SPIED ON then SACKED
...for daring to say her Girl Guides shouldn’t share tents or showers with potentially predatory men
WHEN the Guides decided to allow boys who believe they are girls to join for the first time last year, unit leader Helen Watts accepted the move with a tolerant shrug of the shoulders.
But after discovering the organisation had gone one step further by ruling that they could share showers and tents with girls on camping trips, the City analyst felt compelled to speak out.
After all, the new rules applied not just to boys but also to men who, if they said they identified as women, could be appointed as Guide leaders supervising youngsters on trips away. It was a move Helen believed posed a grave risk to girls in her charge.
What piqued her anger as much as anything else was that to avoid falling foul of equality laws, the Guides insisted parents must be kept in the dark. She says: ‘If a boy is confused about what sex they are then I would be more than happy to welcome them into Girlguiding – it might help them,’ she tells The Mail on Sunday.
‘But the extremes the Guides were going to was putting children in danger and I was not alone in believing this. I just could not remain silent.’
Helen hoped a polite letter might convince those at the top of the organisation to think again.
To her astonishment, what came back was an arrogant brush-off that refused even to address her genuine fears. Instead of facing up to growing concern among parents and Guides leaders, the body ‘ rather ludicrously’, she says, tried to pretend nothing had changed by repeating the mantra ‘we have always been a single gender organisation’.
‘None of my safeguarding concerns were answered,’ Helen says. ‘Instead they tried to rewrite history by suggesting that, despite the new rules, we were just all girls together like we had always been. Girls’ needs were coming second to an ideology.’
In her frustration, Helen and 19 other concerned Guide leaders set up a private Facebook group to discuss their fears. What followed was a troubling series of events worthy of George Orwell’s 1984. Unbeknown to Helen, lurking in the group was a fifth columnist who set about recording their online conversations.
The spy informed on her and others to the organisation’s chiefs, sparking a four-month investigation.
It concluded last month after the arrival in the post of a pre-prepared ‘confession’ they demanded she sign. Helen refused and was later expelled in a dispassionate phone call.
Today Helen, 33, speaks of her dismay at being expelled from an organisation she had dedicated 26 years of her life to. ‘I absolutely love the Girl Guides, but I feel utterly betrayed by them because of this,’ she says.
‘ The only reason I’ve talked about Girlguiding critically is because I think they’re being negligent, putting children at harm. It wasn’t just me. I spoke to a social worker who thought that the new rules would be exploited by predatory males.
‘She said she feared that a policy allowing adult males who identify as women to share tents and rooms with girls could be abused by predatory men.
‘I’ve been accused of thinking all men are predatory, which is not the case. But it would only take one incident and the consequences would be catastrophic.
‘I only have the safety of children at heart and for that I’ve been kicked out. It’s just heartbreaking.’
The former grammar school girl from Kent joined the Brownies aged seven and continued Guiding until she was in her early 20s. After a short break, she rejoined in 2015 as the leader of a Rainbow group for five to sevenyear-olds in Ealing, West London. Her sister too had spent time in the Guides and her mother was a Brown Owl.
‘I was so happy to be back and the kids were just great,’ Helen says. ‘I still had a lot of responsibility with my job and travelled abroad a lot. But I would always move things around to make sure that I was back on Wednesday evenings for Rainbows. I always put Rainbows first.’
Over the last three years, Helen has observed the ‘slow creep’ of increasingly progressive changes in Guiding. For the most part she accepted it as inevitable part of a changing world, but some policy changes driven by dogma left her more troubled.
In 2013, to satisfy a demand for ‘inclusiveness’, the Guides dropped the word ‘God’ from the pledge made by all new members.
Helen witnessed first- hand how anyone who refused to comply was swiftly punished.
‘A friend of mine who is a Christian didn’t want to go along with this and was told she would have to leave if she didn’t comply,’ she recalls.
‘ It was a complete overreaction. There was no need to do that – especially with something as personal as faith.’
Next was the overhaul earlier this year of the achievement badges given to Guides for completing worthy tasks. Some traditional activities were replaced with trendy classes in how to protest, mindfulness and mixing non-alcoholic cocktails.
But for Helen, the Guides’ pursuit of a ‘ trendy agenda’ smacked of hypocrisy and came at the cost of teaching young girls l i fe skills. ‘ They’ve got these badges about speaking out and protesting. But now it all seems really hollow. Speak out as long as it’s something the Guides agree with. And they say that the Hostess badge [due to be ditched in new overhaul] is sexist, but being able to cook and sew are important skills for living your life.’
Despite her f r ustrations with Girlguiding, Helen refrained from speaking out. It was only when the controversial transgender policy was published that Helen felt unable to hold her tongue any longer. ‘I’m not a natural rebel,’ she says. ‘I’m the
‘I’m not a radical person, but I had to say something’
least radical person you could probably meet. But I had to say something. My conscience would not let me keep quiet.
