Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Jimmy Savile and The Misogyny of Liberalism.

There was an editorial in the UK news magazine "The Week", 13th October 2012, by Caroline Law which I have reproduced below. The title above this post is my own interpretation of her comments...

"It was different back then. That's one of the explanations given for how Jimmy Savile got away with molesting girls for so long. Savile, who prowled the corridors of schools and hospitals in search of victims, appears to have been far more calculated in his predations than most. But it is undeniable that many pop stars and DJs routinely exploited young female fans in the 1960s and 1970s. Some even paraded underage girlfriends, yet were not prosecuted. (Jailed for seven years in 2001, Jonathan King was a rare exception; but then he molested teenage boys).
This is often put down to the casual misogyny of the time, but it was more than that. In the era of free love, parents worried, as they do now, about 'dirty old men', but there was also a feeling in the air that sex was something that everyone should enjoy, children included. So much so, there was even an activist group called the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). From 1974 to 1984, PIE openly campaigned for greater acceptance of paedophilia, lobbied for the abolition of the age of consent, and helped paedophiles make contact with one another. And it had influential friends. No less a group than The National Council for Civil Liberties, now called Liberty and then run by future Labour minister Patricia Hewitt, was affiliated to PIE. Consenting sex between adults and children was harmless they argued, and shouldn't be illegal. Perhaps that's how BBC bosses rationalised away the rumours about Savile. They were in respectable company."