Article

Character

Comment

Friendship

Virtues

2 September 2025

6 min read

Guiding’s new badges don’t deserve this media criticism

Encouraging interests builds character now and for tomorrow

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

Girl Guiding.

As a Brownie leader, what I love about Girlguiding is the perfect blend of tradition and modernity. Lots of people will have memories of belonging to Brownies or Guides. In conversation, it’s often the uniforms that people mention first – for ex-Brownies it’s always the brown dresses, or the iconic yellow sweatshirt which has now been relaunched for adults as a retro range. I will admit to buying one almost immediately and have loved wearing my tribute to the Jeff Banks design era of uniform that I loved so much as a child.

For those unfamiliar with the organisation, Girlguiding began in 1909 with a small group of girls who joined a Scout rally and bravely asked that there be ‘something for the girls’ too. Today, Girlguiding has four youth sections: Rainbows (aged 4-7), Brownies (7-10), Guides (10-14), and Rangers (14-18).

I’m particularly excited to go back to our weekly meetings after the school holidays because a new range of interest badges have just been launched for all sections – 78 in total! These badges are designed so that girls can choose which activities they’d like to pursue – either a new skill or hobby or learning something new. Each badge fits into one of our six distinct programme areas: Be Well, Express Myself, Skills for My Future, Take Action, Know Myself, and Have Adventures.

A lot of the publicity surrounding the badges has been really positive – praising the organisation for representing the interests of young people. The badges were designed, after all, with the input of members and with extensive testing by groups across the UK, and feedback from 11,000 girls about the new badge offerings. My Brownie unit enjoyed being part of the testing pool for the ‘Passions’ badge, which encouraged them to think more deeply about the hobbies they have and try some new pursuits. Reading the final version of the badge when it was released was brilliant because I could really see the impact of the Brownies’ feedback.

I’ve been disappointed to see the organisation’s new badges be subject to some heavy media criticism and that headlines have been tailored to mock, rather than share the relevant and interesting content that the badges actually offer. The Telegraph used the current tensions around gender identity to create a clickbait title: “Girlguiding ‘hostess’ badge gets gender-neutral makeover” which, inevitably, caused a flurry of (largely unpleasant) Facebook comments about identity politics. While the article itself does well to describe some of the new badge offerings, leading with a controversial heading detracts from the truth that the previous ‘hostess’ badge was discontinued as part of the programme refresh and that member feedback brought about a return of a similar offering.

Victoria Richards writes in The Independent that: ‘Girlguiding is […] modernising the way it interacts with young people. Speaking their language. After all, what use is an organisation for girls if nobody wants to join it?’

This does not seem to be the opinion of Lucy Mangan who writes a particularly scathing indictment of the movement in general and in a large part advocates for teaching children how to use a gun and cut down trees. Obviously unfamiliar with the Girlguiding programme, she misses that our new interest badges are just that – part of a programme that encourages girls to pursue their own interests and often to try something new! “Interest” simply means that we allow girls to choose for themselves what they are interested in learning more about. We remain dedicated to teaching core life skills (things like first aid, I’d argue, rather than using a gun) as part of the Skills Builder set of badges that progress through each section.

An opinion piece in The Express says: ‘The new Girl Guide badges are so easy, it’s like awarding a gold star for blinking’… This simply isn’t true; even the youngest members are encouraged to try something new or improve on a skill. It’s strange that none of these critical articles come from current members or leaders. Sometimes we do offer badges for participation at an event or marking on occasion but part of the joy of those is collecting them. I love looking for a badge patch when I’m on holiday and adding them to my camp blanket. There are some fantastic blankets out there – with badges from people’s travels, awards they’ve earned, and badges they’ve swapped with others they’ve met at events.

Why shouldn’t we be encouraging our youngest members to have courage?

Most articles – including the BBC – have chosen to lead articles with the range of badges that fall under ‘Be Well’ or ‘Know Myself’ and are therefore designed to help young people learn valuable skills in self-care and identifying the things that are important to them. They are, by nature, designed to help young people learn more about themselves and how they interact with the world.

This leads readers to believe that all badges are ‘self-centred’ as critics like Mangan have written. Why shouldn’t we be encouraging our youngest members to have courage? Girlguiding’s research has shown that 50 per cent of girls surveyed felt anxious about their future in 2024. Showing girls how to manage feelings of worry from a young age can only be a good thing. Our Rainbows are encouraged to “share the laughter with someone else.” Brownie Guides are working on their friendship badge are asked to “spend time with a new or old friend”.

Dig a little further and look to the other interest badges and there can be no doubt that the programme Girlguiding offers is important and helps young people to challenge themselves and build new skills. The activities offered are relevant to the concerns of young people and the betterment of their communities. Rangers are supported to learn more about voting and how to ensure their voice is heard. In a world with fast fashion and markets like Temu dominating digital spaces, Guides can find out how to make informed decisions as part of their Conscious Consumer badge.

Brownies can learn new languages or work towards their Mechanic badge. Even the youngest girls have the chance to learn about key principles of architecture in their Construction badge – the full syllabus of which is online. For critics who say that traditional skills like knot tying, sewing, or semaphore are forgotten by Girlguiding, all of these can be found in our Skills Builders and unit meeting activities. It can be so easy to be critical of something new or something that is changing without doing any further research to find out whether the headlines are accurate. Clickbait headlines are designed to drive up traffic and revenue, but something of the truth is lost in the process.

I am incredibly proud to be part of an organisation that offers a rich, varied programme to young people. It has helped me grow from an anxious primary school child to a leader who can recognise the value of teaching life skills that are relevant to our time and place. Right now, girls need to have the resources and support to thrive in both the tangible world, and in an increasingly digital world.

For those disheartened by the reception of the new badges, it’s worth looking to smaller news outlets. Those who have taken the time to garner responses from members and young people are much more encouraging and help to celebrate an exciting new step in our programme. I hope that those who can see the value of the programme offered to girls through Girlguiding can use this opportunity to find out more. If anything in this article has resonated with you, please do check out volunteer opportunities.

From someone who likes to incorporate things like Star Trek into my academic work, why shouldn’t we be able to offer a badge about Fandoms? Why shouldn’t we celebrate the things that we enjoy? There really is something for every girl, even if the loudest voices in Facebook comment sections don’t make that clear. I’m incredibly proud to be part of an organisation that brings out the best in young people (and in me as an adult leader!).

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now

Article

Comment

Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.