The plain old class prejudice levelled at these girls by the Left was hateful and all too predictable
PAUL BIRCH
A version of this article appears in The European Conservative
This week, ‘Sophie of Dundee’ was exonerated. The girl who was smeared, mocked and condemned online has now been proved right. She and her friends said they’d been forced to defend themselves from an abusive man. The online mob called them liars. The court showed who was telling the truth.
The image that spread online was unforgettable, and an equally memorable meme soon followed. It all happened on a street in Dundee, Scotland, in August 2025. A blurred still from phone footage showed one of the girls holding a knife and an axe, her face etched in fear. This wasn’t the face of a swaggering thug as the Left would have had us believe. It was the face of a frightened child. Because she is a minor, her name has never been published. So the internet gave her one – ‘Sophie of Dundee’.
Some people saw at once what was in front of them. Yet another British working class girl pushed into fear and self-protection because nobody else was coming to help. But plenty of others preferred a different story. They mocked the girls, cast ‘Sophie’ as the real menace and laced their abuse with all the familiar, hackneyed class snobbery. The jokes about Irn-Bru were not harmless digs. They were signals – this is the kind of girl we are allowed to despise.
But ‘Sophie’ wasn’t lying, and Dundee Sheriff Court has now established that. This week, a Bulgarian man, Ilia Belov, was found guilty of making sexual remarks to the girls. The court heard that he said, “Hello sexy, I’ll show you a good time.” When the girls called him a creep, he didn’t back off. He got angry, phoned his sister, Nadjedzha Belova, and the confrontation got worse.
Belova arrived and assaulted one of the girls, pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground and hitting her on the head. One girl’s mother said it was heartbreaking to watch the CCTV footage of her daughter being beaten. The sheriff was clear about the blame. It began with Belov’s abhorrent comments directed at a child.
Then came the second attack and, arguably, the most damaging one – the internet. The pile on against the girls, and especially against ‘Sophie’, added fresh misery to those ordinary families who were already dealing with the real world fallout. After the verdict, one of the mothers said simply that the girls had told the truth and, for that, had been slandered.
That is exactly what happened here. First, sexual remarks from an adult man and an assault by an adult woman. Then, abuse from strangers online; strangers who talk about ‘being kind’. And running through it all was the customary prejudice – the old sneer that some girls count for less than others.
Why were these girls doubted so quickly and mocked so eagerly? The answer isn’t complicated. They are working class, and in polite opinion that means disposable. Too many people heard their accents, looked at their appearance, and decided that they already knew the story. They didn’t see children in danger. They saw the kind of people they had been schooled and encouraged to look down upon. And those attitudes take us into very dark places, such as allowing an ecosystem to develop which allowed the industrial rape of young children in towns and cities across Britain.
That smug caricature of ‘Sophie’ and company fell apart in court. The sheriff described the girls’ evidence as truthful and well presented. So much for the lazy picture of violent, feral kids. So much for the people who watched one clip, felt the rising bile of class contempt and declared the case closed.
And that is what gives this story its force. It isn’t solely about ‘Sophie’. It is about the perennial habit of dismissing working class people – especially girls. Their testimony was brushed aside and they were considered inherently less believable than the migrants who attacked them. Because, in the eyes of the chattering classes, migrants are inherently good, while British working class kids are inherently bad. Class in the United Kingdom doesn’t just shape how people live; it shapes who gets heard, who gets defended and who gets written off.
This case reveals a settled custom in British public life. Working-class girls are left exposed by a state which is meant to look after them, then they are doubted and vilified when, upon being failed, they dare to speak. The people who advertise their own compassion most loudly are the quickest to withdraw it when the girl in question comes from the wrong background. Sympathy is reserved for the approved victim. Everyone else can be discarded. That is the rule this case lays bare. Not compassion, but selection. Not principle, but taste.
A culture that can watch vulnerable girls attacked, humiliated, disbelieved and smeared – yet still feel righteous – isn’t merely hypocritical. It is decaying.
This article (So ‘Sophie’ Was Right, After All) was created and published by Paul Birch and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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