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Posts
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@bassingbourne55 wrote:
I always thought Jimmy Savile was creepy, like there was something about him that didn’t add up. He somehow managed to be both bland but intense at the same time, relying on a collection of catchphrases and cliches while being over familiar with people.
As a DJ he smarmed his way through whatever show he was presenting without appearing to show any great interest in or knowledge of the artists or industry. And despite his catchphrases and silly noises, he was not funny. All the time it was like he was trying too hard – with his quirky appearance, with his ’causes’, with his ostentatious wealth and his ‘warmth’.
I’m a child of the seventies, and the above post sums it up exactly.
@toybulldog wrote:
@bassingbourne55 wrote:
I always thought Jimmy Savile was creepy, like there was something about him that didn’t add up. He somehow managed to be both bland but intense at the same time, relying on a collection of catchphrases and cliches while being over familiar with people.
As a DJ he smarmed his way through whatever show he was presenting without appearing to show any great interest in or knowledge of the artists or industry. And despite his catchphrases and silly noises, he was not funny. All the time it was like he was trying too hard – with his quirky appearance, with his ’causes’, with his ostentatious wealth and his ‘warmth’.
I’m a child of the seventies, and the above post sums it up exactly.
Well it might sum up what you thought about him as a celebrity and a disc jockey…. but you are on a very slippery slope if you think just because someone is a bit different and quirky…. they must be guilty…. it may well be he is guilty but posts like this really do smack of a witch hunt
for our generation Mrs T, I really couldn’t improve upon Bass’s words .
You may have thought different out of misplaced local pride, but eventually you’ll give up the pretence and blame a different age when things were different, when young girls could go to a Beatles gig and not be abused by slightly older pop stars of the day, some of whom are now practically saints. . . ..
(don’t get me started on the Mahatma Gandhi stories will you)
@toybulldog wrote:
for our generation Mrs T,
I really couldn’t improve upon Bass’s words . . . ..
I think you missed my point….. no matter
@tinks wrote:
@sceptical guy wrote:
why? you think they’re innocent angels??
or that adults don’t use witch hunts?
in all honesty i didnt understand what you said
on children..very young children can pick up on an atmosphere very quickly, especially when they are the centre of it eg pedophile scares. Police have now learned to be very careful in getting evidence form kids before they make a move, I believe. The only case I came across personally was when the child of someone I knew said something about her dad which led the mother to go to the police..the dad was innocent.
on older children…I pointed to the Wallander episode as a hypothetical examplke (buy us some lipstick mister, or we’ll tell the police you were groping us’) When I worked as a houseparent, there were very strict rules in place to protect the adults as well as the teenagers…if a girl got a crush on you – and it happened – there were also rules on what to do to protect yourself.
I don’t believe children are innocent – they are vulnerable, which is different, but they can be very nasty to each other, and to adults if they can pick up on an atmosphere.
On adults using witchunts, the examples are legion. I once taught (in the late 1980s) with a man who confided to me that his ex-wife had used the accusation of child abuse to make sure he never saw his children again..he was deeply hurt and angry. Maybe he was lying about his innocence, I don’t know, but I read a few years later that police had suddenly picked up on the accusations of child-abuse beng used as a tactic for revenge, almost always against men. When some men want to hurt their ex, of course, they kill the children..several examples of that. Nothing hurts a woman more deeply.
I also pointed (in a thread on the poor girl in Wales) of how Goebbels tried to recruit the maker of a very powerful film, M, about a child sex murderer and the vengeance taken on the murderer by vigilantes. Goebbels said that the film was what the Nazi party was all about. Far Right authoritarian parties make a big thing about these tragedies for their own ends – I was told that the BNP was active in the Portsmouth anti-pedo vigilantes who attacked anyone who looked ‘different’.
Child abuse is evil nobody condones it but like patriotism, the denunciation of abusers can be the last refuge of the scoundrel.
