No Pride in Predators

Child sexual abuse: when did we ever believe the victims?

As someone who has campaigned against child sexual abuse for four decades, I have heard the phrase ‘lessons learned’ countless times. But what has been learned, since the scandals of widespread abuse within the Catholic Church, and the crimes of the late Jimmy Savile – who, it is feared, abused up to 500 victims?

We know that predatory sex offenders gravitate towards jobs in schools, with organisations such as the Scouts – or anywhere else children are easily accessible. Evidence of this is, unfortunately, all too easy to find.

Failure to act on evidence of institutionalised child abuse cost Justin Welby, former Archbishop of Canterbury, his job. In 2024, he announced his resignation as leader of the Church of England after an independent review into the crimes of John Smyth exposed his failure to bring the prolific child abuser to justice. Smyth, who abused as many as 130 boys at Christian summer camps, was a barrister involved in the Christian ministry.

Justin Welby

The testimonies of the victims who took part in the inquiry make heartbreaking reading. Many say that, out of fear that they would be blamed or disbelieved, they waited over four decades to disclose the abuse (which was known about from the 1980s onwards).

This happens all over the world. For example, an inquiry into clerical abuse in France found that at least 216,000 children had been sexually abused by at least 3,000 abusers in the French Catholic Church since 1950. Many had tried to report the abuse to church leaders, and not been believed.

There was, for example, the scandal of prolific predatory paedophile Neville Husband. Between 1969 and 1985, he was a prison officer at Medomsley Detention Centre in County Durham, where he attacked two or three victims every day. Since the early 2000s, when the Medomsley horror was exposed, more than 2,000 men have come forward to describe the physical and/or sexual abuse they had been subjected to while serving their sentences.

Husband was a former scout leader who later became a church minister. He was also accused of running a child abuse ring in which he took boys out of the borstal to be abused by senior officials – including a police officer and a magistrate. Allegations of abuse followed him to his church, and also to his amateur dramatics activities, which involved a number of children. He died in 2010, but an independent inquiry into Medomsley, published in 2025, found that complaints from victims had been ‘ignored and dismissed’, and that a string of failings by police, the prison service and the government had allowed his heinous crimes to continue so long, unabated.

Medomsley Detention Centre

With the focus, understandably, now back on the terrible crimes committed by so-called grooming gangs, with the majority of perpetrators (Particularly in places such as Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, Bradford and Oxfordshire) ‘being of Pakistani Muslim origin, it has become clear that for many of these men, the mosque has become their hiding place. It is safe precisely because police, social services and many white liberal do-gooders are more concerned with allegations of racism or Islamophobia’ than they are with the safety of the victims. A similar dynamic comes into play around the predatory paedophiles who hide behind the rainbow flag. Yes, some gay men are relying on people being too afraid of being called homophobic to challenge them, and can use this to their own ends. By way of example, no fewer than five prolific child sex abusers who have been centrally involved in the Pride movement are currently serving prison sentences for sexual offences against children.

Just look at the case of Stephen Ireland. In June 2025, he was given a lengthy jail sentence for multiple child sexual offences, including the rape of a 12-year-old boy. He was also co-founder of Pride in Surrey (PiS) – a not-for-profit organisation that that seeks to “put LGBTQ plus people on the map” by means of an annual march and celebratory parade.

Surrey County Council appeared so unaware of the dangers that even after the arrest of Ireland and his partner-in-crime, who was a PiS volunteer, they put out a call for ‘adult volunteers’ to offer a child in care “fun activities and one-to-one time”.

Ireland had been targeting vulnerable children for years, his senior position providing the perfect smokescreen. “He counted on people being too scared of being accused of being called homophobic or bigoted if they challenged him,” one whistleblower told me. “Because, in the past, some people have said that gays are not safe around children, some gay paedophiles rely on people looking the other way.”

From September 2019 to January 2024, a man named Ashley Boyd worked for the Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust as a nurse. He abused that role to conduct inappropriate examinations on children. Between 2022 and 2023, Boyd was also involved in Swindon and Wiltshire Pride.

Ashley Boyd

Ex-SNP politician Jordan Linden stands accused of 25 offences against 13 teenagers and young men; he is to face trial on March 16 of this year. Several of the charges concern (alleged) predatory behaviour during Dundee’s LGBTQ Pride.

Andrew James Way, organiser of the cancelled 2023 Welshpool Pride, was found to have 13 previous sex offence convictions, and was jailed that same year. It emerged in court that Way, 61, had spent at least 30 minutes unsupervised with two children of pre-school age, whose parents were unaware of his past.

Lee Clarke was also involved in Swindon & Wiltshire Gay Pride, the same organisation as male nurse, Ashley Boyd. Between 2017 and 2018, he was in a position that brought him into contact with youngsters. He was a convicted child sex offender, yet was never subjected to any DBS checks. The Pride committee attempted to keep the fact that he had a criminal record from the public.

Three years earlier, in 2014, this former employee of a local secondary school had been jailed after being caught in possession of almost 15,000 child sexual abuse images and hundreds of videos.

Thousands of these images depicted young boys engaged in sexual acts with grown men.

Clarke had also distributed the images to other perverts online, which is how he came to allow a covert police officer to access his collection.

It’s not just abuse within the church, the mosque, or schools we need to be aware of: these predators have now found another place where they can hide in plain sight, sheltering beneath an apparently benign cause.

Stephen Ireland

Attaching themselves to Pride gets them backing from police and other well-respected institutions. It gets them access to vulnerable children they would never otherwise be able to get anywhere near. It gets them a free pass.

The 2025 Crime Survey for England and Wales found that around 10% of all contact sexual abuse described by survey participants had been perpetrated by a ‘person in a position of trust or authority’ such as a teacher, doctor, carer or youth worker.

Then there are teachers, most of whom are totally trustworthy, but a sizable minority breach the trust of their pupils. And not just in state schools: a 2024 report found that over 90 private tutors in the UK have been convicted of sexual offences involving children in the past 20 years. A BBC investigation found that, over a five-year period, at least 959 teachers and school staff were accused of having a relationship with a pupil, with at least 254 resulting in police charges.

Anthony Redmond, 54, has been found guilty of eight counts of sexual abuse and indecency whilst he was a geography teacher.

And former headteacher Dean Juric, 54, who ran St Robert of Newminster School in Washington, Sunderland, was unmasked by an undercover officer who posed as a paedophile on a social media site. Officers later found more than 30,000 indecent images of children on his phone.

I have many years’ experience of how predators manage to target children and divert attention away from themselves at the same time; what it shows me is that we all have to be brave and robust: not just the police, teachers and social services who are tasked with protecting these kids, but also members of the public – even those otherwise inclined to place their trust in the priest, the spokesperson for the LGBTQ community, or the medical professional. We must accept that some men will go to great lengths to be among vulnerable children – and in order to achieve that proximity, they have to pose as someone who is the safest adult imaginable around kids. For the sake of these children, let’s be on our guard.

You can listen here to my podcast series about Pride in Surrey and the Stephen Ireland scandal