Stop exploiting girls

Children should not be making propaganda for the Welsh Refugee Council

There’s a video doing the rounds on social media. It features two girls, in school uniform, welcoming migrants to Wales. They begin by saying, “We understand that being a refugee isn’t easy,” before going on to describe the help that asylum seekers will recieve from the Welsh Refugee Council.

This video was, apparently, made by the girls as part of a school project in 2023. It was shared first by their school and then by the Welsh Refugee Council. Following criticism, the minute-long film was removed by the school within days of being posted online. This week, the video has resurfaced and has garnered attention after being shared by Elon Musk on X.

After more than a week of the news being dominated by the horror of Pakistani Muslim rape gangs, it isn’t hard to understand why interest in this video has picked up now. Official statistics show that most asylum seekers in 2023 were from Asia. They are also most likely to be young men. That two young schoolgirls are essentially marketing a new life in Wales to this cohort would be weird at any time. But when set against a backdrop of harrowing tales of the abuse experienced by girls in towns such as Rotherham, Oldham, Keighley and Telford, this video is not just creepy but perverse.

Talk on X is that the girls are being used as ‘enticement’ - essentially as ‘bait’ to attract young men to come to the UK. I am sure that was never the intention of anyone involved in producing the video but, once released, the school - and the girls themselves - had no control over how it would be used or interpreted. My guess is the film was shared by the school simply because it was deemed virtuous and staff were keen to show off the ‘goodness’ they have engendered in pupils. Bur even without malicious intent, the video speaks to incredible naivity on the part of teachers and school leaders.

This gets to the real way in which these girls are being exploited. A group of adults - presumably teachers - decided that school time should be spent raising awareness about refugees, encouraging children to feel sympathy for the plight of asylum seekers, and then getting them to research sources of help and support available in order to ‘welcome’ migrants to Wales. Pupils were tasked with this ‘project’ and the finished product was then (initially at least) proudly displayed by the school to illustrate a job well done.

In being encouraged to make the video, teachers exploited the good will of children, and the ‘niceness’ of girls in particular, to make a political point about the need to welcome migrants. In communities perhaps already struggling to integrate large numbers of immigrants, this view may not have been shared by the pupils’ parents. It was a political stance, being imposed upon children, by those responsibile for their education. Using the classroom in this way is not education but indoctrination. It is impossible to imagine a video telling migrants, ‘Please do not come to Wales. We are struggling economically and our culture and communities are under threat,’ ever being proudly shared by the school.

Of course, the BBC’s coverage of this story kicks off with a photo of Elon Musk. Members of the Welsh Refugee Council, the BBC claims, have been ‘harassed’ online since Musk shared the girls’ film advertising the charity’s services. The apparent capacity of BBC journalists to be more outraged over Musk’s social media antics than the rape of girls, or even the politicisation of education, truly beggars belief. But in turning this into yet another story about bogey-man Musk, the BBC exploits the schoolgirls who made the ‘welcome refugees’ video all over again.

First, these two girls were robbed of an education and had political views imposed upon them. Then, their efforts were shared to enhance the virtue of teachers and to advertise the work of the Welsh Refugee Council. They have then been used to lend weight to the current outrage over abused girls and rape gangs. And finally they have been used by the BBC to score points over Musk.

It’s time to say enough. We need to kick politics out of the classroom and stop exploiting children by using them as a mouthpiece for adult debates.