Jimmy Savile

I agree petallus on this day of agreement, about baying crowds round courtrooms.
It is an interesting question about the extent to which the dead have rights.

I thought the day of agreement was yesterday. The dead do not have rights.

I am amazed at how often men justify themselves and others who download pornagraphic photos of children on the grounds that 'they are just looking'.Surely they realise that real children were abused to get these disgusting images?

Er JessM not sure what you reference to the dead means!

My comment was nothing to do with Jimmy Saville.

I am rather confused today to read that the staff at one hospital used to advise the children to 'pretend to be asleep' when Savile made a visit. I can possibly understand people being in awe of him [as their benefactor] and perhaps scared of losing their jobs, but how could they know he was abusing children and not say anything?

Apparently, according to the news I heard on the radio, he was in the habit of choosing one of the nurses to take to his private apartment at Stoke Mandeville. And it was adults who were being advised to pretend to be asleep.

The article I read said it was patients that were advised to pretend to be asleep [didn't give specific ages], but that nurses were chosen to go to his room.

Surely professional adult women like nurses would not have been forced to go to his room ?

Yes, crimson - adult patients. The one I heard said she'd been 28 at the time.

I an wondering if this tells us something about the nature of our deference to celebrities and "important people".
Not only were the powerless victims were afraid to speak out, but other people believed he was somehow good by virtue of his fame and therefore did not believe victims or complied with his behaviour. We are a deferent, hierarchical lot in this country. (specially English people maybe - i think us Celts are a bit more stroppy and less willing to doff our caps?) But all goes back to the class system perhaps?
Malcolm Gladwell once wrote about airline crashes and how the safest pilots come from the least deferent (sp?) nations - i.e. NZ and Australia. Where they make a virtue about not being deferent (rebellion against their pommie forebears?)
Pilots from these countries were the most likely to tell air traffic control that is was a bloody emergency and they really DO need to release them a runway NOW or co-pilots most likely to challenge the judgements of captains.

deferential, JessM?

Turns my stomach to think of the people who turned a blind eye because 'he gives a lot to charity' have they any idea of the legacy they have given to those women I hope they can sleep at night.

There is no point wondering why people didnt blow the whistle on Jimmy Savile decades ago. The reason is quite simple, until the 1990s the routine abuse of women, groping etc etc was not considered to be anything serious. It was just shrugged off as one of the hazards of being female. If young girls were involved, even girls barely in their teen,s it was they who were always blamed for what happened to them becaused they had 'enticed' the man to take liberties with them or had gone somewhere they shouldnt ought to be so were fair game.

Do you remember all those jokes about vicars and choir boys and NSIT (not safe in taxis) after the names of Debs Delights in debutante's address books? Complain or object and you would be told that you couldnt take a joke or that it was a compliment that some indadequate found you attractive enough to grope, generally such inadequates would grope anything in knickers under 50.

Back in the early days of post-war feminism when women graduates aspired to be something other than secretaries or teachers, the best way for an inadequate male to put down an uppity woman was to be sexually aggressive.

Jimmy Savile's narrow interest only in pubescent and immediately pre-pubescent girls may well have caused comment and been considered pervy, but then the girls themselves would have been considered old enough to know what they were up to. In the 60s and 70s popstars and popgroups were pursued by groupies who couldnt wait to bed a Beetle, or a Stone, or whatever. Most were over 16 but a lot werent and there cannot be a single popstar of that period who hasnt at some time bedded an under age girl.

I am not defending what happened forty years ago but I am just getting fed up by the virtuous inability to understand why nobody blew the whistle at the time. The answer is, Jimmy Savile was sailing close to the wind, clearly some people were uneasy about him, but in the 60s, 70s, the age of sexual freedom and irresponsibility, anything went and men like Savile could get away with it.

This seems to have been going on throughout the 80's and some of the 90's. I suppose we can exonerate St. Cliff from sleeping with underage girls, at least.

Excellent post FlicketyB that just about sums it up.

I was talking with a group of friends, remembering how it was back then. Lots of groping and certainly everyone knew underage groupies made a beeline for pop stars and celebrities. These days we consider the pop stars should resist the groupies as they are more mature and older but that wasn't the attitude then.

