The Mail Online, anticipating the report, ran with a headline: “Damning Jimmy Savile BBC Sex Report to be Released Today.” But Savile wasn’t damned for having sex at the BBC. However, that they were over the age of consent is immaterial: they did not consent.įast forward four years to the day the report was released. Smith’s report isn’t a report exclusively about child sexual abuse: indeed, a majority of Savile’s BBC victims were legally adults. Isn’t there an implication here that there is an age at which one can consent to the kind of abuse Savile was accused of: groping, attempted rape, rape? That’s also why the persistent labelling of Savile as a paedophile is unhelpful. Think about the phrase “abuse of underage girls”. Euphemism and salaciousness trumped accuracy.Įven when the story became one of abuse, the persistence of the label “underage” is also disturbing. The most damning language was to suggest his behaviour was “inappropriate”. Although this report was about the dropped BBC Newsnight investigation on Savile’s abuse of vulnerable young women and girls at Duncroft School, not once were the allegations described as allegations of abuse or assault.
The abuse stories were arguably presented in a way that fitted this broader narrative – a narrative about sexual scandal and secrets - and initially the actual abuse was invisible.įor instance one of the first mainstream news outlets to cover the story (after it had been broken by The Oldie), was the Sunday Mirror, which ran with an intro about “sex claims”, referred to Savile’s “colourful lifestyle” and described him as “iconic” and a “cigar-chomping star”. This was at a time when coverage of Savile was dominated by stories relating to consensual sex (the emergence of a long-time hidden lover, and a potential love child). Not: “sexual abuse claims” or “allegations of child sexual abuse”. They were labelled, in a variety of contexts, as “sex claims”, allegations of “child sex” and “underage sex”. John Giles/PAĮven when the stories of abuse first emerged, this perception persisted. Leeds turns out for Savile’s funeral, November 2011. Celebrity men helped themselves to women, and too many of us went along with it. The TV audience at home saw this too, but most of us didn’t see it as abuse either. In the now infamous 1974 Clunk Click programme, where Savile hosted Gary Glitter, he joked about “giving” Glitter two girls before both men drape themselves over the young women on set. He notes, for instance, that Savile explicitly referred to sexual contact with teenage girls in his 1970s autobiography, and that he’d openly “joke” that his motto was “don’t get caught”. It was that – among other factors – the macho culture prevented them, prevented us, from recognising it as abuse.ĭavies’ biography demonstrates how Savile was adept at implicating others. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t know. Savile’s abuse of women and girls at least was an open secret, existing, as the title of Dan Davies’ biography suggests, in plain sight. The same problem is alive and well in the way the press has covered the story. Yet it is not the only institution where macho culture and sexism prevent us from seeing the reality of men’s abusive behaviours. In this sense, the “macho culture” Smith identifies takes on an institutional character – institutional sexism – which the BBC clearly can and must tackle. She may have absolved the BBC of institutional responsibility, but director general Tony Hall has accepted that the question of whether BBC bosses knew of Savile’s abusive behaviour does nothing to address the question: “How could you not have known?” In the opening statement in her report on Jimmy Savile’s years abusing girls, boys, women and men at the BBC, Dame Janet Smith refers to a “macho culture” as an important element that enabled Savile to get away with decades of criminal behaviour.
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