Jimmy Savile

Ditto glass Does death of the perpetrator, finally bring some kind of closure.I hope so.It may get rid of that destructive feeling of wanting to annihilate him

I watched Question Time last night and thought Janet Street Porter looked uncomfortable (never thought I'd see that) as she admitted she had heard rumours about JS and dodged awkward questions. Career is all!!

I have avoid this thread for days now can I say that these women would have been to hell and back many many times before they had the courage to stand up and make these allegations, its matter less to them I think that he cant defend his actions, but its a huge step in their own healing, wish I could have been as brave.

I am sure that there is more to come out about other sleazy celebs - it won't end with Jimmy Savile.

Toplic? TOPIC!

Thanks greatnan I was getting worried. My paranoia showing after those complaints I think.
Sorry to digress from the toplic folks.
I am watching with interest!

jeni - it would never cross my mind that you worked for that awful organisation - although, of course, they are only doing what the government has told them to do - stop benefits wherever possible.
Petallus, yes, I also hate the hypocritical way in which some newspapers fume about sexual misdemeanours then show picture after picture of 'celebs' showing their knickers or breasts.
I think we are all agreed that the culture of sniggers and innuendoes was wrong and hurtful and that the truth needs to be told to help the victims feel that they are believed, at last.

Folks. Please do not confuse me with ATOS I work for the depart of justice ie the courts service. Technically I am neither employed or an employee of them I am a ' judicial office holder' apparently!
Just in case any of you were thinking I was ATOS.

petallus, I understand what you're saying. I would have thought that hands down someone else's knickers should be called "intimate" touching, full stop! However, I can imagine people wishing to make the crime seem less bad than it was saying that it wasn't as bad "as if he had....", so perhaps there is a place for all the revolting details to be investigated and made public. It's a sad fact that some people need to be shocked for it to get through to their brains how bad a thing has been.

Brave women. I salute them. Sadly

That sentence did not apply to the behaviour of Jimmy Saville. I made that absolutely clear in my comment. Rape and serious sexual assault are and always have been unacceptable and could be prosecuted.

What I said applied to how those at that time re-acted to what was said about him. I think it highly unlikely that anyone other than a small coterie of a complicit few knew the full extent of what he was doing. Until the late 1980s there was a common feeling that 'dirty old men' were a hazard women faced and you just had to learn to deal with it. The assumption was that dirty old men groped and sniggered, got to close and talked improperly but it went little further. Do you remember the acronym NSIT (not safe in taxis)? In my first job, almost on the first day, I was warned by other women in the department about finding myself alone with one member of staff. I was advised if that happened to get up and walk around and get out. He was a predatory groper, with hindsight, in his case, I think that if he thought he could have got away with it, his groping probably would have moved to assault, but even then that would have crossed a line that would have caused a furore. None of us liked his behaviour or encouraged it but if we had complained it would have been shrugged off as a hazard of life.

To people now the kind of low level (and higher) sexual harrassment that women just coped with thirty or forty years ago is shocking. Nowadays such men could end up in court. All I am saying is that at the time the first rumours went around about Jimmy Saville, that people sniggered, laughed and just passed it off as him being a dirty old man was how the culture of the time worked.

And it is still happening. DD works in the media and several years ago when a certain show business personality came on the tv at home, she commented on rumours about this man's sexual behaviour, not paedophilia, a year or so later it was in the papers, not quite prosecuteable, but it ended his career.

Exposure I should say

Greatnan I am trying to say I don't like certain approaches to scandals. The sort of approach the News of the World used to have.

One thing I didn't like in the Expose prog was when one poor woman was describing how JS put his hands down her knickers and the interviewer, with a very serious look on his face and gazing into her eyes, asked if whilst the hands were down the knickers she had been touched intimately by which presumably he meant did JS touch her genitals. That made me cringe. Hands down the knickers would have been enough. We didn't have to know the exact position of the hands. I'm only thankful he didn't ask if it was inside or outside.

I think some programs go into unnecessary salacious detail in order to attract large viewing audiences.

I don't think I can explain myself any clearer than that.

But it was a scandal. Great article, Bags - I will watch for her articles in future. I had missed the comment that the Pope had not been able to spot a paedophile at close quarters. Well, well, who would have thought it?

I too agree with FlickettB. Things were different then. That doesn't mean to say it was right or acceptable, but stuff was swept under the carpet, it didn't 'do' to make a fuss and the media and police were a lot, lot less supportive. Rape victims, for example, would be told they must have lead the perpetrator on. Children were just not listened too. Wouldn't happen now thank goodness - at least, not so often.

I agree with Greatnan and others who have said that even though the zeitgeist was different at the time, this behaviour was wrong, and it was known to be wrong. The Children Act of 1989 pulled together best practice and took extensive evidence and was game changing in terms of people's perceptions of the rights of the child. But that doesn't alter the fact that that was all it did. It wasn't a reversal of previous law and it didn't make previously right actions into wrong ones. And - it's now 23 years old. So, no excuse for anyone who colluded into cover ups.

I'm all for investigative journalism if it's done properly. I just don't like scandal type programs.

Hard-hitting article here. Rightly so, too. Sock it to 'em PaperTiger.

Some people and organisations need exposing - like ATOS and Group 4, and all the politicians, both local and national, who have their nose in the trough.

I wouldn't normally watch a prog which sets out to expose people every week.

I agree with FlicketyB that attitudes were different thirty years ago (before everybody jumps on me I'm not saying the attitudes were right just that they were there).

It might explain something which puzzled me about the recent Expose film which is that JS didn't make any effort to hide what he was doing. He even made remarks about young teenage girls on air.

I didn't like the program, by the way, I thought it was salacious and cheap in it's approach and I hated the demeanor of the interviewer.

I agree with elegran. Dismissive attitudes ("oh, it doesn't matter") are wrong now and they were wrong thirty years ago. The difference is that now people can speak out and be listened to, and be believed. My father would have done everything in his power to pursue anyone to court who had abused me. I remember telling him years later about a flasher at a bus-stop when I was only twelve years old. He said that I should have told him at the time because the man could possibly have been apprehended and prevented from 'bothering' other young girls at bus-stops.

Something as wrong as child abuse has always been wrong, and it has always been as wrong as it is now. It is worth investigating alleged crimes from twenty or twenty-five years ago, if only to put in place measures to prevent such things happening again in similar situations. We can and should learn from past mistakes.

As for the threat of the charity work being stopped if the alleged crimes are investigated, well that's just a threat and a nasty one at that.

30 years ago my children were in their early teens. If any of them had reported any "fiddling" to me I would have been round to the police station in a flash, and Mr E would have been round to their house to ask what the * So would my parents if they had heard any such thing from me, and my grandparents would not have ignored it for their children.

We might not have been so quick with suspicions as the parents of today, who hear so much in the news, but we knew that it happened and would have acted.

flickety

I am stunned.
" We cannot judge peoples actions 25 or 30 years ago ."
Excuse me? What are you saying??

And, Ana's post confirms, albeit inadvertently I think ,to the ignorance of your post.

I did read a comment from his nephew saying that this could bring about the end of the ongoing work done by Saviles' charities, which made me understand more about the threat at the time of removal of funds from Stoke Mandeville etc if allegations were made.

I think that the important thing is what the outcomes of these investigations might be. Clearly JS cannot be prosecuted, so the only two useful things that might emerge are - some support for these women who have come forward, and highlighting the need for organisations like the BEEB to recognise the power that celebreties wield and the potential for this to be used in negative ways.

Or will a lot of lawyers just make a lot of money.....?