After the film was withdrawn, one of the mothers sent Annie Hall a text message: "It's a real shame when votes come before young girls' lives."

For many white girls growing up in fairly traditional communities, the unfamiliarity of boys and men from different ethnic backgrounds can be exciting and attractive. 

"The man I thought was my boyfriend used to dress really well and always smelt nice," says Sophie, "and I thought it were dead nice the way he talked, and even his manners seemed better than boys I were used to."

Emma Jackson knows exactly how the pimping gangs operate in Rotherham because she was also a victim of one. When Emma was 12, she was befriended by Asian boys around her own age who soon introduced her to relatives in their twenties and thirties. 

Emma had no idea she was being groomed and brainwashed until one day, totally out of the blue, she was taken to wasteland and raped by the gang leader. The attack was watched by laughing gang members and recorded on a number of mobile phones. 

"People ask me why I kept going back to Tarik, even after he raped me," says Emma, "but he threatened to firebomb my home and rape my own mother if I tried to escape."

Emma now gives support, through a charity set up to prevent the sexual abuse of children, to a number of victims of pimping gangs and has found that the girls are being targeted at an even younger age. 

"The gangs want virgins and girls who are free of sexual diseases. Most of the men buying sex with the girls have Muslim wives and they don't want to risk infection. The younger you look, the more saleable you are."

One youth worker in south Yorkshire told me that because religious Muslims are being pressurised to marry virgins within their own extended family networks, it means that some are more likely to view white girls as easily available and "safer" than Pakistani girls.

When I first wrote about the issue of Asian grooming gangs in 2007, my name was included on the website Islamophobia Watch: Documenting anti-Muslim Bigotry. So was that of Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP for Keighley in Yorkshire, who had been at the forefront of attempting to tackle the problem, after receiving requests for help from some of the parents of children caught up with the gangs in her constituency.