What puzzles me about JS is that he made no effort to hide his activities (which is what paedophiles usually do) and I don't think he considered himself to be a paedophile. I think many people in the know at the time didn't think he was either.

Of course, we know better now, but it's no good pretending that more enlightened attitudes existed in those days because they didn't.

The word 'paedophile' would have been barely recognised before the late 90s or even this century. I certainly don't remember its being common currency more than ten or twelve years ago.

With you there, glass.

Flckety that's an almost identical description of the conversation i have just had with my friend over lunch. We remember youths and men descending on us, hands ready to grope, ams round our shoulders before we even knew their names, and rebuffs being met with 'you must be a lesbian, frigid, you know what you need (nudge, nudge), oh! do you only put out for money?' and on and boringly on!

Office pests would pinch bottoms, and we would be blamed if men wolf-whistled. Complaints were futile, and new, young office girls would be warned 'watch out for so-and-so, he's a perv.'

No wonder feminism took off in the 60s. The sexual freedom of the pill and pop culture gave free rein to men thinking they'd hit the jackpot. Many girls with more freedom were not protected from the likes of JS exploiting them.

I remember going on holiday to Italy at the age of 19, with three girlfriends. The Italian youths would shout obscenities at British girls, and make sexual gestures. The middle-aged managers of our hotel and the one next door would escort us up the road to our destination, explaining 'the trouble with these males is that they don't understand that helping yourself without permission is theft.'

Under-age groupies should not have been exploited, but given guidance about their behaviour. However, no man is going to abuse a girl if the opportunity arises unless he has the motivation, sexual interest in that age group, tells himself it's ok to do it, and can separate her from people who will protect her. That takes a deal of planning.

I think you are right about the 70s and 80s Flicketyb but some of this abuse, as anno points out is more recent and after attitudes had apparently changed.
But I agree no point in blaming.
It does no harm to reflect on what it tells us about ourselves - we might learn something useful maybe.
whenim64 can probably put us straight on the history of child protection.

I must have led a sheltered life. Most of the young men I encountered in my late teens and early twenties were well mannered and respectful. There might have been an abusive attitude towards women and young girls from a lot of men but let's not forget that the majority did not mistreat women'.

anno paedophile as a term for sex offenders who target children has infiltrated our language despite attempts by the authorities to avoid its use. In the late 80s, we would use terms like child molester, child abuser or sex offender as a catchall. Some old documents like psych reports refer to 'pederasts' but that didn't stick. The tabloid press adopted the word from the American 'pedophile' which was so frequently referred to by American forensic psychologists, psychiatrists and sex offence researchers and criminologists who came over here to train us to work with sex offenders, and gave lots of press interviews. It doesn't really mean what we use it for - a paedophile was originally defined as a lover of children. An obnoxious word now.

I can remember a policeman I knew saying worry about your son when he is under 11 and your daughter when she is over 11. The mix of sexual harrassment being one of life's problems, a belief that if a girl was raped she had done something that meant she was 'asking for it'. plus the strong public disapproval of sex outside marriage meant that we were both ignorant and afraid to say anything. Jimmy Savile was 'fortunate' to hit the years when young people were priding themselves on throwing away their sexual inhibitions but at the same time didnt like to talk about or admit the down side. Sadly young girls were more freely accessible than ever before and easy pickings for the likes of Savile.

Savile appears to be not a paedophile, but rather a hebephile - one who is attracted to pubescent girls (say 11 to 14).

merlotgran An abusive attitude that almost amounts to droit de seigneur towards young women and girls was – and still is – more often seen in older men, although not exclusively. Moreover, I don't think the situation has improved quite so much s we sometimes think.

I recall sitting in my local pub in 1998 when 16-year-old absentdaughter came in to talk to the landlady's daughter. The middle-aged men on the table next to where we were sitting started a loud conversation about what they would like to do her and how they would do it, giving her marks out of ten for her physical characteristics and so on. I thought Mr absent was going to explode. When I made a loud remark that made it apparent that she was my daughter, they went very quiet and soon disappeared.

I saw similar behaviour in another pub in 2003. (I don't spend all my time drinking.) A middle-aged man always had a little flock of teenagers with him. They used to sit on his lap and he was forever stroking their arms and backs, his hands occasionally slipping down the backs of their jeans or brushing across their pubescent breasts. When I spoke to the landlady about this, I was barred.