The Charity That Shames Scotland's Elite.

There is only one convincing explanation why LGBT Youth Scotland has never been held to account for its child abuse scandals. Our political and cultural elite did everything they could to enable them.

Last week’s article in The Times about LGBT Youth Scotland’s latest paedophile scandal was a powerful indictment not just of Scotland’s charity sector but by implication our entire political and cultural leadership. Janice Turner’s calm, forensic analysis of the history of LGBT Youth Scotland could not disguise her sense of outrage about the apparent immunity the organisation has been gifted for almost two decades by the great and the good.

It’s worth pointing out in passing there might have been no article linking LGBT Youth Scotland to yet another abuser were it not for a thread I posted on Twitter/X on August 17th.

A few days before my thread, a 39 year old man called Andrew Easton had been convicted in Aberdeen of sharing child sex abuse images as well as trying to induce someone he thought was a 13 year old boy to have sex with him (thankfully it was an undercover cop he was talking to in the chatroom). At first, Easton’s link with LGBT Youth Scotland appeared rather tenuous.

The first clue came in an article about his case in The Press and Journal which featured a picture of Easton from his Facebook account. Keen-eyed observers tracked this image down online….only to discover it was accompanied by a curious message.

“For my birthday this year, I'm asking for donations to LGBT Youth Scotland. I've chosen this charity because their mission means a lot to me,”

I bet it does.

The post was the only one Easton had left accessible to the public. Everything else was either wiped or hidden. Was this reference to LGBT Youth Scotland a bizarre attempt to suggest there was another side to his character? An….err…charitable one? One that in his warped imagination outweighed the sharing of photographs and videos of child sex abuse, including of new born babies? Or was the post a note of defiance? Given what we know about LGBT Youth Scotland I tended to the latter conclusion.

Which is why I turned to some sleuthing and uncovered the fact that an Andrew Easton was also listed as one of the authors of a pamphlet published by LGBT Youth Scotland many years ago. It has since been erased from any site associated with the organisation but I found it lurking on an ageing website of East Ayrshire Council. The motto of the biggest football team in the area, Kilmarnock FC, is Confidemus or ‘We Trust’. And that is the problem with this story. Too many people …trusting too much.

At the end of ‘Coming Out: a Guide for Trans Young People’ is a photograph featuring four young people captioned with their names below including that of an…..Andrew Easton.

In my Twitter thread I said I’d written to LGBT Youth Scotland to ask them to confirm if this Andrew Easton was the same person as the convicted paedophile. At the time of his conviction Easton was 39. If it was the same person he’d have been 25 when the pamphlet was published in 2010, 14 years ago. Only one of the young people pictured seemed to fit that age; the man second from the right.

I was wrong about that and we’ll get to that shortly. Before we do you might be asking yourself why I was so interested in Andrew Easton and his potential link to a major Scottish charity?

Two reasons really. One is that if a man has just been convicted of paedophilia it raises the question of whether he might have viewed access to young people in the past as an opportunity. LGBT Youth Scotland’s work is aimed at 13-25 year olds. To say that wide age range is controversial is an understatement.

Either way, if the paedophile Easton worked for the charity might it have brought him into contact with children as young as that thirteen year old he imagined he was lining up for sexual abuse?

There’s another reason it was important to find out more about Easton and to get his timeline right. This pamphlet was published only a year after after one of the most traumatic trials in Scottish judicial history, which saw the conviction of the country’s worst ever child abuse ring. That ring was led by the then CEO of LGBT Youth Scotland, James Rennie, who among the 43 crimes of which he was found guilty, repeatedly abused a boy from the age of three months old and for nearly four years afterwards. Rennie was the god-parent of the child, the son of a couple who thought he was one of their best friends, and whom he betrayed in the worst imaginable way.

By the way, Rennie was “a key advisor on sex education to the Scottish Executive and lobbied strongly in favour of the introduction of gay adoption”

Of course he did.

Pity the child Rennie might have been allowed to adopt. While he was abusing the infant he babysat, he emailed other members of his abuse ring to discuss them one day joining him in the abuse. One did, the other ringleader Neil Strachan. He took a video which is so disgusting I’m not even going to describe it. Hell would be sullied by his and Rennie’s presence.

The point is Rennie’s crimes were so disgusting you would think in the aftermath of his trial LGBT Youth Scotland would have been, let’s just say, anxious to ensure no other paedophiles could darken its doorstep. Surely it would stop at nothing to ensure children were kept safe.

Personally, I’d have expected, say, a moratorium on its schools activity. By then the organisation was in charge of running LGBT History Month in schools all across Scotland. There are no gold stars today for guessing who convinced Education chiefs to hand that responsibility to LGBT Youth Scotland along with its access to thousands of children. Yes, baby-rapist James Rennie….

There was no moratorium on anything however. That’s why the pamphlet co-written by Andrew Easton is so interesting. It is the clearest proof there wasn’t even a brief pause in the organisation’s onslaught on schools. Take a closer look at The Coming Out Guide and it becomes clear it was actually written in late 2009. The same year as the trial of Rennie in May 2009.

Here’s one reference in the pamphlet to “just now (Winter 2009)”.

Rennie was convicted in May but his sentence not handed down until October 2009.

This means the pamphlet’s research was probably conducted while the trial was going on and it was certainly written just weeks at most (Winter 2009) after the charity’s CEO was sentenced amid a slew of appalled headlines. All this makes it all the more extraordinary then that the work was part of a national project the charity was running at the time called…… ‘Green Light’.

‘Green Light’ -a project let me repeat run by a charity that sent adults into schools to talk about sex and produced material for children as young as 13 years old- was funded by the Big Lottery Fund. They obviously didn’t reckon the fact the CEO of that charity had just been jailed for perverse sex crimes against children might mean ‘Green Light’ could be misconstrued.

We know that paedophiles use codes, signals and aliases to communicate. All these were a feature of Rennie’s trial, which we’ll come to soon. If Big Lottery Fund or LGBT Youth Scotland were truly keen to prevent the impression they were inadvertently signalling to abusers, why on earth would they call this organisation’s flagship project in the wake of his conviction for child abuse…. Green Light?

It’s just one small clue to a culture within LGBT Youth Scotland that suggests it could not possibly have taken safeguarding seriously at the time. Even in the wake of the most convincing evidence of the dangers of complacence: the jailing of its CEO.

There were other clues too both within the organisation and among the politicians who enabled its rise to prominence.

One of the reasons LGBT Youth Scotland, it seems, never genuinely felt the need to change its ways was the supine attitude of its parliamentary and regulatory overlords. I’m going to examine a debate that was held in Holyrood in honour of the organisation and Rennie in particular just two years before his arrest.

It reveals a culture among our political elite that paedophiles would be bound to exploit. A culture devoid of suspicion or critical thinking. One that gives gay men and LGBT+ organisations complete immunity from questions of child safeguarding.

To understand why this culture is so dangerous I’ll also examine how the Rennie child abuse ring was discovered. Spoiler alert it had nothing to do with Scottish officialdom’s child safeguarding policies never mind LGBT Youth Scotland’s ‘robust’ version of them.

Let’s start by analysing LGBT Youth Scotland’s reply to my email. See if you agree with me that it seems shot through with the kind of obfuscation that suggests the organisation is still not preparted to learn lessons.