A former volunteer with a prominent Scottish LGBT youth charity which has come forward to reveal the shocking lack of child safeguarding measures he witnessed while working with the organization.
LGBT Youth Scotland recently referred itself to police following a damning Reduxx report featuring testimony from two survivors who allege to have been groomed and exploited by charity staff while accessing the service as minors.
But a former volunteer with the organization has now come forward with new allegations, emphatically asserting that there were no child safeguarding measures in place whatsoever while he was involved with the charity.
Justin, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, explains he had started working with LGBT Youth Scotland in 2009. As a gay man with a background in therapy and counseling, Justin says he began volunteering due to his own experience as a youth, hoping to be able to offer support to young people struggling with their sexuality.
“When I was 18 or 19, I struggled to fit in as I didn’t like the social aspect of what the gay scene was. It was very [focused on] drink, drugs, and sleeping around. I found volunteering within gay group groups and at helplines was a more positive experience,” Justin says. “From experience, I found that if you enter the gay social scene for the first time, being gay can easily become your whole personality, so I thought that supporting the youth group would be a great opportunity to show that it doesn’t need to be that way.”
But after joining LGBT Youth Scotland as a volunteer, he began to notice problems.
Justin says that adult volunteers were imposing their political and social values upon the young service users.
During one of the group meetings, he recalls that he witnessed an adult male worker become enraged at a young boy who had expressed some support for the Conservative Party.
“It actually frightened me the level of anger that came out,” Justin says, noting that the boy fled the session in the middle of the night.
“The young boy left the building at this stage and I was unable to locate him. You should note this office is in the city centre of Glasgow and it was dark outside… not the best environment for an upset youth,” Justin says, explaining that he was told by another volunteer that there was “no point” in expressing support for anything but the Scottish National Party.
At another group support meeting, two young boys were “effectively scolded” by the same adult staff member for expressing that they did not want to attend a Pride parade.
“This went against everything I had learned about providing a supportive environment and empowering young people, rather it was directing them to hold the views that were considered ‘right’ by their gay elders,” Justin explains.
Disturbingly, Justin says that one of his first tasks in the office as a volunteer was helping staff “destroy” any reference to the charity’s former CEO, James Rennie.
Rennie, who had been at the helm of LGBT Youth Scotland for years, had just been convicted of operating Scotland’s largest pedophile ring. In what would be labeled as the country’s “worse abuse trial ever,” Rennie was found to have been molesting his godson starting from when the child was just 3 months old.
While serving as the CEO of LGBT Youth Scotland and receiving praise in Scottish parliament for his work for gay rights, Rennie had been soliciting child sexual abuse materials from other perverts, including those featuring “young Down’s syndrome or learning difficulty kids.”
The sick predator ring Rennie led was broken up in 2007, and he was ultimately found guilty in 2009, along with eight other men who collectively held over 125,000 pieces of child sexual abuse materials.
“If I found any promotional material, printed reports, letters anything that had his photo or name on it, it had to be shredded. All reminders of him had to be removed as if he hadn’t existed,” Justin says. “There was very little mention of his name among staff… I was told not to ask, yet no reassurances were given that they had changed anything from the lessons learned from his time there.”
Justin explains that he felt as though the overt focus in the office was not on providing quality services to youth, but on securing more money for dubious research endeavors.
“The office at this time had easily 20 people in it, many fully paid, doing their own research, and funding applications to continue to be paid to repeat the cycle. Despite my curious inquiries into how some of this present and past research had directly helped the young people using this service, I was never given any real details,” Justin recalls. “I couldn’t see how the youth groups who were more or less entirely run by unpaid and untrained volunteers were benefiting from any work I witnessed in the office.”
Justin says it was then that he began to see LGBT Youth Scotland as a “well-funded pressure group,” with the young service users only being used as justification for additional funding.
“[The charity] used the life experiences of the vulnerable people in their care to keep getting funding to continue their ‘work.’ Essentially, the young people were there as research objects to continue the concept of a ‘vulnerable group’ that needs to be supported by a well funded organization.”
But it wasn’t only in the office that Justin began to have concerns about how LGBT Youth Scotland was conducting its operations.
Unpaid volunteers, many of whom did not have professional qualifications, were working directly with minors.
“It was mainly the unpaid volunteers that tended to do the more direct work with the young people,” Justin says, adding that some of the minor service users had been referred to the charity through social services and were considered quite vulnerable.
