Hard News: Media3: Whistleblower Season
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Lilith __, in reply to
Another effect of this “moral panic” was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, what was once accepted as part of the trappings of power, the wooing of maidens, was used as a means of denigrating a person who would otherwise be considered “a Good guy”, as was Savile in his time.
Hang on a minute. Clinton was not impeached for having (consentual!) sex, he was impeached for lying about it and attempting to cover it up.
Savile was a child rapist. How can you possibly conflate the two?
You think that society is more inclined to punish child rape now than in the past, well, how can that possibly be a bad thing?
Rape is not a social more. It isn't a custom that used to be OK that is now frowned on. If perpetrators are now more likely to be caught, surely this is progress towards a better society, that looks after vulnerable children??
Jesus wept; I can't believe we're even having this conversation.
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Graeme Edgeler, in reply to
Rape ... isn’t a custom that used to be OK
This statement seems counter-historical.
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Lilith __, in reply to
Rape … isn’t a custom that used to be OK
This statement seems counter-historical.
I don't mean legally. I mean MORALLY.
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Just because men thought they could get away with it (let's define "it" as sexual abuse of children) does not mean it was ok then or now
I can't believe I am reading someone suggest otherwise
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
I don’t mean legally. I mean MORALLY.
Morals change, that is the whole point, and when they change those on the "wrong" side get punished without understanding why their behaviour is now considered to be immoral.
Imagine a situation like this. For years you have been selling your home grown vegetables and a new law comes into force that not only makes it illegal for you sell them but makes you liable for any perceived damage from (or indeed to) any vegetables you may have sold in the past. Would that be "fair"? of course not. That is why we do not pass retrospective laws (often).
I know you are going to say there is no comparison but there is and that is the conflation of "Moral Laws' and real laws and the public perception of both. -
Jesus wept; I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.
Yup. Many people here will know people who have been sexually abused as children, or may have been victims of that abuse. Saying that their abusers are also victims because such things used to be swept under the carpet more, and now they're being called on it? Thread is starting to need a trigger warning.
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Imagine a situation like this. For years you have been selling your home grown vegetables and a new law comes into force that not only makes it illegal for you sell them but makes you liable for any perceived damage from (or indeed to) any vegetables you may have sold in the past. Would that be “fair”? of course not. That is why we do not pass retrospective laws (often).
Grooming and sexually abusing children didn't become illegal last week.
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Steve, child rape was also illegal in the 1970s when Savile started offending. And I'm pretty bloody sure that a poll of public feeling about child abuse in the 1970s would also find it pretty bloody repugnant.
Vegetables?? You must be taking the piss.
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Steve’s point, I hope, was that each culture has its own moral code, which appears “normal” to its members. Deploring historical wrongs from our own, hopefully more enlightened, standpoint is all very well, but the moral code of that era also needs to be considered to understand those actions in context. We can’t automatically take our own moral system for granted.
Which is not to excuse Savile or his enablers in the slightest. 1970s England wasn’t that different to today, and sexual abuse of children certainly wasn’t morally OK in that society (though perhaps easier to ignore).
But one really important reason for not taking our own society’s current moral system for granted is that we constantly need to work to maintain it. If we are not careful, there is always the possibility of a return to a morality in which the powerful can do what they like to the less powerful with this being seen as “normal”.
It can start in such small ways: e.g. prisoners being denied the right to vote, or WINZ clients being treated by default as suspects whose privacy does not matter... -
Thank you linger, I'm glad someone can see where I'm coming from.
But.1970s England wasn’t that different to today,
It was. You have to remember that things like sexual harassment in the work place was the norm for women, and many men, that what we now consider sexual abuse, at the lower scale (some would, these days, say that there is no scale, it is all bad) was not considered as abuse, just inappropriate in polite company.
I am certainly not condoning Saviles behaviour which, at best, was an abuse of power and position but the point remains. If you are going to condemn someone for doing what society tolerated back then then you also have to condemn that society.
Watch Esther Rantzen's body language in the "Exposed" documentary and you will see someone trying to hide their shame, she knew what was happening and did nothing because, back then, it was accepted and she is not a bad person.— if we are not careful — there is always the possibility of a return to a morality in which the powerful can do what they like to the less powerful with this being seen as “normal”.
There is also the danger that the moral panic will become pervasive and we do not want to see a return of the Spanish Inquisition but nobody would expect that, eh?.
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I take your point Steve but we are not just talking about Savile just "coping a feel" we are talking about alleged child rape which despite your stories about laws regarding vegetables has been illegal in the UK since 1275
it is not a new crime! -
Also note: the conditions that allowed Savile to offend in plain sight have not magically disappeared since the 1970s. If you want a more recent parallel, you need look no further than Penn State University’s coaching scandal last year. In both cases, one individual was regarded as essential to an institution; in both cases the institution protected itself by pretending the offending was not serious or ongoing, and certainly did not draw police attention to it.
(To clarify: in the Penn U case, the head coach, Joe Pasternak, was not accused of any offence himself; but he had turned a blind eye to long-term offending by an assistant who was seen as an important part of the coaching team.)In trying to take social lessons from these cases, I don’t think “moral panic” is really what we should be focussing on.
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Lilith __, in reply to
If you are going to condemn someone for doing what society tolerated back then then you also have to condemn that society.
Society didn't tolerate it, THEY DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS HAPPENING. Perhaps people should have twigged. If anybody DID know, they are guilty of concealing a horrible crime.
CHILD RAPE WAS NOT ACCEPTED IN THE 1970s. And if people are now making a fuss about it, GOOD.
