A conspiracy of silence allowed sexual harassment to stay routine

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/28/rachel-cooke-jimmy-savile-silence

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When the BBC's director general, George Entwistle, appeared in front of the culture select committee last week, one of the MPs who grilled him asked if he would agree that, with hindsight, the decision to pull the <em>Newsnight </em>investigation into Jimmy Savile had been a "catastrophic" mistake. I was taken aback by this. Even allowing for the schadenfreude you see rolling off MPs in select committee mode – it rises stinkily, like some awful Victorian miasma – his question seemed over the top. A famine is a catastrophe. Or a war. But the failure of BBC management to green light a segment of a late-night news programme? That's an error, not a catastrophe.

Such exaggeration is all of a piece with the fury now directed at the BBC in general and Entwistle in particular: a collective rage that is not synthetic, exactly, but so disproportionately intense as to have taken on a weird life of its own. One understands the need for a lightning rod in this kind of situation, for one individual or institution to take a battering on behalf of the many.

This is how displaced anger works. But there have also been days when I've wondered if anyone still remembers what we're talking about here. Jimmy Savile abused children for 40 years. The police believe that he may have had 300 victims. No internal inquiry in the world is going to change that.

Perhaps, though, the distraction is necessary. Our outrage, in truth, has little to do with any institution, however remiss. It's born of bewilderment that something so terrible could be in plain sight. Why, we wonder, did we not notice? Yet even this idea, if you unpick it, is kind of phoney. I'm not saying that I didn't feel it myself, at first: the ground shifting, metaphorically speaking, beneath my feet. Over and over, I asked friends why the conspiracy of silence had been so absolute and no one was able to give me a satisfactory explanation. But then I started thinking about my life – I am 43 – and I realised I could answer the question myself.

I am privileged. I have never been abused or raped; my parents loved me; I did well at school; I'm someone who can stand up for myself. And yet my life has never not been punctuated by sexual harassment. When did it begin? I was 13. Two boys took against me. They didn't like my face, my voice or my clothes and they enjoyed reminding me of this at the end of every school day. The challenge was to grab my nascent breasts and to twist them, hard. Also to lift my skirt. I was very scared of them. But did I tell anyone? No. I simply took a longer route home and ran all the way.

Well, that was my induction. Things grew calmer once the boys started trying to get laid, but an atmosphere of low-level sexual intimidation nevertheless prevailed. Girls were "slags" and their bodies, for all that boys longed to invade them, were both ludicrous ("look at the tits on her!") and repulsive (female genitals, as depicted on various walls in black magic marker, resembled nothing so much as some form of mutant wildlife, swollen and scary and covered with poisonous bristles).

If, god forbid, a tampon fell out of your bag, all hell would break loose. Menstruation really was a curse, in that sense.

I was pretty Zen, by this point. Battle-hardened. Also, I sincerely believed that I had only to survive school to enter into a civilised world in which men in black polo necks would talk to me about books and art and love. Wrong! At university, I was one of a group of women who wanted our college to have a code on sexual harassment (I'd thought carefully about this, being the child of a tutor-student relationship myself). The opposition we encountered was extraordinarily personal, as if we'd called for the mass castration of all males, and the men were merely returning fire.

Later, I suggested it might be a good idea not to spend common room funds on the <em>Sun</em> and to close down a dining society whose name aggressively celebrated the chasing of women. The abuse I got had to be heard to be believed. I was frigid, a lesbian, sanctimonious, stupid, ugly and in need of a good shag.

In the vacation, I worked in a pub. One of the regulars ran a book on whether I wore stockings or tights. I told him – to shut him up – that I wore tights. But this was not good enough. Whenever I leant over, he would reach for my thighs. He and his cronies would then laugh and jeer. When Christmas arrived, they demanded kisses much as they would request a pint. Groping was standard. I did not complain. I wanted to keep my job. But perhaps my disapproval showed on my face, for I was soon punished all the same. The landlord said the till was down; he would take the missing money from my wages. This went on for days: him robbing me, me trying to smile and the regulars enjoying my discomfort.

I could go on. The man who locked me inside his car, the better to try and have his way with me. The man who shoved me outside his flat at two in the morning, having suddenly tired of me. The man who chased me up the street as I walked home from the tube and then coolly waited at the other side of a hedge while I sobbed and desperately rang a stranger's doorbell. The man who tried to break into my hotel room when I was working on a story. The man who shouted lewd comments at me while I ate alone in a Philadelphia bar.

In Philadelphia, older and wiser, I spoke to the management, with the result that I was moved (it would have been better if they'd moved him, but I was grateful anyway). In every other case, though, I would no more have thought to complain than I would have run through town naked. The plain fact is that this stuff was so unremarkable as to be unworthy of comment, let alone fuss. And even when it was remarkable, when I would have been within my rights to call the police, I kept quiet. Easy to shake your fist at the sky; much harder to shake it in a man's face.

And this, surely, is why there is so much heat in the Savile debate. We are, at least in part, angry with ourselves. Fear, stoicism, an ability to close bad memories off; these are the things that got me and countless other women through, down the years. But our acquiescence had serious consequences – catastrophic, in fact – for the less well-defended among us. The atmosphere worked in Savile's favour and that of others like him. And perhaps it still does. Even as I write, I'm aware that some of this column – perhaps all of it – will be met with derision and, in some quarters, with outright disbelief.