Police and professionals in Bradford are long-accustomed to tackling the sexual grooming of young girls, according to a senior detective.

The issue made national headlines after two Asian men who subjected vulnerable girls to rapes and sexual assaults were jailed last Friday.

Abid Mohammed Saddique, 27, was jailed for a minimum of 11 years at Nottingham Crown Court and Mohammed Romaan Liaqat, 28, was told he must serve at least eight years before being considered for release.

The men were the prime movers in a group who befriended girls aged from 12 to 18 in the Derby area and groomed them for sex.

The case led former Home Secretary Jack Straw to accuse some Pakistani men in Britain of seeing white girls as “easy meat” for sexual abuse.

And there has been criticism that there has been a reluctance by police to investigate some complaints of grooming for fear of being accused as racist, but West Yorkshire Police’s spokes-man on child sex exploitation, Detec-tive Inspector Granville Ward, told the Telegraph & Argus the grooming problem was being addressed.

Det Insp Ward said: “We recognise it, and Bradford is particularly developed in the way it addresses these issues – not because this is an exceptional problem in Bradford, but because partners have developed ways of tackling the issue over a number of years.

“Our investigations are conducted without fear or favour.

“Political correctness has no part to play in what we do.”

Three men, from Keighley and Skipton, were jailed for a total of 18 years in 2009 for the “calculating and evil” sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl, who they plied with drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. The victim had been running wild and was seen as easy prey.

Det Insp Ward said: “The people who are victims often don’t regard themselves as such. They are groomed and developed to be compliant with the abuse.

“The difficulty for us is that the victims don’t want to tell us about what’s happening to them.”

Former Bradford detective Max McLean, who recently retired, said the Force never shirked an investigation.

But he said it was true there was a reluctance among professionals generally to identify the crime as a race or cultural issue.

Mr McLean, who led one of the first investigations into child sex exploitation, Operation Royal in 1996, said: “There is no conspiracy of silence within the police, but there has been a reluctance of professionals working in partnership to see this type of crime potentially as a cultural issue, and to work with the Pakistani community in trying to prevent it.”