Naz Shah said: “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.”
She did retweet this comment from a parody account but quickly deleted it and said it had been done accidentally.
A post on Facebook has claimed that Labour MP Naz Shah previously said: “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.”
This refers to the widespread decades-long sexual abuse of young girls which took place in the South Yorkshire town, where the majority of known perpetrators were men of Pakistani heritage.
However, this is not a direct quote from Ms Shah. Back in 2017, the MP retweeted and liked a tweet from a parody account of the journalist Owen Jones that reportedly said “Exactly Areeq, those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of #diversity.”
She later reportedly undid the retweet and unliked the original post.
At the time, her spokesperson told the Sun that it “was a genuine accident” and was “rectified within minutes”.
They added: “To suggest otherwise is absolute nonsense. Her record speaks for itself. Naz has been working for over 20 years on the issues of child abuse, violence against women and grooming, which is well documented.”
In 2020, Ms Shah successfully sued the campaigning group Leave.EU after it called her a “grooming gang apologist” in a 2019 Facebook post. The group apologised and accepted Ms Shah was a "vociferous campaigner for victims of grooming gangs", said their post was “ill-judged and untrue” and paid her damages for libel.
She told the Yorkshire Post at that time: “I refuse to be defined by a tweet, that was up for eight minutes, that was rectified.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen controversial quotes misleadingly attributed to politicians (although sometimes they are genuine). We often see these claims spreading widely online, and they can persist for many years. False or misleading claims about politicians have the potential to affect people’s opinions of individuals, parties or how they choose to vote. It’s always a good idea to check quotes you see on social media attributed to politicians, especially if they seem extreme or surprising.
Image courtesy of Chris McAndrew
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because this is not a direct quote but was a statement she says she accidentally retweeted and then deleted.
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