UNITED KINGDOM
The Conversation
Chris Greer
Professor of Sociology at City University London
Eugene McLaughlin
Professor of Criminology at City University London
For all its extraordinary impact, the Jimmy Savile scandal has not unfolded in an exceptional way. The media and justice systems’ treatment of the affair is only the latest example of a relatively new type of scandal: the institutional child sex abuse scandal.
Institutional CSA scandals emerged only recently as a focus for sustained public concern because of the longstanding taboos that for decades kept child abuse hidden from ‘official’ visibility and marginalised from UK public debate. These taboos were only challenged in the 1980s by sustained feminist campaigning, media coverage, and public testimony from individual survivors, finally making open allegations possible and the pursuit of justice for victims a political priority. Yet because news coverage of abuse continued to focus on the dominant idea of “stranger danger” and the powerful image of the “predatory paedophile”, still little attention was paid to the more prevalent problems of institutional and familial abuse.
Since the 1980s, a succession of scandals has exposed the sexual abuse of children in care homes, schools, universities and various religious institutions, and forced the problem of institutional child sexual abuse onto the political and journalistic agenda.
Through an empirical examination of the Savile story, we have been developing a model of how institutional child sexual abuse scandals unfold. This model is also applicable to past scandals of this type; it shows how the Savile case, far from being anomalous, has in fact followed an established pattern. Understanding that pattern can help identify the forces which keep these stories from emerging – and the ones that drive them once they do.
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