The Land That Forgot About Wolves

Softness, and where it gets us

History is nothing but the pattern of silken slippers descending a staircase to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.

-Voltaire

As a father raising daughters, I often reflect on the lessons that it is important to impart to girls about men. To pre-pubescent girls being raised in 2025, men are basically mystifying creatures - generally encountered fleetingly, if ever, as ‘so-and-so’s Dad’; a vaguely grumpy and unsympathetic presence who turns up to bring an end to play time with friends or to give them a lift from A to B. Male primary school teachers are becoming vanishingly rare - obscure relics who float, coelacanth-like, through the deep oceans of the educational establishment; though they occasionally turn up trapped in fishing nets, they are for the most part known only in rumour. Due to the widespread shrinking of extended families, uncles and grandfathers and older cousins are simply fewer in number than they would otherwise have been in times past. And churchgoing and other opportunities for intergenerational socialising are much diminished. In short, many girls these days get to know very little about men other than their own fathers (and sometimes, even, not them).

This means that it is important to devote a bit of conscious thought to the matter of teaching girls what men are like - chiefly so that they learn how to discern between good ones and bad ones. And the most elementary lesson in this regard is indeed that there really are good men and bad men; the former being those who are strong, protective, nurturing and competent, and the bad ones being akin to wolves.

Some men, that is, are simply to be understood as predators. And the important thing about these wolf-like men, the really only salient thing to know, is that they are out to get you. They may have their reasons for being the way they are - bad upbringings, ‘systemic’ factors, abnormal genes, whatever - but those reasons are not worth trying to understand or get to know. The predatory nature of these men is better thought of, heuristically, as merely instinctive, intuitive, innate. It may not simply literally be ‘the way they are’ and that’s that, but that is how they should be treated: like, to reach for a different animal metaphor, the fabled scorpion who can only sting. And, having been conceptualised in this way, they can be treated in the most appropriate fashion: exclusion, expulsion, and, where necessary, with violence.

The people who used to tell fairy tales in the rural parts of Europe would impart this message to girls at least partially through stories that were centred precisely around wolves. Think of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘The Three Little Pigs’, ‘The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats’, and so on. In each of these tales the wolf comes with one intention: to prey on somebody, or bodies, young and innocent. And in each, the danger is archetypal. We don’t get any speculation about why the wolf is the way he is or any suggestion that he might be redeemable. He has come to devour, and the response is correspondingly straightforward: the wolf has to die.

The image of the fairy tale wolf no doubt has lots of semiotic resonances but the most obvious (beyond the literal danger of wolves themselves, I suppose) is that of the sexually predatory male. The message of these tales is that although there are good people in the world (your grandmother, the woodcutter, the little pig who made his house out of bricks), it is also inhabited by dangerous actors who want to do bad things to you. And since these actors will often come in disguises, pretending to be nice - and particularly when your mother and/or father has gone out or is otherwise not present - be on your guard. Learn to discern the benevolent from the malign.

Up until the point at which I grew up, at least, these tales were unsqueamish, and often bordered on the sadistic. In the Grimm versions of ‘Little Red-Cap’ and ‘The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats’ the wolf is despatched by slicing it open and filling it with rocks, so that it respectively collapses dead under the weight, or drowns when trying to drink from a river. In the ‘Three Little Pigs’ stories of my youth, when the wolf climbs down the chimney of the house made of bricks, he is boiled alive in a cauldron at the bottom and then eaten. I have vivid memories of, as a child, reading an illustrated version of ‘Little-Red Riding Hood’ in which the wolf is brutally beheaded by the woodcutter’s axe - with the head being flung across the grandmother’s bedroom by the force of the blow, spraying blood. And in some version of these tales, of course, the wolf is cut open so that the people who he has devoured can be dragged out, miraculously alive.

