The Innocent Wanderer: Naming the Wolves on the Path of Needles

Little Red Riding Hood is a tale of innocence betrayed, its roots tangled in centuries-old folklore. A young girl, basket full of gifts, steps into a forest to visit her sick grandmother, only to meet a wolf whose charm hides fangs.

Charles Perrault’s 1697 version is the most popular version that most are familiar with. A curious feature in older tellings, is that the wolf poses a pivotal question: “Which path will you take—the path of needles or the path of pins?” This choice, steeped in the world of sewing, is no mere quirk. Needles, sharp and threading, weave new creations, symbolising risk and transformation; pins, blunt and steady, hold things in place, suggesting safety and conformity. For a girl on the cusp of womanhood, this fork in the road echoes the tension between forging a bold truth and clinging to societal expectations.

Historically, sewing was a rite of passage for young women in 17th- and 19th-century Europe, marking readiness for adulthood. Pins, mass-produced and affordable, were safe tools for securing garments; needles, used for intricate stitching, risked piercing flesh, a metaphor for daring creation. The wolf’s question tests Little Red’s resolve, luring her towards a path that suits his hunger.

This ancient story mirrors a modern tragedy: the UK’s grooming gang scandal, where vulnerable girls were devoured by predators while those in power—paralysed by fears of being called racist—chose silence over truth. Grooming gangs, diverse in culture yet united in harm, wield unique narratives and rituals, each demanding specific confrontation. In a world thinned by digital fluency and unpractised in physical courage, speaking truth to power is no mere act of voice—it’s a battle of body and will, where niceness often masks submission. Like Little Red, we must learn to name the wolves, choose the needle’s piercing path, and stitch a story that protects.

The Forest of Power: Silence as Complicity

Power, in a group analytic lens, is the crowd’s roar—a force that twists truth to serve its own ends. The grooming gang scandal, spanning decades in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford, lays this bare. From the 1990s to the 2010s, thousands of girls—often from care homes or working-class families—were raped, trafficked, and abused. In Rotherham alone, an estimated 1,400 victims suffered (Jay, 2014), predominantly at the hands of British-Pakistani men, though gangs of white British, Kurdish, and other ethnicities operated nationwide. Reports as early as 1997 flagged the abuse, yet police, councils, and social services pinned their hopes on harmony, fearing accusations of racism would spark unrest or derail careers.

The wolf embodies this power, his question of needles or pins a cunning trap. In 17th-century Europe, pins were everyday tools, securing garments with ease, while needles, threading new realities, carried the risk of pain. Elites chose pins, securing their fragile worldview rather than threading the needle of truth. In Rochdale, police dismissed victims as “making lifestyle choices”; in Telford, a victim’s DNA evidence was ignored because she lacked “credibility.” This wasn’t neglect—it was complicity, a collective fawning to social ambition that let wolves roam free.

Diverse Wolves, Specific Rituals

Not all wolves hunt the same. Grooming gangs, while unified in exploiting vulnerability, vary by culture, each with distinct narratives and rituals that demand precise confrontation. British-Pakistani gangs, like those in Rotherham, used younger men to “love-bomb” girls with gifts, exploiting racial dynamics by warning victims their families were “racist” for objecting. Taxi drivers and takeaway workers formed networks, passing girls to older men for rape and trafficking, sometimes invoking religious extremism to justify shame and control. White British offenders, the majority of UK child sex abusers, often leverage familial or institutional roles—priests, teachers, lone predators—relying on trust in authority. Other groups, like Kurdish or Albanian gangs, use street-level coercion or organised trafficking.

Naming these specifics is to choose the needle’s path. In folklore, the path of needles—linked to tailoring and transformation—was riskier, requiring skill to thread a new reality. To call out British-Pakistani taxi networks risks cries of Islamophobia; to highlight white institutional abusers invites accusations of damaging institutions’ reputation, hyperbole, or troublemaking. Yet pins, which hold the status quo, betray victims. The wolf’s charm, like these gangs’ narratives (“others do it too” or “we’re pillars of society”), deflects scrutiny. We must thread the needle, naming rituals—taxi networks, religious rhetoric, institutional trust—without fear, or the forest remains a hunting ground.

