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Dundee Girl, I’m sorry. We rushed to judge you
The public shaming of an innocent 12-year-old portrayed as a feral racist is a salutary lesson for the media
Iain Macwhirter
Sunday June 14 2026, 6.00pm, The Times
We columnists don’t like delivering apologies. It’s frowned upon by the Amalgamated Union of Pundits, Pontificators and Opinionated Trades.
But I feel duty-bound to make an apology to Sophie from Dundee, the 12-year-old girl whom I wrongly suspected of threatening and abusing an immigrant couple in the city’s Lochee area in August last year.
She was widely accused of calling Ilia Belov a “f***ing migrant” before brandishing a knife and an axe. It generated a classic Twitter storm of ignorant indignation.
We learnt last week that she was the one who was wronged. Ilia Belov, 22, was found guilty of assaulting Sophie (not her real name), causing a head injury. His sister, Nadjedzha Belova, 20, admitted assaulting the schoolgirl’s friend by pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground and striking her. The Bulgarian pair will be sentenced on August 5.
This is an extraordinary case — a morality tale for the social media age. We all saw the videos of the tiny “Dundee Girl” shouting at the immigrant pair, waving weapons you’d have thought her barely able to carry. It seemed like an open-and-shut case of feral teenage racism.
That’s pretty much what Police Scotland thought, too, and they issued an initial statement essentially portraying the girls as aggressors. “A Bulgarian couple were approached by youths in St Ann Lane, Dundee,” it said. “A 12-year-old girl has been charged with being in possession of offensive weapons.” Police also warned against “misinformation” on social media about grooming gangs and migrant attacks. “How wrong rabble-rousers Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson were,” claimed a Daily Mail headline.
The paper was referring to the right-wing groups on Twitter/X, who had portrayed Sophie as a patriotic Scot standing against the “Muslim invasion”. Memes portrayed her, blue-faced in tartan, as the “Dundee Braveheart Girl” defending Christian white culture against illegal immigration and grooming gangs.
This was, of course, nonsense. The Belovs were not illegals or asylum seekers, and they were certainly not invaders or a grooming gang. The Braveheart memes were appalling. But in our eagerness to reject the genuinely racist character of the meme-osphere,
people like me ended up tacitly condemning Sophie for the same crime.
She was portrayed as “feral” — the very worst kind of Scottish ned: ignorant, racist, out of control. Sophie’s mother was bombarded with threats and abuse and wrongly called a “crackhead”. After a threat to firebomb her home, she sent Sophie into hiding with a relative.
Police Scotland have admitted that their initial statement “did not fully reflect the situation”. Indeed. And there is a reason for this: a presumption of racism that has become embedded in the police rule book since the days of the Macpherson Report on “institutional racism”. Officers have been under strict instructions to record every incident of alleged racism, whether or not there is any evidence for it.
Police Scotland’s definition of a hate incident is “any incident which is perceived by the victim, or any other person, to be motivated (wholly or partly) by malice and ill-will towards a social group”. There is no requirement of evidence and the “victim” has to be believed. This is what is often called “two-tier” policing.
We saw this presumption of racism play out shockingly in
the murder of Henry Nowak — the Southampton student handcuffed and arrested while he was dying from stab wounds inflicted by his Sikh assailant, who stood nearby falsely claiming to have been racially abused. Police officers have been programmed to believe, initially at least, any accusation of racism. Their jobs depend on it.
There are disturbing echoes of what happened with Sophie, though of course she was not murdered. We rushed to judge her as having been the assailant, not the victim. Like the police, we have been programmed to assume that a confrontation between a white working-class girl and immigrants must involve racism.
Indeed, I think we need to congratulate the Scottish justice system and especially Sheriff Tim Niven-Smith in Dundee sheriff court for getting to the truth of this affair. He said he was satisfied, “beyond reasonable doubt”, that the siblings had been the assailants here and he rejected their claim of self-defence. Sheriff Niven-Smith even congratulated Sophie on her “eloquent” testimony.
This was not an easy adjudication to make in the current febrile climate on race. Had it not been for CCTV evidence showing Nadjedzha Belova dragging and kicking Sophie’s friend, the verdict might have been very different.
As happens all too often when the press are caught with their pants down, the exoneration of the Dundee Girl has received rather less coverage than the assault itself. There has been an embarrassed silence, especially from the Daily Mail, which is usually all over stories about “two-tier” policing. There has been tumbleweed blowing across X, even from the “white power” people.
This is strange, because in journalistic terms this is simply a great story: a real “underdog vindicated” tale, complete with courtroom drama. Were editors afraid they might be accused of encouraging violence in the streets if they amplified this ruling? There’s been no shortage of that anyway as the right and left square up to each other in Glasgow.
Moreover, the case still involves awkward questions. I mean, what was a 12-year-old girl doing walking around with a deadly knife and an axe in the first place? Do pubescent girls feel the need to be armed to the teeth when they venture into Scotland’s housing estates?
I don’t want to appear to criticise Sophie’s mother, who has been through an ordeal. But are Scottish parents aware that some of their children are walking around with a bloodthirsty arsenal in their jeans?
It remains the case that the Braveheart Girl memes on Twitter/X were often racist and universally ill-informed. It was claimed that Sophie had been a victim of
grooming gangs, the mainly Muslim networks that have abused white working-class girls in northern English towns on an industrial scale for several decades. The Belovs may have made sexually motivated comments, “Hey sexy,” etc, but they weren’t Pakistani taxi drivers luring them with drugs.
This affair tells us a lot about the state of race relations and policing, and about attitudes to working-class girls. Perhaps we need someone to dramatise it on TV if only to remind us about the oldest lesson in the journalism book: appearances can deceive.
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