When MWNUK launched a report, last year, on sexual exploitation in the Asian community, it had a major impact because its publication coincided with the revelations of child sexual exploitation by Asian gangs in Rotherham. It challenged the view that the the issue was purely one of race and that somehow Asian girls were left untouched by abusers because of loyalty to their own culture. MWNUK found that a worrying number of Asian women and girls were slipping through the net, as agencies, including the social services and the police, grappled with the difficulties of gaining victims’ confidence because of cultural sensitivities — those same points of faith which are exploited by their abusers to ensure their victims’ silence.

It confirmed what many already knew — that many Muslim girls and women are trapped in a cycle of abuse and violence because of a lack of services. What’s more, it recommended that a helpline be set up as an outlet for them to confide their problems and seek advice.

It seems incredible that after more than four decades of feminism in the West so many on the Left are willing to sacrifice women’s rights, in particular the rights of Muslim-born women, in the name of so-called religious freedom. Speaking out against sharia law in the UK is often viewed as racist. I have been listed on the website Islamophobia Watch since I published my first article about Pakistani grooming gangs in the north of England in 2007, despite the fact that I made it clear the men were committing such crimes because they knew the authorities would probably turn a blind eye.

I am tired of hearing from so-called Western feminists that to criticise the myriad ways in which Muslim men oppress Muslim women and girls is tantamount to Western imperialism. Feminists (many of them of Muslim heritage) who oppose the aspects of Islam that have institutionalised and normalised gender apartheid also oppose sexism within Christianity and Judaism.

It would be inconsistent and hypocritical if defenders of human rights and gender equality were not to expose and condemn the misogyny within Islam, yet many on the Left will defend grotesque and misogynistic practices and beliefs within Islam for fear of being accused of racism or Islamophobia. For what I have written about the anti-women doctrines within fundamentalist Jewish communities I have not been labelled anti-Semitic. In opposing some Catholic practices and naming them as discriminatory towards women I have never been accused of being against Catholic individuals, and have had the support of the progressive Left.

The creeping acceptance of sharia law in the UK has serious ramifications for every single Muslim woman and girl. It is also a sign that all women’s rights are under threat, because to support sharia — which many liberal and left-wing men in the UK appear to do — is to be against equality. To accuse feminists of being “anti-Muslim” because we campaign against sharia and its apologists is to suggest that the Muslim girls and women it affects do not count.