BBC partly upholds complaint by British Sikh group over ‘Asian grooming gangs’ interview

The Network of Sikh Organisations (NSO) has had a complaint it made to the BBC about a Radio 4 programme on Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs partly upheld.

The NSO wrote to the BBC to complain about "various inaccuracies and deflection" in the broadcast on 12 Jan involving an interview with Nazir Afzal about "Asian grooming gangs" in Britain after they garnered renewed publicity following interventions by Elon Musk.

The presenter, Edward Stourton, confronted Afzal, who was chief prosecutor at the time of the grooming gangs epidemic, with complaints by Hindus and Sikh groups regarding the term "Asian grooming gangs" which they said tarred all British Asians with the same brush and instead wanted the term "Pakistani heritage" used. Stourton alleged the word Asian was "misleading."

Afzal responded: "I've got no problem with what you call it, but I think the Hindu community and the Sikh community need to have a look at themselves as well. Just two years ago Sikh Women's Aid (SWA), which is the main body run by women to protect women who are suffering abuse within the Sikh community, published their report on abuse within the Sikh community and, could you believe it, it was really really bad; so bad actually that they didn't want to put their name to it. They reached out to me and said, Nazir, would you do the foreword for our report? I said, why are you asking a British Muslim man to do the report? They said, firstly, if we put our names to it they are going to come for us, and secondly we couldn't find a Sikh man that would put his name to it."

The NSO, in its complaint, said: "It is simply not true the authors did not want to put their name to the report, they did. Second, when Mr Afzal says that no Sikh man would put their name to the same report – again this is simply not true – there were three."

The BBC executive complaints unit, in its published response, has admitted that three Sikh men had put their name to the report, but it did not uphold the complaint about the authors of the SWA report, saying their motive in contacting Afzal was contested.

NSO in its complaint had also questioned why SWA, which focuses on domestic violence against women and girls within the Sikh community, was conflated with a debate on group-based child sexual exploitation perpetrated by majority Pakistani Muslim men on Radio 4 and why the presenter did not challenge this.

"The presenter should have also been informed of the fact that both Hindu and Sikh communities have also fallen victim of ‘grooming gangs' too. The BBC have made a documentary on the issue of British Sikh girls being targeted," the NSO wrote.

The BBC failed to address these aspects of the complaint.

Hardeep Singh, deputy director of the NSO, told TOI: "We will likely escalate the matter to Ofcom as the BBC correction only addresses part of our original complaint."