Jimmy Saville

:shock: DLT ……………god i hope not :(

So now we have Jimmy Savile, Freddie Star, Dave Lee Travis and a member of the top of the pops production team can’t remember his name all involved in Child sexual abuse.

I watched a report that suggested the number of allegations has already run into 1000s and will rise significantly and there will be more arrests…..hmmm well I think Im the only person out of step here in that i don’t think there was abuse of the kind the word Child Abuse conjure’s up in the mind.

I cannot believe that 1000s of kids were being abused and were “traumatised” and too frightened to say….. Im not including in this the terrible cases of the care home abuse…. that’s different and the people concerned in that need to be brought to justice.

I know I will be castigated for saying this….. but truly if this isn’t a witch hunt or hysteria I’m not sure what is.

@mrs_teapot wrote:

So now we have Jimmy Savile, Freddie Star, Dave Lee Travis and a member of the top of the pops production team can’t remember his name all involved in Child sexual abuse.

I watched a report that suggested the number of allegations has already run into 1000s and will rise significantly and there will be more arrests…..hmmm well I think Im the only person out of step here in that i don’t think there was abuse of the kind the word Child Abuse conjure’s up in the mind.

I cannot believe that 1000s of kids were being abused and were “traumatised” and too frightened to say….. Im not including in this the terrible cases of the care home abuse…. that’s different and the people concerned in that need to be brought to justice.

I know I will be castigated for saying this….. but truly if this isn’t a witch hunt or hysteria I’m not sure what is.

Mrs T, you’re almost certainly right in that it is highly unlikely that much at the BBC will conform to the grotesque “slavering old man fiddling with young child” image that the words “child abuse” conjures up. However the BBC wasn’t the sum total of the abuse.

The age limit for Top of the Pops audience was 16, in the days before universal ID it is probable that 14 or 15 year olds and yes, perhaps 12 year olds got in as audience and I should think quite a few of us have young teenage sexual – romantic, clumsy or abusive/bullying situations we shouldn’t have got ourselves into. (Had to phrase that carefully in these days of ‘No regrets it made me what I am’ – I’ve got a few . . . ).

A lot probably would fit the kind of behaviour which has provoked “if a __ year old man came near my ___ year old son or daughter I’d have his bits off” responses in JC chatroom conversations. But under-age sex is under-age sex, consenting or not. Few would remove our current safeguards for people working with children and young people they know and care about.

What I would caution against is minimising the amount of child abuse that went/goes on. Mathematically, the reference to ‘thousands’ would work out over a 20 year period to a tiny number per week/month even if only 3-4 adults were involved, but the numbers add up. I think it’s likely that a good number of the people being named will be innocent, but that other, more obscure, adults were involved.

It’s a mess, how much truth is at the heart of it we’ll probably never really know.

thanks, mrs t..a bit of sense.

It’s not so much a criminal investigation that’s required as an archaeological dig, but not as fruitful as an archaelogical dig. Umpteen reports, all costly – you might as well set up a Royal Commission on Drug Abuse among pop stars since 1956.

I remember a child abuse scandal at Middlesbrough in the late 80s when dozens of kids were separated fomr their parents. It was done very brutally, I was told – the kids were taken away for a routine examination and 5 mins later the gathered parents were suddenly told that they were being accused of sexual abuse and would be tried. One mother just ran out of the room and around the hospital, screaming for her kid.

The evidence was not good (I think my boy was experiencing the symptoms which were used to accuse, but they were caused by genuine illness) and the doctors behind the accusations were very patronising Guardian types, assuming that if the parents were poor unemployed and working class they were abusers.

The net result, in my memory, was that all the kids were returned. Most of them quite happily, probably.

And I’m sure some were returned to abuse and pain.

A careful, sensitive investigation is needed. Witch hunts are the alternative, and often the hurt felt by the most vulnerable – the kids – is intensified.

As Mrs T points out, the term pedophile is being thrown around very loosely – and it’s explosive.

Well, Handyman, I don’t really think anyone has got anythng to worry about here, really….

But McAlpine has told the thousands of tweeters to make out-of-court settlements to avoid the greater fees in court costs etc ..He also threatens to pursue each one of them through the courts. No idea whether this is scare tactics or not.

Libel is a rich man’s game, and McAlpine is a rich man.

One thing the Rupert Murdoch press used to be very careful about was choosing who you slandered and pursued to destruction. Ordinary people don’t have the money to fight back.