Something Has Gone Very Wrong In How We Treat Girls

This post, authored by Natalie White, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic

This week a video went round of a young girl in Scotland, clutching a massive knife in one hand and an axe in the other, yelling at someone to stay away from her little sister as a man approached her and filmed her when she was in a clear state of distress and fury. It was disturbing content, and like everything else these days provided a great source for memes, and provoked huge amounts of division.

??This is absolutely HORRIFIC ??

"DON'T F**KING TOUCH US"

Little girls scream at a migrant recording them before brandishing an AXE and a KNIFE to warn him off

What is happening to our country? pic.twitter.com/b7WyTtBkdM

— Basil the Great (@Basil_TGMD) August 24, 2025

Obviously, she was the one demonised and arrested. I’ve seen her called a “feral thug” and a “retarded little shit, known in the area”, among other things.

To many though, she’s become a symbol of the utter gutter state of this country and an unlikely hero and emblem of our times. Within a few hours of the video doing the rounds on X, the child had stopped being a child and had become a meme and a menace and a problem to be processed, and the state responded not with safeguarding and internal considerations about what has gone so wrong in the country a little girl is carrying weapons, but instead sent a police van. And people who should know better applauded because nothing soothes a guilty conscience like pretending the frightened are the threat and not the adult male filming her despite her screams for him to leave her alone.

The country has spent 20 years training us to clap for brave girls – the cultural feminist lecture circuit has blared it through cinemas and classrooms and adverts and podcasts. The ‘heroic girl’ has become the most bankable product of our age because she is empowering and marketable and commercially invincible. But, of course, only if she’s the right sort of girl, in the right era. Should she be a white working class girl in 2025’s United Kingdom, then she’s nothing but a grotty little feral working class scumbag that needs to shut the fuck up about being raped or gangraped, and get back in her little privileged box – because no doubt ‘she asked for it’.

For nearly two decades now, we’ve had the mythology of the ‘brave girl’ rammed down our throats: Lyra with her courage, we get Katniss standing against the Capitol, we get Mulan charging the line; we get Moana sailing straight into danger; we get Merida splitting arrows and Elsa freezing kingdoms and Wonder Woman saving the world; we get Radio 4 serials where plucky evacuee girls fight Nazis; we get Disney movies that sell little girls “I don’t need no man” bravery by the bucket-load. And that’s all lovely until a little girl actually does stick up for herself and then she’s the bad guy.

The ‘Girl Power’ did not stop with stories: it bled into daily life and into childhood wardrobes. Little girls have been wrapped for years in T-shirts that tell them they are “strong and fearless and unstoppable”, they are marched through campaigns that call sayings like “throwing like a girl” offensive and misogynistic and insist that girls throw further and run faster and tackle harder. School assemblies, NGO videos and brand promotions urge them up trees and onto rugby pitches and into contact sport, the clear instruction being to prove every minute that being female does not mean being weaker or less, to outdo boys at boys’ games, to be louder and tougher and bristling with grit. Being ‘girly’ is almost a sin – unless you’re a boy – these days.

Then comes the twist: the minute some girls actually take that conditioning seriously, the minute they present with rough edges and hard corners and preferences that look ‘boyish’, the adults stop telling them “this girl can” and convince these little girls that they’re actually boys. Next thing they know, they’re on the conveyor belt that once sold them empowerment now sending them to clinics where their puberty is halted, their normal growing chests surgically removed and they’re being sterilised with puberty blockers and told they must share changing rooms and toilets with males.

The culture that demanded a generation of warrior daughters suddenly cannot abide the daughters it made and tries to make them into sons while insisting that womanhood is a space open to anyone who declares it so.

All of this would be laughable if it were not tragic, because when a real little girl in a real British park finally behaves in the way the billboards taught her to behave, when she stands between danger and her sister, she is not applauded, she is criminalised, and the people who cheer fictional heroines suddenly prefer procedure to courage and paperwork to protection. She isn’t the first and she wont be the last.

The late Andrew Norfolk spoke about how a little girl was arrested at the scene of her own gangrape by seven Asian men for being ‘drunk and disorderly’ after being plied with alcohol and found screaming, naked, in the front garden of a house in Telford.

If the little Scottish girl in the park was the subject of a Phillip Pullman play set in Ireland in the 1800s and had been fictional – “the child who stood firm against impossible odds, who raised her weapon to protect her kin, who fought when no one else would” – the perpetually offended Woke Left would be tweeting threads about how moving and necessary her courage was. Schools would set comprehension questions about her “voice and agency”, and you would be forced to buy the companion book for your children.

