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.
