Why Is A British Charity Telling Migrants Not To Be ‘Deceived’ By Underage Girls?

Authored by James Dixon via Spiked,

Three words in a video that did the rounds last month made my skin crawl: ‘Don’t be deceived.’

They might sound perfectly innocent at first pass, but in context, they are chilling. The footage in question comes from a recorded session apparently run by the Aberdeen-based Mamacita Foundation, a charity that works with asylum seekers. The subject in question is sexual consent – more specifically, the age of consent.

In the footage, the seminar leader, herself an immigrant, asks the men present what age someone must be before they can approach them for ‘anything sexual, intimacy’. At one point, she even seems to admit surprise that the age of consent is 16 throughout the UK – she herself had believed up until that very moment, apparently, that it was 18. She establishes the correct answer there and then, while reading from her notes.

Can we not admit that this is already quite a strange spectacle? Adult men are sitting in Britain, being taught the legal age at which they can have sex with British teenagers. But then it gets quite a lot worse.

‘Please, this is very, very essential’, the seminar leader says (trying to make herself heard over the chatter of the bored participants). ‘Because we’ve had young men fall for these things that could be preventable.’ Fall for these things. She then goes on to advise the men to ask young people their age and even request identification, before coming in with the extraordinary warning: ‘Don’t be deceived, we have young persons growing bigger than their age.’ Twelve and 14-year-olds, she explains, can be taller than she is.

A consent session for migrants in Aberdeen reportedly took a bizarre turn when the facilitator got England’s age of consent wrong & an attendee suggested it was 14. They said it was important because young men “fall for these things” I can’t believe this https://t.co/Td5yWUOZaN

— Anna McGovern (@AnnaMcGovernUK) September 18, 2026

It should really go without saying, but a 13-year-old girl who happens to look older than 13 (as many do) is not deceiving anybody. She is simply existing in the body she happens to have, as it has naturally developed. A child (for that is what she is) does not trick a grown man by being tall for her age or developing early. She should also be able to dress and do her makeup how she likes, or how her parents agree for her to, without fear of advances or attack. Nor does a grown man who has sexual contact with a child ‘fall for’ her supposed wiles.

The language employed here is very revealing. It shows us quite plainly the assumptions underpinning the consent seminar. The men are accorded less moral agency than their potential victims. They are seemingly seen as being at risk of an unfortunate misunderstanding, or worse still, of being sexually manipulated by children. What they are not seen as is adults with clear legal and moral responsibilities.

It’s absurd and grotesque. But perhaps most disturbing is the reduction of the whole question to the age of consent.

There is nothing inherently objectionable about teaching newcomers the laws, including the age of the consent, of the country in which they now live (though the fact that it’s deemed necessary should be a bit of a red flag). Yet the law represents the minimum standard of conduct enforced by the state. It does not exhaust our moral expectations of one another. Far from it.

If the principal lesson an adult man can take from training courses like this is that 16 is the magic number, something (or plenty) has gone badly wrong. Most Western adults understand that legality is not the only consideration governing relations between adults and teenagers. A middle-aged man propositioning a girl who turned 16 two months ago will not escape moral opprobrium by claiming he was following the rules. There are norms beyond the letter of the law, and norms that cannot be taught so quickly in a simple seminar (especially one in which none of the attendees seems to be listening).

The Mamacita footage is particularly unsettling because its language is so protective of the men in the room. Be careful, check ID, don’t be deceived. Where is the corresponding concern for the girls? Imagine being a 14-year-old girl hearing a grown woman telling grown men that girls your age ‘sometimes grow bigger than their age’, and that men should therefore avoid being ‘deceived’. You would think that you and your behavior are the problem.

We have spent decades trying to drive precisely this thinking out of discussions about sexual misconduct. We were so close to doing away with victim-blaming and slut-shaming – with asking whether she led him on or looked older. We recognize these as ways of shifting responsibility from aggressor to victim, from the adult who acts to the girl who is acted on. This principle should not disappear simply because immigration enters the conversation.

I’m not smearing migrants when I say this. I’m talking about who should hold individual responsibility in any given situation, and saying that, generally speaking, it should be the adult. He is the moral actor responsible for obeying the moral norms in the society in which he lives. If someone comes to Britain, he should be treated as a moral adult. That means granting him the dignity of agency – and demanding the responsibility accompanying it. If he commits a sexual offense, responsibility belongs to him, not to licentious Western culture (because nobody is ever asking for it), and certainly not to a teenage girl who has the misfortune to look older than her years in a man’s eyes.

Girls do not ‘deceive’ grown men simply by growing up.

James Dixon is a Glasgow-based novelist, poet and playwright.