A man who volunteers to help youngsters has been awarded cash to help combat the sexual grooming of vulnerable girls.

The £10,000 was awarded to Shakeel Aziz, 28, from a charity called UnLtd and from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

It will be used to fund a 12-month programme of sexual health workshops in and around Keighley to prevent young men from becoming involved in the form of exploitation.

The sessions will also be designed to support young girls who may already be being sexually groomed, while addressing related issues such as drug abuse.

Mr Aziz, a Bradford University student who lives in Skipton Road, Keighley, said plans for the workshops were already attracting national media attention.

He said: “One workshop which I set up in Keighley three weeks ago was filmed by Channel 4 and I gave them a two-hour interview regarding my work in Keighley.”

The documentary is due to be screened on Channel 4 on Tuesday, November 7.

He said future workshops would be very blunt and hard-hitting and would mainly be aimed at young men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, aged 17 to 29.

He said Bradford-based youth worker Alyas Karmani was helping to devise the content of the sessions.

“I’m doing this for the benefit of Keighley,” he stressed. “I’ve lived and worked here all my life.

“We’ll be working around the young men’s perception of women, because research has shown that some of these men see them as nothing but sex objects.

“We’ll also be working on their perception of what a man is and why would a man think it’s acceptable to sexually harass a woman.

“We will use the example of the use of rape as a weapon of war. What’s the difference between a soldier raping a woman in a war and a young Asian man raping a woman on the streets of Keighley?

“It’ll be quite psychological - really trying to get into the minds of these lads.”

He said the offence of sexual grooming was linked to other crime such as drug dealing, because the same men who sell drugs often hang around on the streets where they are more likely to encounter vulnerable young girls.

Mr Aziz has been volunteering to provide activities for youngsters since 2005 and he is part of the STAR Youth Club team, which operates from the old Utley Primary School building, off Greenhead Lane.

In August of this year he was nominated for a Community Stars Active Citizens Award.