This week Stephen Ireland, the founder of Pride In Surrey, was sentenced to a total of 30 years in jail for multiple child sexual abuse offences, including the rape of a 12-year-old boy. The boy, who was reported missing at the time, was drugged with crystal meth before the assault. Ireland then sent him photos of another Pride in Surrey organiser, David Sutton, and suggested they have a threesome. Sutton, who was also convicted of several child sexual abuse offences, was sentenced to four and a half years.
The role of councils, at least one MP, schools, the police, the media and, above all, Pride in Surrey itself, needs to be investigated to find out to what extent institutional failings enabled paedophiles to abuse. Was protecting an image of inclusivity prioritised over protecting children?
We wrote a detailed report about Stephen Ireland in March, and in particular how he used his LGBT activism to gain access to children. He was, for example, patron of the disgraced children’s charity Educate & Celebrate, he volunteered at a school radio station in which he had children in bondage gear as guests and was even writing children’s books at the time of his arrest.
However, new information has come to light. It wasn’t reported in March that Ireland had smoked a bong with the boy which was later found to have contained crystal meth. During the trial, Ireland said he was in a polycule in 2020 with Charlie Watts and teenage ‘pup play’ fetishist, Samuel Powell, and they smoked crystal meth together. Incredibly, Watts is now the CEO of Pride in Surrey and Powell, still only 22, has been named its safeguarding lead.
Additionally, we now know that multiple child safeguarding complaints were made about Pride in Surrey, and particularly Stephen Ireland, for at least five years before his arrest last year.
He set up a ‘helpline’ for struggling LGBT children, in which they would text him and he would call them back. A whistleblower has said Ireland refused to let anyone else speak to the children who messaged him.
Ireland was a high-profile figure who’d appeared dozens of times on BBC Radio Surrey, including at least once as a presenter, and on national BBC programmes such as BBC Breakfast. You might have thought that anyone getting a 30-year prison sentence for child rape might be a top story, let alone someone well-known who was embedded in various institutions.
But no. BBC News had correspondents in court ready to broadcast on LGBT issues at the time of his sentencing, but none of them attended his trial. One was there for the inquest into why a drag queen had died. It’s worth noting that BBC News has now covered the death of The Vivienne nearly 30 times since January, and when Ireland was convicted in March, BBC South East Today ignored the story and instead ran a piece about … a different drag queen who’d died.
Source: Nutmeg’s week: We need an inquiry into Pride in Surrey