But because she is real and because she is working class and because she is not neatly packaged, she is processed as a public order issue.

The double standards are not subtle, and they sharpen if you change the casting, because if the child in that clip had been a black boy in Croydon with a machete, forced to carry a weapon because drugs and gangs have colonised every route to school, you would have had a month of Guardian columns about ‘systemic racism’ and ‘disproportionate criminalisation’. Owen Jones would be banging on about ‘14 years of Tory austerity’ being the cause because all the yoof clubs being shut down. You’d have Gary Lineker whinging about county lines and poverty; you would have had a rolling national conversation about compassion and context and the cruelty of a state that punishes children for surviving. And yet when the child is a white girl in a Scottish park you get none of the context and all of the condemnation because she is the wrong sort of feminist icon, and in the wrong century.

And behind all of this sits the reality that nobody in power ever wants to talk about. Last year alone there were over 68,000 rapes of women and girls reported in England and Wales. Scotland recorded nearly 3,000 more, a 15% rise in 12 months. Out of all of them, fewer than three in 100 resulted in a charge. Across all sexual offences the charge rate barely rises above 4%.

If a private company delivered results that dismal its directors would be dragged through court. But when the state does it, ministers pat themselves on the back.

Then there is the Rape Gang Inquiry. Not the Government’s, because the Government still refuses to investigate. This one is being driven by Rupert Lowe and a handful of survivors who are doing it themselves because the state will not.

Even without powers, even without official backing, it has already shown what victims have been shouting for decades. At least 85 councils across Britain ignored or enabled the rape of children. Police brushed off reports. Social workers wrote off girls of 12 as if they had consented. Officials tied themselves in knots to avoid mentioning ethnicity when it was inconvenient, and whole communities of children were sacrificed to protect reputations. Taxi firms, takeaways, guest houses – everyone knew and nobody in power disturbed it. If the races had been reversed, if minority children had been raped on this industrial scale by gangs of white British men, there would have been riots, there would have been lynchings, there would have been expulsions. But because the victims were working class white British girls they were written off as scum who asked for it or ‘made a lifestyle choice’.

Put that inquiry beside the video in the park and the difference is stark.

This is a country that tells girls to be heroines in theory and abandons them in practice. Girls learn that adults will not protect them or even care; that the police may arrest them faster than they will arrest the man raping them; that the agencies there to protect them are more interested in protecting their abusers; that schools will hold empowerment assemblies while prescribing mindfulness to girls who are too scared to sleep because they know which taxi plates to avoid.

And the hypocrisy of the commentariat never fails.

Were this girl the heroine of a BBC Radio 4 afternoon play, they would be swooning into their vegan flat whites about how ‘brave and magnificent’ she was.

Had she existed in 19th-century Ireland fighting the British, they would wrap her in a tricolour and commission a statue. Had she fought off a paedophile priest in the Magdalene Homes, she would be canonised in feminist journals and celebrated on panels at Hay. Were she a Palestinian girl throwing stones at the IDF, they would all change their profile pictures in her honour. Were she Liesel Meminger raging against the Nazis, she would be in the school curriculum. But because she is none of these safe metaphors, and none of these curated narratives, because she is simply a working class Scottish girl in a municipal park, she is treated as a thug and carted off by the fuzz.

Little girls raised in safe homes and safe communities do not walk around with knives. They splash in puddles and argue for five more minutes on the swings. When a child becomes a protector it is not an aesthetic or a phase, it is 100% survival.

Call her a little shit if you like, maybe she is, but she did not create herself – this country did. The same country that drowns girls in empowerment slogans while turning a blind eye to predators.

A little girl with a knife and an axe should shock us. Not because of the knife and the axe but because she knows what no child ever should: that nobody is coming to save you and that we all should have done a lot more.

Natalie White is a single mum from Cornwall and a persistent thorn in the side of MPs, journalists and officials who would rather not be challenged. This article was first published on X, where Natalie’s handle is @KingBobIIV.

Stop Press: Police Scotland has issued a statement from Chief Superintendent Nicola Russell:

We are aware of misinformation being shared on social media in relation to an incident where a Bulgarian couple were approached by youths in St Ann Lane, Dundee, on Saturday August 23rd 2025.

A 12 year-old girl has been charged with being in possession of offensive weapons. She will be referred to the relevant authorities and our enquiries are ongoing.

We would like to thank the local community for their help with our investigation and would urge the public not to share misinformation about this incident or speculate on the circumstances.

Stop Press 2: The Mail reveals the “truth” about the man filming the video, a Bulgarian immigrant who says the girl attacked him as he walked to the shops.

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