Posts Tagged ‘Jimmy Saville’

An extraordinary Liberal party election broadcast from the archive

22/04/2014, 02:18:40 PM

An extraordinary election broadcast from 1974 – Jimmy Saville, followed by Cyril Smith in support of Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberal party (h/t Left Futures)

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Savile’s is not the only face of child abuse in modern Britain

31/10/2012, 07:00:25 AM

by Kevin Meagher

If you remember the 1960’s the old counter-culture quip goes, you weren’t really there.

Jimmy Savile certainly was; and as his torrent of victims attests, they do remember. Perhaps we didn’t have a name for what Savile was doing back then, leaving his victims to face an inarticulate inner torment about what had even happened to them. But they have suddenly found their voice. And now we do know what to call it.

But Jimmy Savile is not an adequate public face for contemporary paedophilia. In fact creepy old bogeymen like Savile, Gary Glitter or Jonathan King actually hamper our understanding of the far more prosaic dangers facing children and young people.

The recent child abuse cases in Rotherham and Rochdale involving gangs of predominantly Pakistani men offers a very different face of 21st century child abuse in Britain, with scores of young girls used as little more than sex slaves passed about by groups of vicious, inhuman child rapists.

But the problem is not confined to just predatory celebrities, or, for that matter, particular ethnic groups. Indeed, the NSPCC says that the majority of child abusers sexually assault children known to them, with about 80 per cent of offences taking place in the home of either the offender or the victim.

But to truly understand and tackle this vile problem in our midst we need to cast the net wider than just the perpetrators.

Just as the BBC must face up to allegations that its premises were systematically used by Savile to procure and abuse young people, so, too, the social workers, teachers, police officers and youth workers who allow vulnerable young people in their charge – like those in Rochdale and Rotherham – to enter into abusive “relationships” under that wretched dogma of making “informed choices” deserve similar sanction.

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