The Crimes Hidden in the Countryside: The Summer Camp Leader Who Abused Children

What I never imagined was that it would be a criminal investigation into something so sick and sinister, rooted in such a familiar part of the world, that I already knew the short journey there without even needing to set maps off on my phone.

If you ask most people to picture a summer camp leader, they’ll reach instinctively for words like kindness, compassion, trust. At the very least, you assume morality.

Those assumptions are the foundation on which parents leave their children in the care of strangers and on which communities allow charities to operate largely unquestioned.

None of those words, however, can be reconciled with Jon Ruben, the man who ran the Stathern Children’s Holiday Fund.

On paper, the charity’s aims were heartwarming and honourable.

According to the Charity Commission, it existed to run holiday camps that helped children from disadvantaged backgrounds build self‑confidence and grow into positive members of the community.

It is difficult to argue with an objective like that, and for nearly three decades Ruben ran camps under precisely that banner.

To the outside world, this was philanthropy in action: giving children experiences they might otherwise never have had, in a countryside setting that felt wholesome and safe.

That appearance of safety was the smokescreen. Behind it lay a reality that is almost unbearable to even imagine. Ruben, a retired veterinary surgeon, abused the trust placed in him in the most calculated way imaginable.

By lacing sweets with drugs such as diazepam, he ensured that children were sedated to allow him to carry out sexual abuse unnoticed. It is the kind of detail that turns your stomach, not just because of the acts themselves but because of the manipulation of parents, guardians and an entire community.

For those of us who know the area, the shock was profound.

This is a quiet, rural corner of the East Midlands where serious crime rarely intrudes on daily life. News tends to travel by word of mouth and group chats, not push notifications.

Yet suddenly phones buzzed with breaking news alerts, and within hours the world’s media had descended on a single‑track lane, complete with a humpback bridge so blind you have to sound your horn before driving over it. Satellite vans and journalists jostled for space in a setting more accustomed to tractors than TV crews.

There is something uniquely disturbing about seeing global headlines attached to places you associate with your childhood.

This case is not just about one man’s crimes. Rather, it is about how easily trust can be weaponised, and how vulnerable children become when systems designed to protect them rely too heavily on reputation and good intentions.

For a community like Stathern, the damage will linger long after the cameras have gone. For those children, and their families, the impact is immeasurable.

Police also believe it has the possibility of reaching back decades through Jon Ruben’s running of these camps, and they’ll now be turning their attention to trying to identify if there are victims of previous camps and that it has the potential to become one of the biggest historical child abuse cases.

It’s a stark reminder that whilst the countryside can seem quiet and peaceful, sometimes master manipulators and abusers use it to their advantage for that very reason.

They take their depravity to corners where they think they’ll go undetected and unstopped.

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George Icke is a Reporter for LBC.

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