(In)visible minorities and the law in England

This article was occasioned by a number of major police investigations culminating in a series of high-profile prosecutions, involving groups of men, almost entirely from the Muslim Asian community. The way these prosecutions were portrayed, by the authorities and the media, shone a light on the broader issue of the way sensitivities are managed in the relationship between minorities and the law, and the paradoxes this engenders. The brackets around the first syllable of the first word in the title underscores an initial paradox: non-white minorities are manifestly visible in English society, yet as we shall see, in the official discourse of law enforcement officers and the authorities, in the context of the prosecutions mentioned above, there was a consistent attempt to occlude any significance that might be attached to ethnic or religious specificity. As the title also indicates, the focus of the article is England, given the independence of the Scottish legal system with regard to the rest of the United Kingdom and the different dynamics in community relations there.