These endings are cathartic, but they have symbolic importance: the wolf, to repeat, is not worth making the effort to get to know, or to redeem. Yes, he may be able to make the legitimate argument that he is hungry, and that human beings after all eat other animals, too. Perhaps he has a wife and children he needs to support. Perhaps the humans have been intruding in his territory and scaring away his prey. Perhaps winter is on its way. But it is not worth dwelling on these explanations when confronted with his sharp fangs and ravenous hunger. In that moment, he ought to be treated simply and straightforwardly as a threat.

The implied heuristic laid out by these tales then, if I can summarise, is twofold:

1. The world contains predators who may be very cunning and resourceful and who may not be what they appear; and

2. Predators have to be ‘terminated with extreme prejudice’ when they have come to your doorway to eat you.

And, again, layered on top of this is the important semiotic resonance: this does not just apply to wolves but to the wolf-like across the piece. And since there are men who are to all intents and purposes wolf-like - girls do not have to know precisely in what respect they are wolf-like, as long as they understand it in the abstract - the same reasoning needs to be applied to them. They are predatory, cunning and resourceful, they may not be what they appear, and they need to be terminated (I of course do not mean this exactly literally) when they have made you a target.

Just hungry after all

This is a simple but very important lesson for girls to learn - wolf-like men are destructive, and they are especially destructive of the lives of women. But we seem to have stopped teaching this lesson somewhere along the line. We seem indeed in recent years to have arrived at an almost opposite set of predicates: that it is terribly important that we try to redeem, or at least carefully manage, the wolf-like in light of the fact that there are always external causes at play. We are not to merely treat them as inherently and ineluctably dangerous; we are to give them the benefit of the doubt and subdue them gently, with kindness. And we are to try to understand why they are the way they are, so that we can ideally dissuade them from their lupine preoccupations and bring them in from the cold. And it is instructive, in this regard, to examine fictional treatments of wolves and the wolf-like in current, rather than traditional, children’s story-telling.

One curious element of becoming a parent is that it forces you to confront changes in the culture very directly. It is easy, having grown out of childhood, to imagine that it remains roughly the same, and that children are taught the same things they have always been taught and that children’s entertainment is basically unchanged. When you become a parent, though, twenty years or so after having left childhood yourself, you quickly realise that things have transformed rapidly and that a lot of the old certainties have not just been questioned, but thrown out of the window.

And these changes likewise have their semiotic resonances. Nowadays, it seems, the wolf as a figure representing danger has, if not entirely disappeared from popular children’s entertainment, then transmogrified into something very different. And its symbolic importance has likewise shifted to something altogether new. I’d like to hold up for analysis here three exhibits from BBC childrens’ TV programming featuring wolves, which, if you are reading in the UK, you can watch along - but don’t worry if you are not; the discussion is not complicated and you will get the gist.

The first of the exhibits is Little Red Riding Hood: A CBeebies Ballet. This is one of a series of programmes in which actual ballet dancers (I think in all cases from Northern Ballet) perform a ballet fairy tale in front of a group of school children and one of the adult presenters from CBeebies, the BBC channel for younger children. During the performance, these on-camera viewers provide a commentary on what is happening and explain it to the audience.

These programmes are mostly harmless, semi-educational fun - the type of thing which the BBC excels in: producing nice, free things for bourgeois people. It is hard to imagine that the series would have any hand in transforming working- or lower-middle class viewers into ardent ballet enthusiasts, but as fantasies go that is not an entirely unpleasant one, if one is willing to overlook the deep injustice that is the BBC license fee itself.

In Little Red Riding Hood, we see ‘Little Red’ going to visit her grandmother with a basket of treats, as in the original. And, sure enough, we discover that there is a wolf lurking in the forest. But he is curiously un-wolf life. With bunny-like ears and a fluffy tail he looks more like a fox, and his behaviour is flighty, cowardly, almost effete. And we quickly find out that he has no interest in eating ‘Little Red’ or her grandmother or anybody else. Arriving at grandma’s house, he sneaks inside in search of honey and hides under her bed. When the old lady goes off for a nice hot bath, he then comes out of hiding to raid her kitchen. But he is spooked by the arrival of ‘Little Red’. Quickly, he puts on grandma’s clothes and glasses as an improbable disguise, and dives under the bed covers.