@sceptical guy wrote:
Child abuse is evil nobody condones it but like patriotism, the denunciation of abusers can be the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Scep’s points about the complexities of abuse and accusations highlight some of the difficulties in this area, although I can see that some people think they come across a bit out of context in this thread.
I think there are very serious implications from the Savile case. What I fear is that our wider responsibilities to protect vulnerable children might be lost, because people’s energy is spent denouncing Savile and burning anyone who failed to blow the whistle on him.
I know it is a subtle point. I am not defending Savile – his fate is sealed. But I do want us to concentrate on hearing and supporting the victims, and then better protecting vulnerable minors, rather than going on a witch hunt, for example, against people at the BBC.
As I said in a previous post, this is the story of a whole rotten culture, and the attitudes of society which supported it. There will have been other celebrity abusers, and scores of people who had clues but did not want to really believe what was going on. Even the views of the police, media and the wider public to these issues may have contributed to the environment that allowed the abuse to happen and made it difficult to report.
Scep is of course right that loudly condemning child abuse can itself be a cover for hatred and abuse. I was dismayed at the height of the Portsmouth panics to see paediatricians’ homes attacked, as well as the bitter irony of a mother on TV spitting hatred against theoretical abusers who might live in her area, while her child played unsupervised in the street, dirty from head to toe, dressed only in a disposable nappy and a vest. Wonder what the greatest risk to that kid’s life chances were?
For all the reasons above, we need to learn the lessons to better protect the vulnerable. Learning those lessons as a society, whilst ensuring the abused have a voice as well as personal support, is more important than finding living people on whom we can exact retribution for a dead man’s crimes.
Not suggesting anyone here is doing that, but you can see the pressure building up in parts of the media for the witch hunt. It would be sad if the media and the wider public were satisfied by getting blood, to the detriment of the much harder job of protecting the vulnerable and really learning the lessons.
ty scep for the explanation…..
i see up to date there have been 340 accusations made against that disgusting man
yw tinks…
no reason why any thread has to keep on track, momes, but you’re heroic in trying to bring arguments together..
Yes, 340 last I saw, tinks, and rising, I think…
but they are a bit mixed..my local news carried headlines of him sexually assaultng a local woman when she was 13, and it turned out to be a French kiss – inappropriate to say the least, even in that tmore tolerant age, but to call it a sexual assault is to describe the night where all cats are black??.. The groping accusations are one thing – the boss calls you in and gives you a very harsh warning, or the cops pay you a visit, depending on how serious it is…it could have been scotched in the bud.
but some of the accusations are very serious indeed, and really should be subject to criminal rules, with nobody gulity until proven innocent…in fact, if he were alive, I’m not sure a lot of this could be handled in this way as it would create a prejudicial atmosphere to any trial.
He who becomes wealthy by razzmatazz, dies through razzmatazz…oh, he is dead. One forgets.
This is one of those subjects that raises many issues
As the person in question is dead should he be persecuted after he has died?
Is trial by media valid? Christopher Jefferies was vilified by the media as having killed Joanna Yates until Vincent Tabac was arrested charged and found guilty of having killed her – but how has Jefferies life been changed due to that?
How is it that if the allegations are true that one person could exert such pressure on the media that everything could be kept quiet over a couple of decades?
I have no doubt that the people who may have been abused need to find a suitable outlet for their feelings but is broadcasting it in public that solution? We hear on the News every day that the Police have received allegations but so far we have not heard how they are reacting to them
Given the fact that the gravestone has now been removed after the family’s initial denial mean that they knew about the allegations?
My last question is – if true would he be able to do the same thing today?
Please note that these are just questions that spring to mind and are just that
The guy is dead, but we buried Sir Jimmy Savile, campaigner for charity and fundraiser for Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Maybe we need to go through a process of grieving for losing him so we can bury James Savile, molester of teenage girls, abuser of social position and sleazebag.
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