The legacy of the Savile scandal must be no more suffering in silence

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/02/legacy-savile-scandal

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October was a devastating month for the BBC. We learned that, in Jimmy Savile, the corporation inadvertently created and fostered the career of a prolific sexual abuser of children, young people and women. The BBC commissioned shows that provided Savile with unusual access to potential victims and an unimpeachable celebrity aura.

It is true that the BBC was only one of many institutions where young victims were abused, but these crimes have left physical and mental wounds that time rarely heals. The accounts of many victims bear witness to the long-term tragic consequences of childhood sexual abuse. Many have gone on to suffer psychiatric illnesses and many need help, but there is inadequate provision of such care.

So it is no wonder the realisation of the BBC's moral responsibility for Savile weighs so heavily on George Entwistle, the director general of the BBC. Last week, he was as bowed with horror as Oedipus when he realised that the plague on his city arose from the secret stain on his lineage.

The UK has a painful and profound experience of the sexual abuse of girls and boys. The very age of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, founded in 1884, is a telling testament to the thousands of children who have suffered abuse – in institutions as well as extended family networks, where uncles, stepfathers, cousins, parents and family friends predate. It might cloud the picture we have built up of Savile as a monster, but it is quite possible that he was himself a victim of sexual abuse in childhood.

Like Savile's victims, most sexually abused children do not tell anyone, and this silence continues often throughout their lives, or until their lives are interrupted by a tragedy that pinpoints the psychiatric illness that has spread like poison from the wounds of long ago. The NSPCC estimates that even now, between 60% and 90% of all sexual abuse of children goes unreported and undetected. Wider recognition of the magnitude of our national affliction is long overdue, but the public also needs to recognise that the silence and muffling of victims' voices is pervasive in our society, whether the perpetrator is a celebrity or not.

The Savile scandal has illuminated again the plight of adult victims of childhood sexual abuse, summed up by the former England rugby player Brian Moore: "The ongoing failure to help us is as much a scandal as the failures of 30 years ago to catch our abusers. If everyone's starting point is our welfare and we all work outwards from there, at least things will be going in the right direction." We all have a responsibility to create a culture where no victim of abuse feels they won't be taken seriously.

It is distressing that a case should need to be made for devoting resources to stopping something as obviously abhorrent as child abuse. Nevertheless, we must: we still don't have the architecture of support necessary to deal with every report, and to offer the necessary therapy to every person who needs it. The case is therefore worth reiterating: child abuse frequently underlies adult depression and other mental health problems; it is linked to substance abuse and to criminal behaviour. Every increase in the proportion of abuse reported and investigated is a message to potential abusers that one day they will be caught, and a potential deterrent to abusers.

This week's revelation in the Guardian concerning an emerging new charitable partnership between the BBC and the two charities most directly concerned, the National Association for People Abused in Childhood and the NSPCC, is very encouraging. The voices of the adult victims are beginning to be heard. It is to be hoped that other institutions affected will also contribute to the first full national provision of care for victims. This initiative shows contrition and the acceptance of the right of Jimmy Savile's victims to restitution.

The legacy of this terrible national scandal must be to give the charities dealing with sexual abuse the publicity they deserve, some of the funding they need, and to immensely expand public understanding of the scale of this evil in our midst, and of the damage it does.