He then pretends to have a nasty cold and ‘Little Red’ offers him a selection of cakes, before finally discovering, after examining his big eyes, big ears, big teeth, etc., that he is actually a wolf. But don’t worry! He does not intend to harm a single hair on her head. He just has a rumbly tummy. And when grandma comes back from her bath, she and ‘Little Red’ share their treats with the wolf and everybody lives happily ever after. ‘He was just hungry after all,’ one of the adult presenters exclaims, simperingly, towards the end; we are presumably supposed to overlook that this was also true of the wolf who, in the authentic version of the tale, gobbled up ‘Little Red’ and her granny.

In Musical Storyland: The Three Little Pigs, the second of our exhibits, meanwhile, we get a narrated cartoon account of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ set to a pleasant live musical accompaniment. In this version of the famous tale, we see our little pigs making their houses of straw, sticks and bricks respectively in the ordinary way. And sure enough the Big Bad Wolf then duly turns up, hungry.

Here the wolf does at least look like a wolf, and he does at least seem to have come in search of fresh pork. He approaches the straw and stick houses as standard and dutifully blows them down. But, for some reason, rather than eating the residents, he allows them to escape to the house made of bricks, where they take shelter with the owner. Having failed to blow this third house down, the wolf tries to get in down the chimney, as we have come to expect. But in a break from tradition, he finds waiting at the bottom for him not a cauldron of boiling water but…a compost bin, complete with a recycling logo on the front. And he is not boiled to death, but rather just gets a bit smelly from all the rotten fruit and vegetables he lands in, and decides as a consequence not to bother the little pigs again. A far kinder ending than in older versions, and one that makes absolutely no sense; even my eight-year-old smelled a rat, and wondered why the wolf didn’t just eat all three pigs now that he was inside the house with them. Hadn’t he achieved his goal, after all, smelly or otherwise?

The third exhibit is a new series, Piggy Builders, another ‘Three Little Pigs’ variant. The conceit of this series is that there are three pigs, all of whom are expert builders, living together in a bucolic, sylvan community. The pigs perform various tasks for their neighbours, organise picnics, and so on - the typical things that ‘goodies’ do in childrens’ TV series. But they are bothered by Wilf, a ‘lazy and selfish wolf’ who ‘interferes with piggies’ projects and rubs his paws in glee at the prospect that his meddling will mess things up for them’.

Wilf is what passes as the villain of the piece. In the first episode, the plot revolves around his attempt to steal a pie which the pigs have made for a party for their friends. Taking advantage of the pigs’ known generosity and kindness, he deliberately damages the roof of his house and asks them to come around to fix it. While they are busy on this task, he then sneaks into their house, causes a gigantic mess, and steals the pie. The rest of the episode details how his plan is foiled. In the closing scene, we see him being forced to give up his ill-gotten gains. The pigs, in their goodness, then invite him to the party to have some pie with them, but he refuses in a fit of pique and storms off home. The pigs then, absurdly, reward his bad behaviour by sending him a slice of pie anyway which he devours at the very end.

Earlier, I described the implied heuristic of the traditional fairy tale, in respect of the wolf and the semiotically wolf-like, as ‘the world contains predators who may be very cunning and resourceful and who may not be what they appear…and predators have to be terminated when they have come to your doorway to eat you’. The heuristic implied by these contemporary offerings is, as you will have noticed, rather different. If I can attempt a description, it runs roughly as follows:

1. There are purported predators in the world, but they can be dealt with in three ways:

   1. With some purported predators (like the wolf in the ballet version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’) it is possible to understand their motives, get to know them better, and learn that they are not actually predatory at all - and even to then befriend them.

   2. Some purported predators are genuinely predatory (like the wolf in Musical Storyland) but their bark is worse than their bite. Ultimately, they can be placated or deterred relatively straightforwardly and without doing them any harm.

