Predators on Pedestals - America has Jerry Sandusky, Britain has Jimmy Savile, Mystery surrounds graves at boys' reform school

[childadvocate]

Op-Ed Columnist Predators on Pedestals By BILL KELLER October 14,
2012

America has Jerry Sandusky. Britain has Jimmy Savile.

Sandusky you know; the predatory Penn State football coach was
sentenced last week to spend his remaining years in prison for raping
boys who looked up to him. Savile you may have missed; a venerable
British TV personality who died last year, he is now at the center of
a posthumous scandal unspooling in London. His appetites ran mostly to
adolescent girls, but otherwise the parallels are striking. In both
cases, the story is not just one of individual villainy but of the
failure of a trusted institution, if not a flaw in the wider culture.

Perhaps you’ve had your fill of these sordid accounts — the celebrity
gropers, the pedophile priests, the fondling in the locker room
shower, the witnesses who look the other way. But Savile’s case is
worth mulling, if only because the institution in which his serial
child abuse took place is one of the most respected media
organizations in the world, a putative shrine to truth and
accountability: the BBC. And in the early days of the scandal the
revered broadcaster has faced the same questions of dereliction or
outright cover-up that dogged Penn State and the Catholic Church when
they experienced their respective outbreaks of infamy.

To appreciate Jimmy Savile’s place in English culture, imagine a
combination of Dick Clark of “American Bandstand” and Jerry Lewis,
maestro of the muscular dystrophy telethon. Savile was the longest-
serving host of the immensely popular BBC music show “Top of the
Pops,” and the star of another long-running show called “Jim’ll Fix
It,” in which he pulled strings to grant the wishes of supplicants,
mostly children. Like Sandusky, he buffed his reputation by throwing
himself into charity work. Like Sandusky he seems to have used his
philanthropy both to identify vulnerable children for his personal
sport and to inoculate himself against suspicion. The good deeds
helped earn Savile two knighthoods, one bestowed by the queen, the
other by the pope. He was Sir Jimmy, confidant — or at least photo-op
accessory — of royals, prime ministers, even Beatles....

The testimony of his accusers describes what Malcolm Gladwell calls,
in a shuddersome study of Sandusky’s ilk published in The New Yorker
last month, “child-molester tradecraft.” You have “the subtle early
maneuvers of victim selection,” the screening out of children who
object or who are supervised closely by parents, the testing,
ingratiating, “grooming” and “desensitizing the target with an ever-
expanding touch,” the escalation of abuse.

Gossip about Savile’s fondling of young teenagers was rife, but never
rose to a level deemed newsworthy during his life. But on Oct. 3 the
investigative program “Exposure,” on the rival ITV network, aired a
damning documentary. It included interviews with five women who
described being sexually abused as teenagers and with colleagues who
witnessed compromising behavior. After that, the deluge. London police
now say they are pursuing more than 300 leads, and that they believe
Savile abused girls as young as 13 over the course of four decades —
in his BBC dressing room, in hospitals where he was a benefactor, in
the back of his white Rolls-Royce.

It turns out that the BBC’s own investigative show, “Newsnight,” had
also delved into Savile’s history, but ended up killing the program
last December. It would have run a few weeks before a BBC holiday
tribute to the memory of Jimmy Savile....

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/opinion/keller-predators-on-pedestals.html


Esther Rantzen: 'How I long to turn the clock back'
We were all part of a conspiracy of silence – and that’s why it is
vital that Savile’s victims come forward to tell their stories

By Esther Rantzen
07 Oct 2012

As I arrived at an NSPCC conference last week, a taxi pulled up, and
the driver shouted to me. “Esther!” I walked over. “Jimmy Savile was
in my cab some years back, with two very young girls he said were his
nieces. But they weren’t. What he got up to with them in the back of
the cab was bad, very bad. I knew it was wrong. But what could I say?”

For decades, nobody said anything, at least not publicly, not
officially. Everyone knew – that is, everyone in the television and
pop music industries knew. The rumours swirled around him, that he
sexually abused young girls. A journalist friend told me in the 1970s
about a little girl with a heart defect. Jimmy had helped her to have
the defect surgically corrected. A newspaper heard about his
generosity and contacted the girl’s family to run the story, but the
family refused to talk to them because they were sickened by what they
knew he had done to her to make her “earn” the operation.