‘Five-year-old Rainbows who feel uncomfortable around a leader who self-identifies as a woman cannot articulate that. They need someone to speak up for them.’
Helen also had serious concerns about the culture of secrecy the Guides’ new rules were encouraging. The transgender policy stated that it was not ‘best practice’ to tell parents that their daughters would be sharing facilities such as sleeping areas and toilets with transgender girls, who were born male, during trips away.
And it added that it would be ‘ unlawful’ for leaders to inform parents their children were being looked after by transgender women on overnight excursions.
‘To foster this environment where Guide leaders can keep secrets from parents felt very sinister,’ Helen says. ‘Child protection rule number one is you do not keep secrets with children. A child who has a secret with an adult is very vulnerable to being exploited.’
She also fears that teenagers sleeping in the same tents might start having sex. ‘Teenagers will do what teenagers have always done,’ she adds. ‘The fact someone is trans does not tell you anything about that teenager’s sexual orientation.
‘What do we do if a Guide becomes pregnant after sharing a tent with her very close, trans girlfriend?
‘ It would be catastrophic if it did happen.’
Because of the Guides’ refusal to act on her concerns, Helen turned to the Mumsnet forum, posting messages under the pseudonym Agnes Baden Powell – the name of the Guides’ founder.
‘As a leader, I’m struggling to see how I can safely balance the needs, privacy and preferences of all children in my care under the current guidelines,’ she wrote. ‘I have challenged GGHQ [ Girlguiding Headquarters] but not received any satisfactory answers.’
She immediately received hundreds of replies from both mothers and other Guide leaders, many of which were supportive of her position. Emboldened by the response, Helen decided to go public and started airing her dissatisfaction with the Guides under her own name on Twitter.
This unabashed criticism prompted an invitation to meet Guides’ chief executive, Julie Bentley, a leading abortion rights campaigner who has described the charity as the ‘ultimate feminist organisation’.
But when the two met at the London headquarters last year, far from showing any understanding of Helen’s concerns, Ms Bentley simply became irritated.
‘We spent an hour talking about the policy and Julie became visibly annoyed,’ Helen recalls.
‘ She said t heir solicitor had pointed out they hadn’t got a trans policy and they had to have one to comply with the Equality Act.
‘But when I raised my concerns about safety and the policy requiring leaders to keep secrets from parents, she got very defensive. She said you can’t “out” individuals.’
Chillingly, within a matter of weeks of invoking the displeasure of Ms Bentley, Helen received a phone call from a Girlguiding ‘middle manager’ – a county commissioner – informing her she was under i nvestigation. This was quickly followed by a letter which Helen s ays could have come directly from the ‘thought police’.
It said an i nquiry had been launched into comments she had made on social media, which the Guides had alerted to by unnamed complainants. Her accusers had apparently found her conduct to be ‘ inappropriate’ because of ‘ perceived’ negative commentary relating to views about trans people.
In the letter, her investigator revealed that one member of the closed Facebook group for Guide leaders with concerns about the t ransgender policy had t aken screenshots of conversations.
‘I was deeply upset when I found out someone I trusted had passed this information to the powers that be,’ she says. ‘Part of the Guide law is to be honest and trustworthy. It is not honest to befriend someone and say you share their ideals, then secretly take pictures of your conversations and run off to the authorities with that.’
Throughout the four months of what Helen terms as her ‘Kafkaesque’ trial, she never met the woman investigating her alleged misdemeanours.
So it was perhaps fitting end to the matter when, earlier this summer, she received a pre- written statement, which she was expected to sign, confirming her guilt.
By putting her name to the document, she would be admitting to breaching the Girlguiding code of conduct and social media policy, as well as to calling one of her colleagues ‘a nightmare’ on a private forum. She would also have to agree to avoid making public any complaints she may have.
Helen made a final stand and refused to sign. Within weeks of her refusal, she had been told by telephone that she was no longer welcome in the Girl Guides.
And it has emerged that she is not the only one to be sacked for refusing to follow the transgender policy, as a Brownie leader also met the same fate.
Reflecting on her treatment by the Guides, Helen says: ‘To have your membership revoked is the most serious sanction. It’s something reserved for people who have committed a crime or put children at serious risk of harm.
‘ I was simply trying to do the right thing. This was just about winning for them because they cannot countenance they might have got something wrong. It was the same when they changed the Promise to take out the mention of God.
‘What makes me most sad is that my Rainbow unit will probably have to close now because I’m the only leader there and it’s unlikely they’ll find someone else to take it over. I’ll miss the children so much.’
Last night a Girlguiding spokeswoman insisted that keeping girls safe was the ‘number one priority’. She added: ‘As an organisation, we pride ourselves on caring for every individual. Simply being transgender does not make someone more of a safeguarding risk than any other person.’
Addressing t he i nquiry i nto Helen’s conduct, she added: ‘ We have a thorough and robust investigations process and the withdrawal of membership is always a last resort, but we take very seriously any breach of our volunteer code of conduct or policies.’