The Body’s Betrayal in a Thinned World

Truth isn’t just spoken—it’s lived in the body. Yet our bodies, shaped by a world of hashtags and likes, seem to increasingly falter when threat looms. The grooming scandal exposes this social thinning—a loss of skill in navigating physical exchange. Victims and families begged for help, only to face dismissal. In Rochdale, a girl raped nightly by dozens of men was arrested for being “drunk” while her abusers walked free. Police, social workers, even parents hesitated, their instincts dulled by social rhetoric —a fawning reflex to avoid conflict or prejudice.

In Little Red Riding Hood, Little Red’s body doesn’t scream run when the wolf speaks kindly. Her courtesy, like ours, betrays her. Carl Jung captured this, writing, “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other” (Jung, 1970, p. 87). Those importantly focussed on critquing group power—racial dynamics, institutional privilege— can sometimes miss the specific relational call to act now, leaving girls to face the wolf alone. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil deepens this: perpetrators weren’t monsters but ordinary men—taxi drivers, fathers—whose complicity thrived in a system that pinned blame on victims. Officials, convinced in their own virtuous crusade, were blind to the wolf at the door, paralysed by high-level, large group politics while the individual girls suffered alone.

We universally condemn predators, yet when faced with the immediate need to protect a child, hesitation creeps in. Why these abusers? Why not others? We acknowledge the harm abusers inflict, but when survivors present the psychological wounds they bear, responses turn dismissive. Why can’t they move on?

A Rotherham survivor described how her abuser’s “kind” gestures and warmth disarmed her—a reminder that social niceties distort our instincts, leaving us unpracticed in identifying danger. This thinning of awareness makes us vulnerable—outspoken in digital outrage but inept in real-world confrontation, hesitant to trust intuition over politeness.

The sheer scale of the scandal—thousands of victims, while authorities deferred—demands that we recondition our bodies to act. Niceness must be recognized as a potential warning, not a shield against discomfort. We must choose decisiveness over appeasement, and like the fabled path of needles, embrace vigilance even when it is painful, rather than clinging to the deceptive ease of silence.

Wickedness and the Shadow of Jamie Bulger

In 1993, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables—two ten-year-olds from troubled homes—abducted and murdered two-year-old Jamie Bulger. Their backgrounds of poverty and abuse raise the old question: is evil innate or learned?

• Nurture: Research links early trauma and neglect to later aggression, showing how systemic failures thread a path toward cruelty.

• Nature: Yet most abused children do not become killers—a temperament or biological predisposition must play a role.

Wickedness is a braid of both forces. To blame only “monstrous nature” or only “broken systems” is to choose the pin: comforting but false. We must thread that multiple needles - acknowledging personal predispositions, group failings and environmental context.

Reflections from the Forest’s Edge

As I linger on Little Red Riding Hood and the disturbances of Rotherham, Rochdale, and the Bulger tragedy, I’m struck by the weight of the needle’s path. How do we pierce the horror without losing ourselves in its complexity? The grooming scandal, with its thousands of victims and continued silencing enablers, resists easy answers. The wolf’s question—needles or pins—haunts us. Pins offer comfort, a way to pin down chaos with broad strokes of political knowing, but they betray the vulnerable. Needles, sharp and unsteady, demand we face the specific, the individual cry, even when it risks pain or backlash. Yet who are we to thread such a delicate truth through a forest so dark?

The banality of the wolves—ordinary men, ordinary systems—unsettles me most. It’s not just the groomers or the killers but the countless moments where love, as Jung said, gave way to social power. I wonder about the girls, their baskets of trust shattered, and how our thinned world failed them, our bodies too slow to act. Going to quickly to superior knowing best rather than staying with their pain. I think of the Bulger boys, shaped by a neglectful world, or the innocent Pakistani men who bear absolutely no guilt yet now forced to live under suspicion’s shadow. Can we hold the specificity of harm? Can we retrain our instincts to see the wolf’s charm for what it is, or are we doomed to avoid? Staying with the detailed stiching work that requires pinpoint accuracy to navigate our way through the complexity

These questions linger, unanswered, as I stand at the forest’s edge. The needle’s path is no promise of mastery—it’s a fragile thread, weaving resilience from pain, clarity from chaos. For the wanderers still in the wood, we owe them this: to keep asking, to keep threading, to keep naming the wolves, even when our hands tremble.

References

• Jay, A. (2014). Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham 1997–2013. Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council. https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham

• Jung, C. G. (1970). Civilization in Transition (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 10).

• Perrault, C. (1697). Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. In Histoires ou contes du temps passé.