The
current circumstances at the Muslim Youth Helpline (MYH) are devastating. The
MYH is a faith sensitive charity for young Muslims, offering a helpline,
webchat, email and signposting support service.
My wife, Akeela Ahmed, until this last Friday was Chief Executive there for
some years, and prior to that Head of Support Services.
Currently,
confidential communications – some of them involving me, Akeela and the police
– are on an anonymous blog identifying itself as a ‘whistleblowing’ group of 30
signatories who signed an initial “statement against the CEO and Helpline
manager ”, raised on 18th May.
Understandably,
there have been huge concerns about what is published on that blog, based on
communications between myself, Akeela and police. I completely understand why
so many people who have seen this material are upset, worried and downright
angry; and why so many people assume that what we have done is indefensible.
Indeed, if I was in your shoes, I’d probably feel much the same way.
But
there is a wider context here which has not been publicised. The first element
of this wider context is our communications with the police, only a part of
which the hackers have disclosed. On that front, I want to state from the
outset that we made a fundamental mistake in our approach, and it had an
entirely unintended consequence. I of all people should have known better, and
we tried, with some success, to neutralise those consequences. But we did what
we did in genuine fear, rather than any malice.
The
second element of this context is how this information got on the blog in the
first place – it did so as fallout from an escalating criminal campaign against
the charity and its management since last year. Without understanding how this
campaign affected our perceptions and emotions at the time, it is difficult to understand
what led us to make this mistake. What follows is not a justification of the
actions we took, but an explanation – the lesson of this narrative is, indeed,
that whatever illegitimate actions others took, ours should have been wiser.
