Another broken promise: Scotland's children are being failed badly

Former first minister Humza Yousaf’s currency of late rests on him seeing almost everything through a particular lens, understandably perhaps, a very personal lens, and while I appreciate his pain over the atrocities committed in the Middle East and his stomach-punch response to wherever he perceives racism, it doesn’t make all his deliberations right or give him a monopoly on calling out injustice. 

Last month, in response to the sentencing of seven utterly depraved Scots – men and women – for the horrific sexual abuse of three young children who were gang-raped, drugged, tortured, starved and abused, Yousaf, unforgivably, in my opinion, managed to turn the attention away from them and onto him. If there was a hierarchy of victimhood, he managed to upend it and I wonder if he had taken just a moment to think more rationally and broadly, to consider what had been done to those kids, would he really have posted on X that:

“No messages of anger or disgust from Farage, Reform or Musk about one of the biggest child grooming gangs in UK who were sentenced yesterday. It’s almost like they don’t actually care about keeping children safe but have an ulterior motive? “Hope those sentenced rot in prison.”

While his final throwaway line may have at least redeemed the completely insensitive nature of what he had just said, absent as it was of any real reference to the fact that children had been so horribly abused in the city that he still represents as an MSP and in a country he used to govern, it did nothing to minimise that he was attempting to make political capital out of the fact that because the perpetrators in this case were white, they were of no interest to those on the right that want to hijack nefarious cases of abuse to opine about immigration, race and particularly Muslims. And I get that. I get that he is angry about what he sees as populism fanning the flames of Islamophobia by whatever means, but I don’t agree with his response in this instance. 

My disgust about those that commit child sexual abuse isn’t ring-fenced around particular groups or individuals, rather, it is for all those that perpetrate sexual atrocities against the most vulnerable in our society, and my compassion centres solely on the children that have been let down. The children that Yousaf failed to mention in his post. The children abused in his hometown of Glasgow, a city that has returned Yousaf as a parliamentarian repeatedly and given him the power to be more than just a commentator.

And while I am sure that Yousaf’s online fury was genuine, it was based on a false equivalence. The cases that have caused so much disquiet in Rotherham, Oldham, and other areas of England where men, mainly of Pakistani origin, committed unspeakable acts of abuse and went undetected for so long precisely because their race became an aggravating factor in stopping police and other official bodies from investigating abhorrent crimes against children. If there was any prohibition involved in the speed of response to the harms that the victims of the Glasgow rape gang suffered, it was about how the children themselves were viewed: poor, feral, worthless, and disposable. While that was also a factor in why the girls in Rotherham etc were let down, it was the profile of the perpetrators, and how those in authority feared they could be accused of racism, that prevented justice being done with any alacrity.

And they deserve more from our politicians than handwringing, platitudes and passing the buck. Scotland’s children were made an actual promise that they would grow up ‘loved, safe and respected’ and to a deadline of 2030. That clock is ticking down on yet another broken promise

So, yes, accuse Farage et al of hypocrisy but the Glasgow child sex abuse case should cause revulsion, without exception, for it reveals a shameful and rotten underbelly of Scotland. A godforsaken place, inhabited by a drug-addled underclass that has lost any sense of probity of what it means to be a human being. Where children could be used, abused, and cashed-in on. 
And for me, there will be no sadder set of words in child abuse cases like this than ‘the children were known to the authorities’. 

We live in a small country led by politicians who continually talk of our shared values, of our inherent belief in social justice, that Scotland is the best country for a child to grow up in, and yet here we are, with one of the most horrific scandals of child sexual abuse right on the doorstep of not one, but two former first ministers, and the response, limited as it was, was reduced to a point-scoring opportunity rather than to address the systemic failings, on their watch, that have allowed such horrors to go on.

Ash Regan, a former community safety minister, who left office and her party over concerns for the safety of women and girls, reflecting on the Glasgow case, asked Scotland’s minister for children and young people in parliament whether she could categorically say Scotland’s children were safe. Her answer, though full of sorrow for the children in this case, did not directly address the fact that, self-evidently, some children are not.

These children were on the at-risk register, were painfully thin, showing signs of neglect, not attending school, neighbours saw them scavenging for food, there were social workers visiting, one public servant talked about a child having the worst case of head lice he had seen in 30 years. The abusers were known to be drug addicts, the filthy and stinking flat, dubbed ‘The Beastie House’ where the abuse occurred, was a mecca for drug dealing. 

All of this was in plain sight and with so-called safeguarding in place.

You can dismiss this case as a one-off but when you have thousands of children trapped in temporary accommodation, one in five children living in poverty, drug and alcohol addiction off the scale, kids are missing from classrooms, young people leaving care ending up homeless – despite Nicola Sturgeon trumpeting her Independent Care Review which led to the tweely named The Promise which is already failing on its targets – and where public services are cut to the bone then, clearly, you have multi-factorial problems that combine to mean that no, of course minister, our children cannot be considered safe. 

And they deserve more from our politicians than handwringing, platitudes and passing the buck. Scotland’s children were made an actual promise that they would grow up ‘loved, safe and respected’ and to a deadline of 2030. That clock is ticking down on yet another broken promise. Tick-tock.