to all of these suggestions. But it’s also easy to forget a very simple anthropological fact in the scramble for understanding. It’s an unsettling fact, too. This is just what people do and always have done. It’s actually normal. In expecting people to behave otherwise, we’re the exception, the oddities—not them.

For the vast majority of human history, in the vast majority of human societies, individuals have had no obligations whatsoever to the out-group—to anybody who doesn’t belong to the tribe, as it were. And I really mean that: no obligations whatsoever. You don’t have to help other people if they’re not from your tribe. You don’t have to be nice to them. Whatever things you have to do for your parents and siblings and your fellow clan members, by virtue of their being your parents, siblings and fellow clan members, go totally out the window when an outsider rocks up, unannounced, at your chabono (that’s an Amazonian hut, by the way).

Indeed, in many societies throughout history, deceiving and generally outfoxing members of other tribes has been elevated to an art, and considered something admirable and to be celebrated, especially if you’re talking about longstanding rivals, like those chaps from across the river who wear their hair or penis-slings on the opposite side or paint their faces white instead of yellow.

As a former anthropologist, I know this is something my fellow practitioners used to learn fairly early on in their encounters with foreign tribes (most anthropologists these days stay much closer to home and study things like refugee theatre companies and activist sex workers, tribes with which they share a much closer kinship). Perhaps the most famous example of this learning process comes from E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940), a study of a group of Nilotic pastoralists who roamed South Sudan with their cattle.