October 13, 2024 - 8:00am
There has been yet another twist in the scandal embroiling a Scottish charity for young gay and trans people. A man is reportedly suing LGBT Youth Scotland, claiming that its negligence exposed him to child sexual abuse. The complainant, who can’t be named for legal reasons, is seeking more than £100,000 in damages from the charity, which has faced a series of troubling revelations.
Last month, LGBT Youth Scotland lost funding from the BBC’s Children in Need after it was revealed that one of the authors of its “coming out” guide for children is a convicted paedophile. So is the charity’s former CEO, James Rennie, who is serving a life sentence after sexually assaulting a baby and being exposed as one of the leaders of Scotland’s biggest paedophile ring. The Times, reporting on the latest legal action, has described the organisation as “discredited”. But its website is unrepentant, boasting about its mission of “making Scotland a place where LGBT+ youth can flourish and thrive”.
Given the eagerness of public bodies to prove themselves “trans inclusive”, it should come as no surprise that the Scottish Government was one of a number of organisations to lavish funds on the charity (it received £1.4m in all last year, from a range of sources). But it raises questions about what has happened to safeguarding, which should surely be one of the founding principles of charities dealing with vulnerable children.
It’s no secret that predators are attracted to positions which provide access to kids. The extent of the risk has been exposed by investigations into the activities of Catholic priests, including one that suggested as many as 3,000 paedophiles had been identified in the French church. A charity set up to offer advice to young people aged 13-25 might be considered an obvious target, requiring careful monitoring.
But the transformation of LGB organisations into proselytisers for “trans rights” seems to have relegated safeguarding to the back seat. As recently as April this year, when the Cass Report exposed the lack of knowledge about the long-term effects of puberty blockers on young people, LGBT Youth Scotland described them as “wonderful” and opposed a pause in prescribing. “Am I trans?” a box on the charity’s website asks.
It’s more than two years since the Charity Commission opened a compliance case into the trans charity Mermaids after “safeguarding allegations” were made. Three months later, it upgraded the case to a statutory inquiry, talking about “newly identified issues about the charity”. The Commission has said little since, leaving critics and supporters equally in the dark.
The fear of being labelled “transphobic” has turned some of the country’s best known charities, including the Girl Guides, into a laughing stock. “Girlguiding promotes an inclusive and safe environment where all girls and young women, including trans girls and young women, should feel accepted,” its website declares, tacitly admitting that it’s no longer a girls’ organisation.
What’s astonishing about this is how quickly it’s happened. In a few short years, safeguarding has been repurposed as a species of prejudice, based not in genuine concern but prejudice against LGBT people. The word “trans” is akin to fairy dust, sprinkled in the eyes of credulous people — and the effects are already becoming apparent.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeWhenever I am accosted by charity chuggers in Bristol City Centre, I am always very very blunt indeed in my excoriation of their wokeness.
Craven by name, but certainly not by nature! You set a good example. Well done.
Haha, thanks!
What sort of thing do you say to them? And what is their usual reply?
It depends on which charity they represent. If they represent a homelessness charity, I ask them whether they accept that the UK’s housing crisis can only be addressed by means of a drastic reduction of immigration. If as they usually do they deny this, I tell them that they are part of the problem.
More recently, I have been accosted several times by Barnado’s chuggers. I always direct these people via their smartphones to an essay on Barnado’s website regarding the importance of teaching children about White privilege. I tell them that this is why they will not be getting a penny from me. If they try to justify teaching kids about White privilege, I abuse them roundly as the racists that they are. If as sometimes happens they show contrition, I am kinder.
Agree. I have stopped funding several charities who started spouting this nonsense.
Well, well, well, It’s all a big surprise.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame trans specifically for this. These kinds of organisations are magnets for all sorts of fringe people. Not always criminal, of course, but strange. Often with their own unresolved issues. It’s not that “trans” has caused them to take their eye off the ball – it’s more about closing ranks around what are often weird little enclaves of slightly odd people. Some dangerously odd.
