If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The allegations surrounding the hostage case in Cleveland, Ohio, remain truly astonishing; how can three women be kidnapped, raped and beaten for so long? One possible explanation derives from a psychiatric phenomenon which is supposed to develop in these extraordinary and intense predicaments, termed 'Stockholm Syndrome'.
Our aims are simple. We want to raise awareness of child sexual exploitation, via education and campaigning across all communities. We want to encourage reporting and promote services to help vulnerable young people. We want to produce training kits and background fact-sheets for faith and community leaders, so they can speak out with knowledge and confidence.
Hewson seems to have missed a fundamental point of Operation Yewtree: it is fighting to give victims of abuse a voice after years of being too afraid to speak out. She is merely adding to this fear in her article.
News that veteran BBC broadcaster, Stuart Hall, has admitted to a string of sex crimes involving girls and young women in the 60s, 70s and 80s is especially troubling for its similarities with the Savile enquiry.
No sooner had Stuart Hall admitted what he'd done then some voices were calling for anonymity for people accused of sexual crimes. Now at first glance you might think, yes, why should someone's reputation be smeared before they have been proven guilty?
Thatcher's attacks on unionised industries devastated vibrant communities. The impact is still being felt, with high levels of unemployment and drug abuse. Her cull of manufacturing, mining, steelworks and shipbuilding led to the current unsustainable situation where our core industry is finance, with volatile banks run by questionable people.
Paedobritain has been trending not because there is moral panic but because many people are angry that large-scale child abuse has happened - sometimes involving prominent people - and there are still questions not being answered.
The terrible commonality in all of these abuse cases is that children were afraid to speak out or did not think they would be believed. In Rochdale when victims did initially speak out, we now know they were not believed, and because of this some children continued to be abused.
This separation of male violence from the men who commit the crimes is a key feature of rape culture. It silences victims whilst simultaneously creating a hierarchy of abusers with Roman Polanski being a "good" abuser because The Piano won him some Oscars.
I thought it would be jolly to chat to Rubberbandits for this blog, because I thought there might be a chance they would pay me money in a belated, after-the-event bribe to win the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award.
Nostalgia is a funny thing. A dull yearning for times past. Life is speeding up these days, technological progress accelerates and drags us barely-dev...
Jimmy Savile was a "predatory, serial sex offender" but he did not "groom the nation". He was allowed to continue abusing because he was a 'celebrity'. Pretending that he "groomed the nation" allows those who knew to minimise and deflect their guilt. Those who knew and did nothing are guilty of helping Savile in sexually assaulting hundreds of children and adults. I say hundreds but we will never know how many. The term "grooming the nation" only serves to silence victims. It serves those predatory, serial sex offenders who are still harming people.
There are many different possible reasons why British celebrity Jimmy Savile was never caught over his half-century long sexual predator rampage. One was his psychopathic-like super-sense of being able to sniff-out the most psychologically vulnerable who would either not tell or not be believed.
Operation Yewtree represents an opportunity to transform forever the legal landscape so never again can a marauder such as this escape detection. What needs to change is an awareness that sexual abuse can be going on right under our noses without us realising.
Paedophiles may try to convince themselves these are 'consenting' relationships but they come at great cost to the victim, or survivor, and to the UK taxpayer through associated health costs. At the NSPCC we hear about and work with this fallout every day.
If the legacy of those who have survived the Savile scandal is worth anything at all, it must lead us to a multi-lateral commitment to bring those responsible for past and current child abuse cases to justice - and to do what we can to prevent them from occurring in the future.
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