Jimmy Savile

when very well set out.

When I would argue that his appearance was quite bizarre – shiny gold tracksuit, loads of chains and THAT hair.

He was average size, crimson. About 5'10 or 5'11, looked about 11 stone, not an imposing figure. Some children do fetishise personal, intimate touching when being cared for, but at a much younger age than he was when he had the accident. If his relationship with his mother was inappropriate, it would most likely have been like that prior to him being bed-ridden. The way he is being portrayed now is verging on sensationalism by the media. What he has done is bad enough, without them making his victims feel even worse by making them think they should have recognised he was a monster and run miles from him. He was able to normalise a lot of abnormal behaviour, and in the 60s and 70s his appearance wasn't bizarre, like it became in later years.

He was one of many and moved in a culture of permissiveness that he was able to exploit. There may have been plenty of pop celebrities who didn't break the law, but they were certainly misogynistic and treated young women badly. It is shocking to see just how many people have complained about him and been ignored or dismissed. I wonder how those in authority are going to justify colluding with his abuse?

Could some of this be attributed to the accident he had when young that left him bedridden and [I assume] helpless for quite a long time. I knew someone who had a very close [but healthy!] relationship with their mother when they became physically very dependant on her. It could also have something to do with his involvement with hospitals [although that was also as a thank you to them for making him better]. There has also been a mention by several people of how physically imposing he was [always thought of him as small and scrawny, but he wasn't]. He was always a revolting man, but the spectre of him now makes me feel quite sick.

I think that is unlikelythat there are any 'normal' men with an idolatrous relationship with their mother, because to be devoted to a parent and idolise them the way Jummy Savile did his mother is a sign of arrested development. Many people have a close relationship with one parent but as they grow up move on to form normal close adult relationships with other people. To stay in that infantile state where one parent is the centre of your universe and can do no wrong is abnormal. But it also says something about the parent, in this case Jimmy Savile's mother, who obviously nurtured and maintained this relationship.

Some of those young girls will be grandmothers by now won't they.
The money paid for memorabilia highlights the god like status our culture bestows on celebrities and other VIPs. Shades of the saints "relics" that used to pull in the punters for the church in days of yore. (and still do in some places)
This item was touched by the holy hand!
Failing to act on his behaviour was not a matter of individual psychology was it.

Are there any 'normal' men who live with and idolise their mothers like he did? It seemed quaint at the time, now it seems weird.

How awful for all those young girls. Hearing them interviewed on the radio news they are still distressed by the what they suffered all these years later.

Nasty that it was all kept under wraps by those in power so that JS had the opportunity to go on and molest so many over the years.

I doubt it - the world is full of strange people who will probably pay more for it now.

Nov. BBC Homes and Antiques magazine, in an article entitled ' Auction News', has a feature called Estimate Busters, Hows about that then?
It lists items once belonging to Jimmy Savile and the amount of money they made at auction.
A 'Jim fixed it for me' badge sold for £2000, well above its estimate of £300-£500.
I bet the authors of that item are now cringing and the new owners of the badge are wishing they had never bought it.
Surely all the JS memorabilia will now become worthless!

I think the first criminal case (or series of cases) that finally brought sexual child abuse to the public attention involved a paedophile ring of social workers in Staffordshire in the mid 1980s and many of the early cases involved social workers, then spread out to teachers and other youth groups like the scouts and eventually to minsters of religion. I suspect we may soon find that the moslem community has exactly the same problems within its religious leadership. There have already been a handful of cases plus a number involving physical violence to young boys attending madrasas but these have passed generally unnoticed because of the furore over the disproportionate number of cases involving exploitation of young vulnerable white girls by asian gangs.

When I was a teenager in the mid 1950's I had lots of boyfriends but never felt pressurised to 'go all the way'. There were girls who did, and girls who didn't, and local boys soon learnt what type you were.
I am afraid I cannot agree that teenage boys are now more willing to accept rejection. My grand-daughters told me they were happy to settle with the boyfriends they had met at school, at age 14, because if they had had a lot of different boyfriends it would be assumed that they were 'slags'. The double standards are alive and well.

Jess it was the mid-80s when the NSPCC started working with Social Services and Probation, using family therapy type techniques to try to change the behaviour of sex offenders. At the same time, Ray Wyre, a Midlands probation officer, took on the role of sex offender therapist for the Catholic Church, trying to address child abuse with Irish catholic priests who were not being prosecuted, but agreed to engage in treatment. From this, child protection guidelines were married with the provisions of the Children Act, with the collaboration of ATSA (American Association for Treatment of Sexual Abusers) and the newly formed NOTA (UK's equivalent, now the National Organisation for Treatment of Abusers), as well as other statutory and voluntary organisations for the welfare of children who lobbied for massive legal changes in child protection.

There have always been child protection arrangements via social services, but sexual and emotional abuse of children were not treated as seriously as violence or abandonment. In the early days, any practitioner who decided they would work with sex offenders was viewed with suspicion, and I remember being asked if I 'got off' on hearing the specific details of what sex offenders do. Even professionals in this field had a major shift in thinking to make, to be able to clarify where the boundaries lay after the cultural changes of the 60s and 70s.

Flickety and when you are so right! Many men assumed that they had every right to paw and grope, and I am talking of a varied social cross section here. Even as a junior officer's wife one was not immune. My goodness, I had forgotten. Will think on this for a while.

There is no mention of JS molesting girls as young as 11. Police say his victims ranged from age 13 to15. He also liked girls of 16 according to one witness on the recent tv prog. Rather gruesomely she said he fondled her until she was 16 and then had (insisted on) full sex.

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.

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

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.

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 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'.

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.

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.

With you there, glass.

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.

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.

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.