There’s also an element of Willie Sutton about this type of thing, as in “I rob banks because that’s where the money is.”
Trans Rights is so dangerous to safeguarding is that it demands that everyone ignores the very facts on which safeguarding for women and children depends.
For example, it is a basic safeguarding principle that adult men are not allowed in girls changing rooms. But now Trans Rights demands that some men must be re-classified as women if they say they are and are therefore allowed in girls changing rooms. Undermining safeguarding is in fact inherent in the Trans position that men are women if they say so.
Other people in and around charities may be strange and eccentric but as far as I know are not destroying women’s and girls safeguarding.
You could say something similar about male homosexuals in male changing rooms. There are more of them, and they are far less obvious. I’m not saying they pose such a risk – just that there is just as much reason a priori for thinking that as there is with trans. It’s also precisely the sort of thing that we did used to think of homosexuals.
Such fears tend to disappear – rightly or wrongly – after social acceptance has been achieved.
There should be no ‘social acceptance’ of males in female only spaces. There will be women and girls who will be sexually abused in the name of ‘inclusivity’. It is entirely predictable.
Not really.
A male homosexual in a male changing room is a male getting changed where he is supposed to be.
A male getting changed in a female changing room is either one of the tiny number of males with genuine gender dysphoria or one of the much larger number of males who is a sexual predator.
the company I work for signed some of us up for “LGBT” training with the charity “Mermaids”. We were advised by them not to question, just to accept because it is not our place to understand. If that isn’t a red flag, I don’t know what is! Telling care workers not to question!?!
That’s true. Even the rent-a-crowd outside LGB Alliance conferences contains faces you’ll be familiar if you work in or around biology laboratories, and are familiar with the fetid milieu of 1980s London Stalinism. Older, madder, sillier, but the same stupid faces. (The three who joined ISIS excluded, I assume something guided and highly explosive found them in the end?)
Talia probably knows a few of these windscreen lickers.
It sounds like a terrible prejudice – but you really do only have to look at some of these people and think – oh yeah, got it. They have a look about them, even a tone of voice.
Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics in action:
Quite possibly the Third Law as well:
Usefully supplemented by the Law Of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it. (I first saw that used by Rod Dreher, not sure if he came up with it).
LGB needs to be unglued from T.
Yes! LGB needs to be unglued from T because these are different issues entirely. LGB is about sexual orientation — who do you like to sleep with? T is about gender identification — are you male or female?
T latched onto LGB because that’s where the lobby and money and leadership is. But now T is destroying the public image of LGB because the public is lumping them all together, as the T activists intended. T are such a minuscule % of the population that they would make no impact otherwise.
Some LGB organizations may have gone woke on this, as have many straight organizations, but most LGB regard T in exactly the same way as straight people do.
It’s long past time to unglue!
You are making a common error. Gender is not sex. It’s identity— masculine or feminine—and based largely on stereotypes. Male and female are sex. The definition is based in science. Male=small, mobile gametes. Female =large immobile gametes. Otherwise, I definitely agree with you about LGBs separating from the Ts. They need to do it now before they are dragged down and demonized like in America.
How to unglue yourself when the glue-pot holder refuses to stop gluing?
In essence the ungluing of LGB from T is the solution to this madness. Being LGB requires no surgery, no medications, no pornographic dress code, no insult nor danger to 50% of the population i.e women. T has become an abomination enabling criminal perverts access to their victims.
BBC withdraws funding from organisation that let pedophiles operate under the radar. Oh, the irony!
Years ago the charity sector was predominantly occupied by nice middle class ladies who ran jumble sales and Oxfam shops.
In the last 3 decades it has grown enormously as a means of government channeling funding for services which it would otherwise have to manage and deliver itself. Particularly in policy areas where it feels like it has to be seen to do something.
