The resignation of Rosie Millard as Chair of the Trustees of BBC Children in Need is a big deal. The Chair of Trustees of a charity is responsible for ensuring the organisation’s behaviour reflects its stated ethical values. If the Chair then resigns, as Millard just has, expressing outrage and disgust with that behaviour, it goes without saying the charity has a major problem.
The good news is that this is actually a simple story. And hangs on an even simpler question. What did Children in Need really know about LGBT Youth Scotland when it gave the charity the first instalment of £466,000 it has donated.
That first donation was for £24,000. And it was made in November 2009. If you hold on to that date for the rest of this post everything will fall into place and Millard’s outrage will make perfect sense.
It’s not just the fact that Children in Need started donating money to LGBT Youth Scotland in November 2009 that matters. Something material to the reputation of LGBT Youth Scotland had happened just before our magical date.
On October 28th 2009 LGBT Youth Scotland’s ex-CEO James Rennie was sentenced to life for the most disgusting child abuse imaginable. He’d raped a toddler who was just three months old and continued to abuse the boy for a further four years. He did so as the leader of a child abuse ring that spanned the globe involving hundreds of men who shared countless images of abuse, egging each other on to ever more depraved crimes. Rennie sent images of himself abusing the child to the other eager predators in his online circle of monsters.
Children in Need made its first donation -of £24,000- to an organisation that a convicted child abuser had recently led. And they did it just a couple of weeks after he was jailed.
The facts are that James Rennie abused his own god child, the son of his best friends. He also led LGBT Youth Scotland’s campaign to change the law to allow gay men to adopt. Is it too much to expect some recognition on the part of LGBT Youth Scotland that Rennie reminds us of the dangers of such a policy? Dangers he minimised and when they were pointed out he dismissed as homophobic.
Yet….Rennie did actually rape a toddler and run a child abuse ring. Does anyone seriously think he didn’t imagine how the adoption policy he championed might have given him access to vulnerable children?