Shocked by the BBC Savile Report? Prepare for More of the Same

By Sandra Laville
The Guardian
February 25, 2016

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/25/shocked-bbc-savile-report-prepare-more-of-the-same

Police said Jimmy Savile had been ‘hiding in plain sight’ for decades. Photograph: BBC

A hierarchical organisation, overseeing a climate of fear, where the overriding concern is to protect reputation rather than investigate the sexual abuse of children and young people.

Remind you of anyone? Today it is the BBC taking the onslaught as Dame Janet Smith’s report highlights decades of sexual abuse carried out by Jimmy Savile under the noses of senior managers – whom Smith kindly clears because they “generally did not hear rumours”.

But the BBC can take depressing comfort from overwhelming evidence that it was not and is not alone in its failures.

The Church of England, the Roman Catholic church, leading private schools, local authorities in Oxford, Rotherham, Rochdale, Derby, the police service and numerous other institutions in British public life have all exhibited these same traits.

When a senior police officer first revealed the scale of Savile’s offending three years ago, he noted the entertainer had been “hiding in plain sight” for decades. But the likes of Jimmy Savile, albeit of varying degrees of recidivism, have been hiding in plain sight across many British institutions and within society for years.

We have seen how the establishment, from the then archbishop of Canterbury down, wrote letters of support in 1993 for Church of England bishop Peter Ball when he was first accused of sexual abuse – an intervention which might or might not have led to the decision not to prosecute him then.

The Guardian view on sex abuse after Savile: culture change needed

We have witnessed the repeated failures of police and prosecutors to bring Greville Janner to justice while he was alive and we have noted with alarm how the authorities in ordinary British towns such as Rotherham, Oxford and Derby – to name just a few – treated vulnerable young girls as consenting adults and refused to believe their allegations of horrific sexual abuse.

If reading Smith’s report is shocking, be prepared to be further shocked in the months and years to come as Justice Lowell Goddard opens public hearings investigating up to 25 British institutions over their failures to tackle child abuse and sexual exploitation.

Many of these investigations will examine non-recent child sexual abuse carried out within institutions in plain sight. As such it is likely that an excuse cited repeatedly in Smith’s report – “things were different then” – will be used as a defence by institutions.

But exactly how different? Rape was still rape in the 1970s, the age of consent has been 16 for more than half a century and growing evidence suggests things might not be that different today.

The failures in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford – not in the 1970s but in the last 10 years – included the authorities being concerned to protect reputation, believing underage girls could consent to sex with older men, the scapegoating of victims and a simple refusal to believe.

The independent report on child sexual exploitation in Oxford found police and social workers perceived that girls as young as 11 could consent to sex with men who raped and brutalised them not in 1973 but in 2012.

While one of Savile’s victims was told to “keep your mouth shut, he is a VIP”, a young girl in Oxford who went to the police complaining of rape with her trousers soaked in blood at the crotch, was dismissed as a troublemaker.

And when we hear the Metropolitan police commissioner attempting to swing the pendulum back decades by suggesting complainants of sexual abuse and rape should not automatically be believed, we have to ask how different are things now?

If Goddard can do anything in her mammoth ?17.9m inquiry over the next five years, it will be to expose how similar are the themes threading through abuse scandals from the 1970s, when Savile was allowed to sexually abuse girls on Top of the Pops without reprimand, to today when an underage girl in Rotherham is left in the hands of untouchable child sex abusers because of a culture of impunity.

Abuse of power, exploitation of the vulnerable and voiceless, a failure to believe and a tendency within organisations and the establishment to close ranks, are all timeless themes repeatedly exposed as we, as a society, attempt to drop the scales from our eyes.