   3. Some purported predators (like Wilf in Piggy Builders) are better understood as nuisances. In the final analysis harmless, they may nonetheless require careful and ongoing management. Ideally, they can be persuaded to change, but, if not, and if push comes to shove, they can at least be bribed to behave themselves.

2. By default, purported predators should not be harmed. The first resort when encountering anybody should be kindness, and this principle should be applied without discernment. It is only in extremis that active countermeasures should be taken.

What accounts for this change in emphasis no doubt has many possible explanations. But the picture it paints is, in any case, one of complacency, naivety and softness. It is not exactly that we raise our children to imagine that the world lacks threats or dangers - far from it; small children these days are probably the most molly-coddled in human history, protected from the slightest inconvenience lest it do them lasting and irreparable harm. It is rather that we raise them without steel, without edge, without grit, and without any understanding of the virtue of ruthlessness. And this in particular manifests itself in a failure to discern between those who are worth taking the effort to try to understand and redeem, and those who are better treated as merely wolf-like.

Kindness without discernment

Examples of the consequences of this trend are everywhere in modern British life, of course, but given what I have said about the semiotics of the fairy tale wolf and its connection to the sexually predatory male, it is difficult not to draw a line from our changing understanding of the fictional wolf to what is perhaps the most salient political issue of the moment: contemporary attitudes towards the safety of women and girls vis-a-vis matters of asylum and immigration.

Nobody sensible now denies that there is a problem with young, undocumented male immigrants in this regard: the evidence is overwhelming that such men are much more likely than average to commit sexual offences, particularly if they come from certain jurisdictions. And even if they were not, it would still be necessary in the perspective of public safety to ensure that no foreign national committing a sexual offence would ever be allowed to remain in the country in any circumstance at all: it is simply better to have fewer wolves in one’s house than more. Yet we seem to have an extremely difficult time overcoming a squeamishness about taking the correct approach to wolf-like behaviour - or, indeed, really confronting the fact that wolf-like behaviour exists in the first place.

Examples abound, of course: the Zimbabwean pedophile successfully appealing his deportation on the grounds of likelihood of ill-treatment in Zimbabwe itself; the Bangladeshi would-be rapist initially spared deportation because he could be ‘managed in the community’; the Sudanese asylum-seeker who tried to kidnap a 10-year old girl; the two Afghan asylum seekers convicted of raping a 12-year old girl and whose identities were kept secret by police so as not to ‘inflame community tensions’; the Iranian national who raped a 13-year old girl in an alleyway in broad daylight and received only a 7-year sentence because the judge considered him not to be a ‘dangerous person’; and so on, and so forth.

But I was very struck in particular by the recent, bizarre case of Osamah Al-Haddad as almost the perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Mr Al-Haddad is a Yemeni citizen who came to the UK on a student visa and then applied - seemingly on arrival at Heathrow - for asylum. During asylum screening his phone was examined, and found to contain, lo and behold, videos of the sexual abuse of children and, er, of a goat. Yet the system’s reaction was not simply to put this - forgive me for calling a spade a spade - deviant on the next flight back to Cairo, where he had originally embarked. It was rather to entertain his defence that he could not be sent back because he would then have to return to Yemen, where he might end up having to fight for the Houthis. Ultimately he received a 30-week suspended sentence and made subject to a ‘sexual harm prevention order’, but was allowed to remain in the country while his asylum claim is assessed - and is apparently now working as a waiter at a restaurant in Plymouth.

A better symbol of our contemporary confusion about the nature of the wolf-like could hardly be found. Here is a man who is, presumptively, sexually predatory; how else would one describe a man who kept videos of child sexual abuse on his phone? And he has arrived at the border of the country. How is he to be treated?

