The shameful history of silence on child abuse
While we pore over the details of the allegations against Jimmy Savile, we turn a blind eye to other forms of exploitation
Nick Cohen
The Observer, Sunday 7 October 2012
Christopher Marlowe's most quoted exchange comes in The Jew of Malta when Bernardine, a friar, tries to accuse the antihero Barabas of murder. "Thou hast committed…" he begins. "Fornication?" interrupts Barabas as he deflects attention from a capital crime to a charge too footling for serious people to care about. "But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead."
Barabas's cool assertions that no one could prove a sex charge – "but that was in another country" – and no one need care – "and besides, the wench is dead" – have haunted writers and audiences for centuries. TS Eliot used them at the beginning of Portrait of a Lady to illustrate male indifference to female suffering. Colin Dexter and PD James wove them into their thrillers.
I doubt if the words of Peter Rippon, the editor of Newsnight, will ring down the ages. But they ought to be remembered for the Marlovian dismissiveness with which he explained why he had canned an investigation into Jimmy Savile. "Newsnight is not normally interested in celebrity exposé," he said as he emphasised that he was a high-brow journalist rather than one of those grubby hacks Hugh Grant and Lord Justice Leveson so disapprove of. "What was the public interest served by reporting it, given he is dead? The nature of the allegations and the level of proof required. The fact the incidents were 40 years ago."
Rippon left it to others to allege that Savile had abused the young from the 1960s on BBC premises and charitable homes for abandoned children. He regrets what he said now, particularly as the BBC's management, who, if the allegations are correct, did nothing to stop Savile, appear to be thinking of making a sacrificial offering of his career. Nevertheless, the excuses given for keeping quiet are as important as the facts of a case. With child sex scandals, there is an unnerving consistency. The abuse happened a long time ago; no one can prove it; respectable people should not take the allegations seriously; no one need care.
If I believed in a divinity, I would call the child abuse scandal that has destroyed the Roman Catholic church's reputation in Europe and North America divine justice. As I do not, I will stick to its repellent symmetries with the Savile affair. Abusive priests were once like celebrities. They were big figures in their parishes. They performed good works, as Savile did for charity. The children they groomed were rough boys and girls under the church's control. Who would want to believe their stories, even if the abused found the courage to tell them? When enough men and women found that courage, and the scandal could no longer be denied, the church switched from defending victimisers to playing the victim.
"From GHod comes the courage not to be intimidated by petty gossip," said Pope Benedict XVI, as he presented the accusations of the powerless as acts of aggression. In a moment beyond satire, the preacher to the Vatican household, one Father Raniero Cantalamessa, went further and compared criticism of the church's record on child abuse to "the more shameful aspects of anti-semitism". The powerful were now the persecuted. Their victims were the modern equivalent of the Nazis.
It is a familiar inversion. When journalists hinted that "Jimmy liked them young", Savile replied that he did not like children at all – a revealing response in retrospect. He accounted for the gossip by saying that he was a famous man and a single man and his enemies made malicious assumptions on that basis. The celebrity, like the priest, was the true object of pity. His accusers were fantasists or worse.
Irish atheist friends, who have learned from experience not to believe a word that emanates from the Catholic hierarchy, tell me that they smell a whiff of Protestant prejudice in British condemnations of Catholic backwardness. They are right to believe we have no grounds for feeling superior. The English judicial hierarchy has shown itself to be equally unconcerned with the abuse of children. In the case of Roman Polanski, the judiciary imitated the Pope and all his cardinals by staring evidence of child abuse in the face and then turning the other way. Polanski, you may remember, had fled to France to avoid punishment for having sex with a 13-year-old girl he had supplied with drink and drugs in LA.
If you want to know why the British press only hinted at Savile's predilections, look at what happened when Polanski asked the English courts for permission to sue Vanity Fair for saying he had propositioned a woman while he was on the way to his wife's funeral. A terrible thing to say of a man of good reputation, no doubt, but how could a convicted child abuser living in exile to avoid a prison sentence be said to have a good reputation on matters sexual he could defend in court? The judges not only decided in 2005 that Polanski was a reputable man, paedophilia notwithstanding, they also worried that the Met would arrest him if he visited London. To save him from American justice, they allowed Polanski to give his evidence via video link from Paris.
Chaps who look after other chaps make easy targets for a liberal newspaper. But let me move on from judges and clerics to the many versions of child abuse the politically correct protect. Peter Rippon proved that he wasn't a complete duffer when Newsnight aired a report in July on how thousands of British girls had Type III "infibulation" inflicted on them. Their mothers or grandmothers, or maybe an imam or some other variety of priest or "traditional healer", cut off the inner and outer labia and clitoris with scissors or a knife to form a wall of flesh and skin across the vulva, leaving only a hole the size of a matchstick.
Not one representative from the teaching or medical professions would go on air to explain why they never protested. We live in a country where the law prohibiting genital mutilation has never been enforced; where the authorities go wild when a 15-year-old white girl runs off to France with her teacher but stay silent when Asian girls are yanked out of school and forced into marriage.
The tolerance of child abuse by the old conservative establishment and their multicultural successors shows there is a strong public interest in learning how Jimmy Savile could abuse so many for so long – even though the wretch is dead.
