Authors: John Stonestreet and Dr. Glenn Sunshine
Last week, a 12-year-old girl in Scotland was charged with carrying an offensive weapon. A video showed her brandishing a knife and a hatchet against a man while screaming at him to get away from her. The girl claims that she and her sister were being sexually harassed and followed. The man claims that he and his wife were on the way to shop when they were approached by the girls who cursed at him and accused him of being an illegal migrant. The couple, originally from Bulgaria, are in Scotland legally.
The police sided with the man and say there is no evidence of sexual harassment. The video used to charge the girl, which was taken by the man, shows him walking toward her and goaded her to pull out the knife and the hatchet. As the girl backed away, both she and her sister scream at the man to keep his hands off them, obviously terrified.
What exactly happened is not clear. What is clear is that things are not ok in the U.K. Among the many questions that needs to be answered is why this girl was carrying these weapons in the first place. Scottish influencer and detransitioner Sinead Watson commented on X that she also carried a knife at that age because “working class Scottish girls are never protected.”
In fact, unchecked violence against girls by immigrants is a serious problem throughout the U.K. According to a recent report from the crowd-funded “Rape Gang Inquiry,” there are 85 cities in England where rape gangs operate. Often, police either turn a blind eye or protect the rapists, who are predominantly Pakastani men, rather than the girls.
The Labour government has only recently launched a national inquiry into the gangs, after dragging its feet for years. According to one report rightly called “damning,” local authorities often failed to act out of fear of being labeled racists. Fearful that violence would result from attempts to arrest the abusers, they’d excuse their inaction with appeals to “social cohesion.” Had the victims been from a higher social class, it is hard to believe they would not have acted.
Just this summer, a 15-year-old girl in Scotland was dragged behind a pub and raped in broad daylight by an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan. According to his lawyer, the man’s behavior was due to cultural differences. He was sentenced to prison but not deported. There were over 68,000 reported rapes in 2023 in the U.K., a nearly seven-fold increase since 2000.
Given this state of cultural chaos, is it any wonder that a girl might decide to break the law to protect herself? Though it’s unclear in this particular case from Dundee who the aggressor was, it happened in the context of a systemic failure to protect girls and young women.
And this is a problem not confined to the U.K. In the Netherlands, a 17-year-old woman was stabbed to death while she was on the phone to police. She called to report that she was being followed. An asylum seeker, who had been arrested for rape four days earlier and had allegedly assaulted another woman five days before that, was arrested for the murder.
In Berlin, when a Syrian man was harassing and physically assaulting a woman on a train, an American man stepped in to help. An accomplice of the Syrian pulled a six-inch knife and slashed the American’s face, cutting his nose to the bone. The police arrested the Syrian, a well-known criminal and drug dealer, but released him because he wasn’t the person who had the knife. Had he been a German, he likely would have been kept in jail. In fact, when asked why no one else had stepped in to help the woman, a German man replied that if he had, he would have been the one arrested.
All of these incidents happened in just the last two weeks. When governments treat immigrants more leniently in court than citizens, there is a problem. When courts release violent criminals to commit more crimes, there is a failure to perform the fundamental responsibility of government, which is to protect its people. A society that refuses to protect girls who are from lower classes or sacrifices them for “social cohesion” has capitulated to evil.
The prophet Isaiah said,
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
That is a possibility, not only for individuals but for entire societies. The western world is in real danger of crossing that line. Even if it does, Christians cannot. We must know what is true. We must embrace what is true. We must live by what is true.