William Robinson says that The Northern Echo’s most famous 19th Century editor would be concerned about what’s happening on Britain’s streets today. But would any of his ideas and methods work in the 21st Century.

JACK STRAW, the former Home Secretary, has stirred up a hornet’s nest that takes us back to the days when WT Stead sat in the editor’s chair of this newspaper.

Mr Straw was commenting following the jailing of two Asian men, said to be part of a gang of “sexual predators”, for abusing white girls aged between 12 and 18 who they picked up off the streets of Derby.

The judge in the case said the race of the victims and their abusers was “coincidental”.

But Mr Straw, the Blackburn MP, said there was a specific problem in some areas where Asian men “target vulnerable white girls”.

Supported by research by The Times newspaper, Mr Straw said: “Pakistanis, let’s be clear, are not the only people who commit sexual offences, and overwhelmingly the sex offenders’ wings of prisons are full of white sex offenders.”

But he continued: “These young men are in a western society; in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically.

“So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care... who they think are easy meat.

“Because they are vulnerable, they ply them with gifts, they give them drugs, and then of course they’re trapped.”

Few starting points in this debate could be better than the streets of Victorian London, where WT Stead, a pioneering investigative journalist who became editor of The Northern Echo in 1871 at the age of 22, found that it was possible to purchase the right “to rape with impunity”

for as little as £5.

Almost a century-and-a-half later, it seems as if Stead would be able to investigate the same outrage.

This is because many of the conventions and taboos that encouraged Stead’s frock-coated villains to debauch the daughters of the poor still exist in the communities Mr Straw is spotlighting.

What drove t h e s e Victorian gentlemen to such desperate measures was not simply that they were – as Stead alleged – cruel monsters, aroused by the “very acme of agony” on the part of their victims.

Many were respectable fathers, chained down in loveless marriages where sex was frowned upon, not least because (without readily available contraceptives) their wives were fearful of unwanted pregnancies.

As a result, many resorted to visiting prostitutes, who were often mere children, though considered by law adult at 13. Their youth was crucial for at least two reasons; firstly because female children were regarded as relatively dispensable by their impoverished parents, and secondly because they were less likely to be infected with syphilis than their older counterparts.

This encouraged a vicious trade, not only in London, but between England and the Continent as well.

The situation for men in some modern Asian communities is similar. Just like their Victorian predecessors, they commonly view marriage in coldly pragmatic terms, with well over half of their matches formally or informally arranged.

Though much attention is rightly given to the wives who are “sold” in this way, few pause to consider the implications for their husbands, or the young bachelors – often earning well below minimum wage – who are deemed “ineligible”

for matrimony by their elders.

Some will visit prostitutes as their only means of escapism with the inevitable result that gangsters are the only people who profit.

Yet, whereas Victorian pimps would have to delve into the most grimy slums to get their “merchandise”, their modern equivalents need only drive into the poorer white districts, where unaccounted for young women – 13 and upwards – can be found.

Such a cultural chasm provides the backdrop to nearly every thriving sex trade. In Britain, it allows brothel-creeping husbands to worship their own wives and daughters despite profaning those of their neighbours.

There is a perverse “multi-cultural” logic to this: the perpetrators combine a British indifference towards sexual incontinence with their own traditional ethic, which considers a woman to be adult as soon as she can bear a child.

Naturally, long term solutions are going to be far harder than snap diagnoses. On the Pakistani side, it will not do simply for a collection of religious leaders to call for more “self-control”

and respect for the sanctity of marriage.

This was Stead’s approach – and it failed miserably.

Underpaid Pakistani waiters, just as poor Victorian clerks before them, do not particularly enjoy being harangued on the importance of chastity by purity crusaders, who invariably seem to have well over the average number of children themselves.

Even the great Stead (who had six little ones) privately confessed to being absolutely “mad on sex” – his numerous conquests included a Russian princess, several attractive contributors to his London newspapers and at least one of his devoted secretaries.

A far more effective means of protecting young British women would be to teach children of all backgrounds that marriage needs to be based on love, not family honour or financial convenience.

Faith schools, which potentially pose an obstacle to such doctrines, should not be allowed to plead special exemptions.

In return for these concessions, the rest of us could look more carefully at our own inconsistencies.

To many outsiders we seem to lecture endlessly about the equality of the sexes, yet we encourage our own women to make themselves look like sex objects from a disturbingly tender age. This not only acts as a continual taunt upon men from more conservative backgrounds, it also undermines our credibility in the eyes of the world.

But the greatest lesson of the revelations is surely that water-tight segregation of our communities is not only undesirable, but highly dangerous as well.

Ideas such as the freedom to enter voluntarily into marriage, to dress with respect to ourselves and to others and to acknowledge that childhood does not necessarily end at puberty should be common to all.

Such uniformity may take time to catch on, but it is essential to our collective well-being.

■ William Robinson is a freelance writer currently researching a book on WT Stead.