A quick example from when I worked in local government. At the time there was a national panic about children with autism. Under the media spotlight and wanting to be seen to do something, the devolved government in Wales sent every local authority an autism grant. It wasn’t enough money to actually do anything, low 6 figures. So we just gave it to the local branch of one of the national mental health charities. They in turn designated one of their existing staff as “Autism Champion” and threw the money in their funding pot. She held some meetings, commissioned some research from the charity itself which concluded that yes, indeed, children with autism do need extra support, and submitted a report of her activities which nobody ever read.
At the same time as government is outsourcing this sort of spending to charities, we have had an explosion of humanities and social science graduates who need jobs. The public sector can’t take them all and they’ve not really got a lot to offer the private sector. So the charity sector has become a valuable career path for mostly left-leaning people whose career interests are best served by promoting the status of progressive causes. If this means actual safeguarding takes a back seat then so be it.
Nicely summarised, and thoroughly depressing. Leftism ruins everything.
So there is the theory of “elite over-production”. This is the manufacturing of progressive mediocrity. You are right these people have to go somewhere why don’t they use their degrees in compassionate, caring subjects to work in the care sector or if vulnerable humans and their needs discomfort them, cleaning the physical environment. As it is they use their third rate brains to apply the insane insights of plodding progressive ideologues like Butler, Di Angelo and Kende.
When the Tories chose to cut every part of the welfare state – ie social services, health care, transport, housing, etc – in the 80s onwards, in their hatred of independent Councils which had been there to plug some gaps in national-level provision, they axed the parts of the local council providing it and created contracts with local charities and other voluntary organisations. Hence the Third Sector – which up to then had not been a significant part of the economy. Now its very name reveals that it delivers what councils used to, in a less co-ordinated and efficient way. Some councils are beginning to bring those services back in-house. Is Labour now going to encourage that process and support them for both capital and running costs of the more accountable setups, instead of funnelling it through charities where big chunks will go to DEI managers? (We can meanwhile start to chip away at the DEI depts in councils, as we can at least see who is meant to be doing what and how much it costs via FOI requests, not valid for private companies.)
What, Joan? You only just noticed? It’s been going on for years, even decades.
Paedophiles are attracted to jobs in schools, sports clubs, scouts & guides, after-school clubs, Disney even, because that’s where the kids are. Which is why there is so much vetting of these (except Disney, obviously).
The only new-ish thing here is that there are many more “youth” charities, so they’ve colonised them as well. Because no-one seems to vet charities very well. No doubt once there is serious vetting in the charity/NGO sector the perverts will move on to something else.
Personally, I’d be much more interested in finding out why we’ve heard nothing of the Mermaids case you reference, and also why nothing has been done about Stonewall and the vile entity it has become since a certain now-Baroness took over running it.
Actually I think that people in the charity sector will be subject to DBS checking – so there is vetting.
“What, Joan? You only just noticed?”
The author has worked in women’s refuges and been writing about this topic for many years.
Your comment demonstrates only your own ignorance.
This is the purpose of queer theory: to break down boundaries. Safeguarding is the fundamental boundary.
I maintain that safeguarding is *the* issue. Everything else – women’s rights, gay rights, child protection, even free speech – is downstream of it. Fix safeguarding and you fix everything else.
LGBT is deviance or at best mental illness
T is an extremely well-funded political movement. Read or watch anything featuring Jennifer Bilek.
Thank you Janet G, revealing but horrifying
NB for those still struggling with the language, “all girls and young women, including trans girls and young women, should feel accepted” (Girl Guides) is discussing boys and young men. being in with the young females, Please can we start naming males correctly, it’s not illegal to refuse to use the deliberately confusing language of the transactivists.
I think we’re getting closer to the answer. Gender identity has most in common with sexual fetishes like paedophilia.
This is dark territory but anyway with regard to the two — one is a practice that exerts abusive power on the vulnerable, while the other is a discourse that allows sections of the medical and plastic surgical establishment to do the same…
i don’t know what to say so I’ll say nothing.