The focus of the Jimmy Savile affair shifted this week to
questioning why the BBC, the press and the Establishment failed to
investigate the rumours of his crimes. Here, a survivor of clerical abuse in Ireland highlights how a culture of institutional denial allowed these scandals to go unchecked.
I have heard it suggested recently that it was the power of Jimmy Savile’s reputation, his larger-than-life personality, his apparently tireless work for charity and his extensive work with young people that made him invulnerable to suspicion and accusation.
But it wasn’t. What made the former BBC presenter Savile so invulnerable was the extraordinary determination of so many people to ignore repeated suggestions that he was a serial sexual predator. It’s not that no one knew, it’s that so many didn’t want to know.
We are not talking here about occasional, isolated rumours spoken in hushed tones and never publicly voiced. The suspicions about Savile were explored on numerous occasions by sections of the media; the allegation that he had a sexual interest in young girls was put directly to him by journalists on a number of occasions.
Writing in The Independent on the occasion of Savile’s knighthood in 1990, Lynn Barber reported that she had put the rumours directly to him. He, of course, denied them. But the fact that the allegations were put to him, and his denial of them publicly reported, speaks to the extent of the knowledge of the rumours.
This raises very critical questions. First, and perhaps most importantly, given the fact that the rumours about Savile had been so widely circulated that Barber felt able to put them directly to him, why were they not thoroughly investigated in advance of him being awarded his knighthood?
That failure resulted in Savile receiving the honour – a royal seal of approval for a man now widely accepted to have been a serious sexual predator.
The award made him even more immune to scrutiny, arguably granting him still greater licence to continue his criminal assaults. Savile was granted a papal knighthood that same year. Such plaudits and his celebrity status, combined with his reputation for charitable works, made him a public hero, a national treasure.
In her piece in The Independent, Barber wrote: “There has been a persistent rumour about him for years, and journalists have often told me as a fact: ‘Jimmy Savile? Of course, you know he’s into little girls.’
But if they know it, why haven’t they published it?
The Sun or the News of the World would hardly refuse the chance of featuring a Jimmy Savile sex scandal.
It is very, very hard to prove a negative, but the fact that the tabloids have never come up with a scintilla of evidence against Jimmy Savile is as near proof as you can ever get.”
But refuse it they did, and not just the tabloids but the entire British media, press and broadcast alike. The only media examination of the widespread suggestions that Savile was sexually assaulting adolescent girls was in a handful of interviews where he denied the accusations in an offhand manner and that was it, case closed.
The failure of so many powerful institutions, including the Government, to investigate what was serious criminal behaviour granted Savile even greater licence to abuse with impunity.
He was untouchable, not because he was especially devious or clever, but because those who had some responsibility to act on rumour, suspicion or allegation failed to do so.
There are obvious parallels with other such episodes, the most evident being the child-abuse scandals that have engulfed the Catholic Church for much of the past two decades.
The BBC was centrally involved in investigating and reporting the crimes of the Church.
I myself made three investigative documentary films with the BBC which dealt with such abuse. It is a shame that the corporation was not equally courageous in reporting the crimes of one of its own.
What both scandals reveal is that powerful institutions rarely cast an objectively critical eye inwards.
Power rarely subjects itself to honest and open scrutiny, and when it either discovers serious wrongdoing within its own ranks, or indeed is itself guilty of wrongdoing, it often acts to cover up such corruption in an effort to protect its reputation and its authority.
Such wilful blindness creates monsters.
The crimes of child abusers like Savile and paedophile priests are only possible within a culture of silence and denial. It has often been said that those who sexually abuse children rely upon secrecy, that sexual abuse is possible because it is a secret crime and that its victims are silent and voiceless.
Surely, we need to question that view.
What the abuse scandals in the Church, and now with Jimmy Savile, reveal is that secrecy is not the enabler of such crimes but rather silence is; the silence of those who shared rumour and gossip but who failed to act to protect desperately vulnerable children and young people.
When we trace the “careers” of serial abusers like Savile, or Fr Seán Fortune, who abused me when I was a teenager in Ireland, we see that as their crimes were ignored by those in authority, so their offending became more brazen.
Complaints of Fortune’s sexual abuse of young boys was first reported to his superiors when he was a seminarian.
Despite that, he was ordained a priest and continued to abuse with increasing depravity and
violence. Over the course of the 18 years that followed, repeated complaints were made to church authorities – including to the Vatican – about his abusive behaviour.
Fortune became renowned for his work with young people in the village of Fethard-on-Sea, in County Wexford. A larger-than-life character, he pressured villagers for donations for his “youth groups” and other suspect causes. It is also believed that he extorted large amounts of money from government employment schemes.
After their complaints of abuse were ignored, parishioners organised delegations to two bishops and wrote to the papal nuncio. Bishop Brendan Comiskey eventually sent Fortune to London to study media and communications, and under that cover to seek therapy with a number of psychiatrists.
Yet when Fortune returned to Ireland two years later, he was made director of a Catholic media organisation, the National Association of Community Broadcasting, and continued to abuse scores of young boys. He was also appointed manager of church-run primary schools, and taught in secondary schools.
He was only arrested in 1995 after I had reported him to the Irish police. He killed himself four years later, during the first week of his trial on 66 counts of child sex abuse against eight boys, the charges relating to serious sexual assaults and rape.
Fortune abused hundreds of boys, his crimes becoming more horrific as it became clear that no one would step in and stop him.
I honestly believe he would never have abused with such depravity and on such a scale, had he not been both empowered and emboldened by the wilful blindness of his superiors.
Like Fortune, Savile was brazen, and he had cause to be. Despite all the rumours and gossip, he was free to carry on abusing. Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Police launched a criminal investigation into his alleged offences; this week it said it was following up 400 lines of inquiry involving 200 potential victims.
But Savile died without ever having to face the consequences of his actions and without a single one of his victims achieving justice and seeing him brought before the courts. He got away with it all, scot-free.
Back in 2001, in an interview with an Irish journalist, Joe Jackson, Savile was again questioned about the stories circulating of his sexual abuse. Was he “into little girls”? In response, he referred to an earlier interview he had done with psychiatrist and broadcaster Anthony Clare.
“Anthony Clare asked me my feelings towards children and I said, ‘I couldn’t eat a whole one … I hate them’, but that, too, is because I want to shut up someone who’s trying to go down that dirty, sordid road with questions like that.” Jackson went on to ask him what, if after he dies, all these rumours, or similar stories, were to form part of his legacy? “Bollix to my legacy. If I’m gone, that’s that,” replied Savile.
Well, now he is dead and gone, and he will never face proper accountability for his crimes.
But at least no one can say any more that his victims are silent.
Finally, after all these years, their voices have been heard, because finally, we have decided to listen.
* Colm O’Gorman is founder and former director of One in Four, a non-governmental organisation that supports women and men who have experienced sexual abuse, and author of the memoir Beyond Belief.