“Despite this first impression, I stayed because I felt the young people deserved better support,” Justin added.
Justin asserts that he did not feel as though there were any child safeguarding measures in place while he was at the charity, a persistent issue which contributed to a disturbing incident he witnessed while volunteering at an event in Glasgow.
The event was a national LGBT Youth Scotland gathering that was being held in the city, one which required overnight accommodations for attendees. In addition to paid employees, there was also a large number of adult volunteers.
During a workshop on the first day of the gathering, Justin says he watched an adult volunteer new to the organization “openly flirt” with two of the teen service users, who were approximately 14 to 16 years old.
“Not only was this verbal flirting, such as asking them where they lived, but he openly placed his hand on one of the boys thighs and used his foot to brush up against the leg of another boy.”
Justin explains he and another volunteer were so perplexed by the “sheer boldness” of the behavior, they initially doubted themselves, confused as to whether he was a volunteer or a service user.
“After this workshop both myself and the other female volunteer decided it was best to speak to a responsible member of staff regarding our confusion and concern,” Justin says. “As it transpired, this was an adult male volunteer … He was allowed to stay on for the rest of the weekend with only the assurance that [LGBT Youth Scotland] would ‘keep an eye on him.'”
Justin tells Reduxx that even though he and the other volunteer had witnessed the inappropriate conduct, LGBT Youth Scotland staff did not speak to the young people involved, or consider the behavior a risk.
“Allowing inexperienced and untrained volunteers to work with quite often vulnerable children is unethical. Not empowering any volunteers to be able to raise concerns in any adequate or effective manner.”
Reflecting on his time at LGBT Youth Scotland, Justin expresses some regrets about how he handled the unethical situations he had witnessed.
“I am beginning to accept over these past few years that I, too, was part of the problem. Those kids deserved better. I should have been stronger and not trusted an organization’s good reputation. I should have pushed enough people who were employed by them until one of them who had the power did the right thing,” he says.
On December 23, Reduxx published an exclusive interview with two survivors who allege to have been sexually abused and groomed while attending LGBT Youth Scotland as minors.
Sam Cowie and Daniel Nechtan both utilized the charity’s services at different points in time, but reported disturbingly similar experiences.
Cowie, who informally accessed the services in 2010, told Reduxx that he had been “groomed” by older men at the charity, who would provide him with special privileges, cigarettes, and alcohol.
“I was plied with alcohol free of charge, encouraged to sleep with older men and given money to perform sexual acts,” Cowie explained to Reduxx, saying charity staff had also brought him to adult gay clubs in Edinburgh.
Daniel Nechtan, who attended the services in 2003, recalled having been sexually exploited by now-jailed CEO James Rennie, despite the statement made by LGBT Youth Scotland following his arrest that none of their youth members had been harmed by him.
“Although I was young, many people involved in this charity were in their twenties and thirties, and, as far as I can tell, there was no safeguarding or anything. In fact, it seemed more like a social network to connect older men with [often vulnerable] teenagers,” Nechtan said.
Less than 24 hours after the Reduxx report was released, LGBT Youth Scotland issued a release declaring that they had referred themselves to police as a result of the allegations against them.
BREAKING: LGBT Youth Scotland have issued a statement on the allegations of grooming and abuse made against them by two former youth members.
— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) December 23, 2022
The charity says it has filed a police report on the allegations. This was done without the knowledge or consent of the survivors. pic.twitter.com/6LJbPMNXbv
Justin says it was after reading the Reduxx article that it “hit home” how dire the situation had been at LGBT Youth Scotland, and prompted him to come forward.
“Reading about someone who I might have, at one time, had the chance to protect or at least do better for… It brought back that moment of that man flirting and touching those boys at that LGBT Youth Scotland event. I’d failed them. The organization failed them. And if creeps like that would do that openly, then what the hell were creeps like him doing in more private situations?” Justin asks.
“We have to stop protecting these guys, we know they can be drawn towards youth organizations, we have to empower our young to be able to speak out without them getting accused of fueling bigotry.”
LGBT Youth Scotland has declined to comment on the allegations leveled against the organization, but has continued to rally public support for donations.
A Freedom of Information request published in 2019 noted that the governing Scottish National Party administration had been providing funds to LGBT Youth Scotland through the equality budget since it took office.
According to its most recent fiscal disclosure, LGBT Youth Scotland had received seven different Government grants through various allocations, including the Equality budget and the Violence Against Women and Girls budget.
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