Creative Rein
The Isla Bryson and Catholic Church Abuse scandal moment for the Arts- Our creative industries are enabling child abuse.
Part One of a series shining a light on our broken creative industries in Scotland, in particular our failure to protect children.
Some say the recent Creative Scotland “Rein Scandal” is the ‘Isla Bryson Moment’ of the Scottish arts sector. For years corruption and nepotism have protected and funded a small cohort of ‘special’ individuals with their own agendas in the Scottish Arts circuit. Rein shows us the sharp end of the stick.
The bureaucrats at the top of Creative Scotland (Scotland’s National Arts Funding Agency) funded a hardcore porn film to the tune of £110,000 of tax payer funds which is either a reflection of really poor management of Creative Scotland (worrying) or how ‘normal’ porn and explicit sexualised content has become in our creative industries (more worrying). This is the cliff face of Queer Theory, where boundaries are seen as oppressive and therefore it is up to us, societally, to transgress again and again, sexually.
Queer theory is a radical political view and proponents weaponise our empathy, our desire to not be bigots - via our (shared) stance against homophobia (primarily) to restructure society around sex. This is not about a person born male or female sex, but around pushing boundaries around sexual experiences (hence the weird obsession with LGBTQI+ identities). A big part of this is the idea that sex itself is social construct and that (ironically) homosexuality is as well. (If one does not believe a person is male or female then how can same sex attraction exist?).
This project and it’s team also demonstrate an enormous amount of disconnect from the ‘real world’. Leonie Rae Gasson (and Aniela Piasecka her collaborator) will never face the harms of prostitution. They can propagandise extremist sexual views but will never experience the (very common) tragic and horrific experience of sexual abuse, trafficking and worse that the majority of women (& children) ‘working’ in prostitution face. In this way it speaks of the exceptional luxury the bureaucrats and artists can bask in. Rob Henderson speaks cogently on how the adoption of these beliefs is the new status symbol adopted by elites and harming the poor, terming them ‘luxury beliefs’.
But it doesn’t end there. I see this as the Catholic Church Abuse moment of waking up. This story exposes the tribalism of abuse that is being perpetrated across the whole arts sector in Scotland. I hope this is a call for all the individuals who have been complicit and silent in their jobs, with the ‘I’m alright Jack’ mentality who have enabled this kind of thing more and more. And in that vein, I’d like to speak of the child abuse that is happening in Scottish Theatre, and we taxpayers are paying for it.
For the past several years the children and youth sector in Scotland has become populated by activists. These individuals do not derive their practice from child development stages as to what is appropriate but rather from a point of activating adult viewpoints under the mantle of ‘a child’s voice’. No where is this more obvious than in the embrace of gender and trans ideology in every sector of state funded child and youth arts.
At one time the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland had an excellent track record for training up artists to work in the youth sector, now they don’t learn Piaget (the pre-eminent child psychologist and at one time the go to in how good education for children should be framed) in terms of what is developmentally appropriate when working with children but the Contemporary Theatre Course (CTP) does include a module on ‘Activism’. And these are the youth drama workers who are going into your child’s schools and in theatre programs touring across Scotland. They treat your children like adults in small bodies, and that is dangerous.
If your child attends a drama session by one of these state funded organisations expect to be asked pronouns. Indeed, the National Theatre of Scotland provides pronoun badges as you enter the premises. To impose or accept a pronoun badge is to accept the ideology that it is possible to be born in the wrong body.
In 2020 NHS England carried out an independent review of the Tavistock Centre in London. The Tavistock was the leading gender specialist in the UK. Dr. Hilary Cass carried out an independent review on the centre and one of her most important findings was that social transition is not a neutral act and is incompatible with safeguarding. Pronoun use is the gateway to social transition. It should not be implemented in a youth setting.
The release of the WPATH files uncovered a Mengele level of exploitation and abuse in relation to ‘gender medicine’. Yet WPATH have consistently been called on as the ‘gold standard’ in advocating for radical programs of social engineering in our children’s schools and community settings in the name of ‘gender care’. With the release of files it is time to challenge our tax monies funding “wrong body propaganda” which when embraced leaves previously healthy children infertile, with no possibility of sexual function, mutilated, with stunted brain development, liver cancer, osteoporosis, dementia, with dangerous psychiatric conditions and leading to early death.
To be clear there is NO publicly funded youth drama or dance project I know in Scotland that is safe for children. No program that is informed alone by imagination, pretend or just learning to dance. They are all political entities using your children as their mouthpieces. This is a tragic place indeed.
But back to Rein, as this shows the level of political motivation in the arts sector to the detriment of basic safeguarding. This production brief brought up a host of safeguarding issues any normal person could see (a GP friend pointed out no where was it not indicated whether STDs would be tested for) but Creative Scotland did not, The Work Room (a Creative Scotland regularly funded organisation representing the dance community who funded two residencies to build the piece) did not, Take Me Somewhere (the Creative Scotland funded festival who are a project partner) did not, The Tramway (a Scottish Government, Creative Scotland and Glasgow City Council funded arts venue who also were a project partner) did not.
When I saw the Rein work in progress in the Work Room members page (where i was formerly a member) advertised I reeled in horror. Where were the safeguards? There was no trigger warning, no sense that anyone in that organisation would NOT want to hear about this explicit sex film, no respect for anyone else’s boundaries.
And yet when I had commented on the same private members forum in August 2023 expressing my concerns for the undermining of free speech as seen in the instance of David Greig, Lyceum director getting mobbed for having unpopular opinions. I got a pile on by the same membership. Because I also expressed that sex was real, and this offended the trans members of the forum (so I was told). My post was deleted but not before 80 members of the organisation expressed their approval of my cancellation.
The promotion of Rein was the straw that broke the camels back. I had been contemplating retiring from the arts for some time, but the celebration of this work alongside my being silenced sealed it for me. This was not the world I wanted to be part of. There is something strange happening in the arts, that is distinctly different to the Scotland I arrived in 25 years ago and that shift should worry us all.
Thank you for reading. Please consider supporting my work. You can ‘buy me a coffee’ here. Or become a paid subscriber for as little as £3.50 per month, £25 for the year, or £250 for a founding membership. Every penny makes a difference (and I really really need every penny, I remain a solo Mum and putting head about parapet has made me a persona non-grata for many jobs) and allows me to keep speaking out about the failure in safeguarding for our children in schools and cultural institutions. We need to recognise, preserve and celebrate childhood. No one else is doing this in the arts in Scotland. Thank you.