A call for better safeguarding
It is a grim truth that paedophiles look like you and me. They are heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual. Some will claim a gender identity and many will not.
They are teachers, social workers, bankers, gardeners, librarians and train drivers. They are overwhelmingly male.
Safeguarding for children means recognising that truth. It means always assuming that adults, and especially adult males, pose a risk and designing spaces and services with those risks in mind.
No group should be exempt from proper scrutiny because predatory men will seek them out and exploit the absence of safeguarding in order to abuse children.
Following the arrest and sentencing of Stephen Ireland, the founder and CEO of Pride in Surrey, for the rape of a child, it’s clear that some groups are considered beyond scrutiny.
Ireland boasted often about his close relationship with the police. He was driven around, by officers wearing Progress regalia, in a rainbow liveried car.
He visited schools and set up youth groups whilst arguing that very small children should be encouraged to explore their gender identity and sexual orientation. He said expressions of kink should be normalised and exposing children to an adult’s fetish was a good thing – it encouraged ‘inclusion’ after all.
When Stephen Ireland was pictured promoting International Fetish Day with a 17-year old girl, on her hands and knees, wearing a dog mask, and on a lead held by him, onlookers shrugged their shoulders.
He wore a rainbow badge – ‘You’re Safe With Me’ – and stoked the narrative that LGBTQ+ people are always kind, caring and benign. Credulous heterosexuals and captured organisations looking to burnish their progressive credentials eagerly agreed with Ireland. It became a heresy to even consider that such a man might assault a child. Whistle-blowers were labelled bigots with Ireland even suggesting they should be reported to his friends at Surrey Police for committing a hate crime. The pretence that some of these men, who were reading to children or encouraging them to dance at Pride, were actually women was a further smokescreen.
There is nothing new about this threat.
In the 1970s and 80s, the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) grew its influence, in part, by attaching itself to the growing gay rights movement, piggy-backing on a bid to lower the age of consent for homosexuals. They framed their agenda as centring the rights of the child. Children as young as four, they argued should have the right to choose to have sex with adult men. Their aims were to “alleviate [the] suffering of many adults and children” who wanted to have sex together.
Today’s activists tell us to ‘listen to children’ because ‘children know who they are’ in a horrible echo of that manipulative abusers’ narrative.
Our concerns aren’t only about Stephen Ireland or even about Pride in Surrey, which continues to operate despite there having been no investigation into how this tragedy was allowed to unfold. Instead it is about the dangers inherent in creating a sacred caste. Of pretending that there is a type of man who would never harm a child. Of ignoring red flags for fear of being thought homophobic or transphobic. Of cheering on a movement that actively seeks to involve children in its activism.
As lesbians, gay men and bisexuals we fought to remove PIE and its acolytes from the mainstream gay rights movement and we must be firm again today in demanding safeguarding measures that are applied equally to all. We have never asked for special privileges and believe those who do should be viewed with suspicion.
We stand for LGB people who want parity in all things and we stand apart from an LGBTQ+ movement that asks for exceptional treatment.
It is very clear to us at LGB Alliance why Stephen Ireland urged the Charity Commission to remove our charity registration. He was right to perceive us as a threat to him and to all those who seek to use lesbians, gay men and bisexuals as cover for activities that harm children.