If decrying child rape is moral panic, then I'm all for it. -
Russell Brown, in reply to
Watch Esther Rantzen’s body language in the “Exposed” documentary and you will see someone trying to hide their shame, she knew what was happening and did nothing because, back then, it was accepted and she is not a bad person.
Like Paul Gambaccini and others, Rantzen clearly feels she should have done more; asked more questions. She's taking that on herself.
But it's an unfathomable leap from that to saying what Savile did was "accepted" in society.
Did he operate within a particular culture? Yes. And I think you could extend some latitude to, say, John Peel, who doesn't seem to have been scrupulous about asking radio groupies their age in the 1960s.
But Savile, to take just one example, sexually assaulted a brain-damaged teenage girl at Stoke Mandeville Hospital . The fact that he was allowed to do these things is an indictment on the adults who should have been protecting those children. In no way does it make Savile a "victim".
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Russell Brown, in reply to
If you want a more recent parallel, you need look no further than Penn State University’s coaching scandal last year. In both cases, one individual was regarded as essential to an institution; in both cases the institution protected itself by pretending the offending was not serious or ongoing, and certainly did not draw police attention to it.
I think that's a pretty good parallel.
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Closer to home, there was former ChCh City councillor Morgan Fahey, who was in a position of trust as a doctor - and abused it.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
I think that’s a pretty good parallel.
I agree and would add that because it was so recent should be regarded as worse.
Society didn’t tolerate it, THEY DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS HAPPENING. Perhaps people should have twigged. If anybody DID know, they are guilty of concealing a horrible crime.
I don't know how you can be so certain that they didn't know as to be able to SHOUT about it. Much as you would like to believe otherwise it was tolerated and denied. I spent the first 30 odd years of my life in that society and find it rather odd that people that have had little or no experience of British society in the 60s and 70s are telling me that I don't know what I am talking about.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Be preraped, er, prepared...
Also note: the conditions that allowed Savile to offend in plain sight have not magically disappeared since the 1970s.
Some chipping at the edges though. The Boy Scouts of America have finally released their "Perversion Files", after a two year legal battle...
The Scouts began keeping the files shortly after their creation in 1910, when pedophilia was largely a crime dealt with privately. The organization argues that the files helped them track offenders and protect children. But some of the files released in 1991, detailing cases from 1971 to 1991, showed repeated instances of Scouts leaders failing to disclose sex abuse to authorities, even when they had a confession.
Britain's pedophiles will get off very lightly if only the fallen, or low hanging fruit, like Glitter and Savile are flushed from the shadows, I suspect their capering betwixt Limelight and Twilight, also saw them in a procurer's role - like Garish Lawfords to JFK's Grimy Camelot.
I'm not saying that Kennedy was a pedophile, just I'd imagine there might be a similar symbiotic relationship between Savile and the Great-and-Not-So-Good... - Every Court needs its Jester. -
Danielle, in reply to
it was tolerated and denied
If it was the former I can't work out why it would have been the latter.
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Lilith __, in reply to
I don’t know how you can be so certain that they didn’t know as to be able to SHOUT about it. Much as you would like to believe otherwise it was tolerated and denied. I spent the first 30 odd years of my life in that society and find it rather odd that people that have had little or no experience of British society in the 60s and 70s are telling me that I don’t know what I am talking about.
My heart goes out to anyone who's survived abuse, and particularly if their complaints have not been heard. But denial or disbelief is not the same as acceptance that abuse is OK. I cannot believe that people of the 60s and the 70s are so different from people now that they were happy for their children to be abused. What parent, what adult, could possibly be OK with that?
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mark taslov, in reply to
The same parents who smacked their children, who sent them off to schools knowing they'd endure brutal initiations, bullying and God knows what other suffering, having endured it themselves. The countless parents who have refused to rock the apple cart for millenia.
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Islander, in reply to
If people want to be truly informed on the Chchch Creche case – read Lynley Hood’s book “A City Possessed.”
Nothing in it has been officially refuted – and it did assist in Peter Ellis’s early release.
I have the additional advantage of knowing Ellis’s lawyer…Rob still comes to Big O,
and some of his stories are alarming-
while I partly trained in law, I think something like the ‘continental’ system of examining magistrates could be a useful addition to our legal system. Aside from anything else, some of the totally ridiculous statements from put-upon children would’ve been been heard for what they were – adult-generated fantasies put into the mouths of small children-edit: I was a public supporter of Peter Ellis from the time of his conviction.
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Islander, in reply to
<q>The same parents who smacked their children, who sent them off to schools knowing they’d endure brutal initiations, bullying and God knows what other suffering, having endured it themselves. The countless parents who have refused to rock the apple cart for millenia.
Whom I trust have *always* been in the minority, even when children were reguarded as either minature adults (and responsible for their actions) or as evilly-inclined subhumans who had to be whacked into rationality-
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mark taslov, in reply to
Whom I trust have *always* been in the minority
The smackers yes. The tacit enablers not at all.
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Islander, in reply to
The smackers yes. The tacit enablers not at all
Hmmmm...food for thought.
It is like sexists/racists/supporters of slavery...why kick against the norm?
Until evidence of just *what* the norm enables - and the damage it does to those corrupted- and the rest of humanity- that a positive societal reaction happens-I believe in hope, & humans learning from past mistakes.
We're clever apes.
BUT - I dont believe H.s.s is intrinsically *good.*
We are hierarchical & dominance-driven animals and our whole histories prove that those who percieve they have power will use it to their advantages over the powerless.
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