But that story, like all the others I heard, was hearsay, rumour,
gossip. Many a person has been crucified unjustly by rumour. A lie,
they say, goes halfway around the world before truth has got its boots
on. So for decades the abuse was an open secret, and Jimmy easily
rebuffed the rumours when interviewers like Louis Theroux and the
psychiatrist Anthony Clare dared to put them to him....

But now the truth is out. More victims are emerging every day, telling
stories of the sexual abuse by Sir Jimmy of children as young as nine,
on one occasion alongside the convicted paedophile pop star Gary
Glitter. They reveal that, like every practised paedophile, he
targeted the most vulnerable children, including those in care. Jimmy,
for instance, reportedly visited the notorious Jersey children’s home,
Haut de la Garenne, several times in the Sixties and Seventies, where
seven people have since been prosecuted for child abuse....

Knighted by both the Queen and the Pope, Sir Jimmy hid the private
reality that he was also a prolific, predatory paedophile. All of his
crimes – the multitude of attacks committed in his famous Rolls-Royce,
in his caravan, in schools and children’s homes, in his dressing room
and in a London taxi – remained an open secret. In spite of the fact
that he flaunted his taste for underage children, police
investigations failed, newspaper investigations were never published,
a Newsnight film was dropped, and through it all Jimmy’s image
remained intact....

But the shock of his callousness, his ruthlessness as described by
these women, was so profound that I found myself in tears. I listened
to the careful, factual accounts by the women, whose recollections
were so vivid and detailed that it was clear they were describing
scenes etched on their memories. The helplessness of the children he
had preyed upon made me long to turn the clock back, to assure them it
was not their fault. It was all true; I had no doubt. Without knowing
it, they corroborated each other by describing similar attacks that
still caused them pain and shame, even down to the sexually
transmitted disease with which he had infected two of the girls. Now
they have been further corroborated by the other victims coming
forward every day; at the time of writing, more than 40 of them....

Why were they silent for so many years? Because abused children find
it difficult to describe the crimes against them. The shame is
transferred to them, the guilt rubs off, they feel defiled. They think
– because they are often threatened – that nobody will believe them if
they do have the courage to ask for help. And in this case they were
right. As the documentary shows, Charlotte, one child who did speak up
and fight back, was punished for it. Jimmy was a regular visitor to
the Duncroft Approved School for Girls, near Staines in Surrey, where
Charlotte was a pupil. He invited her to his caravan, told her to sit
on his lap and put his hand up her jumper. When she protested, her
teachers dragged her away and told her off: “Uncle Jimmy does so much
good for the school.” She was taken to the isolation unit for two or
three days and told to retract her allegations. “I hated it in there,”
she says now. “It was a padded cell, and you were just locked in a
room and left.”....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9591322/Esther-Rantzen-How-I-long-to-turn-the-clock-back.html


Mystery surrounds graves at boys' reform school
By Rich Phillips, CNN Mon October 15, 2012

Marianna, Florida (CNN) -- This Florida panhandle town is the home of
a mystery that has been lost to time.

A small cemetery buried deep into the grounds of a now-defunct boys
reform school dates back to the early 1900s. Rusting white steel
crosses mark the graves of 31 unidentified former students.

Former students said the deaths were at the hands of abusive
administrators, but a 2009 state investigation determined there was no
evidence of criminal activity connected with any of the deaths or of
abusive treatment.

But the investigation did not clear up the mystery over the fate of 50
other students who died at the school and whose bodies have not been
accounted for.

In the wake of that investigation, more former students -- who are now
senior citizens -- have come forward with stories of abuse at the
school, including alleged beatings, killings and the disappearance of
students, during the 1940s, '50s and '60s....

The mystery surrounding the graves first made headlines in 2008 when
Florida's then-governor Charlie Crist ordered an investigation after a
group of men, known as "the White House Boys," came forward with
stories of how they were beaten with leather straps by school
administrators inside a small, white building on school property.

Robert Straley, who spent about 10 months at the school in the 1960s
for allegedly stealing a car, said he was taken to the "white house"
on his very first day.

"I came out of there in shock, and when they hit you, you went down a
foot into the bed, and so hard, I couldn't believe. I didn't know what
they were hitting you with," said Straley.

Former school administrator Troy Tidwell, a one-armed man who was
there at the time and who some former students accused of beating
them, has said in a deposition that "spankings" took place at the
school but denied anyone was ever beaten or killed.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/13/us/florida-graves-mystery/index.html