A society that had a keen understanding of the dangers of wolves would not have difficulties in answering that question. It would examine the implied heuristic stored in its traditional fairy tales, which you will recall runs as follows:

1. The world contains predators who may be very cunning and resourceful and who may not be what they appear; and

2. Predators have to be ‘terminated with extreme prejudice’ when they have come to your doorway to eat you.

And the result of this would be rejection: the presumptively predatory Al-Haddad would be immediately expelled from the jurisdiction. That might have negative consequences for him; it might not be reflective of all of the nuance involved; it might fail to take into account contextual factors or causal variables outside of his control. But the predator, you will recall, is not worth getting to know, nor worthy of redemption: when he is at the door, he is a problem to be solved and nothing more. It is not the responsibility of the woodcutter to worry about the wolf’s well-being; it is the responsibility of the woodcutter to protect the young girl to whom the wolf presents a danger.

Compare this mentality, though, with that of the society whose children are raised on a diet of Piggy Builders and CBeebies Ballet. Here, you will recall, it is acknowledged that there are predators in the world. But you will also recall that, by default, kindness is extended without discernment. It is thought possible to understand the motives of predators and gently placate or deter them - or, at worst, to manage them. And it is thought particularly important than in all of this predators should not be harmed: indeed, the intended victims might even be said to be in some sense responsible for their predators’ safety.

It would be to put the case altogether too strongly to suggest that it is the fault of childrens’ TV programmes that our politicians and our legal system and its various enforcement authorities have become so inept in dealing with the problem of sexual violence committed by immigrants. But the response to Osamah Al-Haddad is nonetheless instructive. Rather than dealing with this presumptively predatory man in an effective way by simply deporting him, the system as such seemed rather to prefer to treat him with an almost pathological level of kindness. It welcomed him into our national home; it made every effort to understand his motives and take them into consideration in how it treated him (it was felt to be terribly important to protect him from being forced to fight in a war); it placed a gentle deterrence in his way (a 30-week suspended prison sentence) and ultimately conceptualised him as an issue that could, with care, be nicely managed - in the form of a sexual harm prevention order, likely placed to prevent him accessing the internet or taking on a job involving interaction with children.

And the end result of this, it goes without saying, is to treat Al-Haddad as something akin to Wilf, the ‘lazy and selfish’ villain of Piggy Builders - pesky, perhaps; a little naughty, admittedly; but still in the end a part of the community: still in the end entitled to a slice of pie despite his misdemeanours. He will remain here, no doubt, at least for months, and probably in perpetuity since he will soon have access to legal advice allowing him to make a claim that deportation to Yemen will qualify as ‘inhuman or degrading treatment’ and a violation of his Article 3 rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. And the risk posed to British women and girls - I will resist jokes about goats, because it really is no laughing matter - ratchets up yet another tiny notch.

And what is true in this particular instance is true in the round. We have lost a concept of the wolf-like, and we have accordingly lost a clear understanding of what is at stake in the debate over immigration and asylum. To put the matter as bluntly as one can: we have forgotten that the safety of women and girls is simply more important than the rights of young men who are trying to enter the country, irrespective of their reasons for doing so. We have forgotten that it is not the job of the would-be victim of a predator to redeem or protect that predator’s well-being, and nor is it the job of a would-be victim to manage the risks associated with a predator’s ongoing presence in his or her home. It is the would-be victim’s right, and common-sense reaction, to exclude and expel - whatever the consequences for the predator himself.

This is a ruthless stance to take, but a necessary one in restoring sanity to our immigration system. Nobody sensible imagines a future scenario emerging in which immigration does not take place at all; nobody sensible insists the rules should be rooted in discriminatory attitudes about race. Yet it is also the case that nobody sensible could possibly have dreamed up a system that would allow a man like Osamah Al-Haddad to enter into and remain in the country. Here we are, though, allowing such men to freely enter and remain on the basis that we are generous enough to manage their presence in perpetuity. We need very quickly to rediscover an understanding of the semiotics of the wolf as our ancestors understood it - to remind ourselves that there is a very clear and obvious division between those who it is necessary to protect and those who we have no responsibility whatsoever to understand, redeem, or assist.

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