‘We now know the identity of the most reviled man in the
world…’ said the BBC broadcaster. On the
day of the publication of the long-awaited report into Jimmy Savile at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, it might be thought to be a
reference to the deceased celebrity.
In fact it was ‘Jihadi John’, who proudly parades beheadings
on the internet.
However the eliding of a bloodthirsty terrorist with the
posthumous reputation of Savile is not that far-fetched in view of the
hyperbole that has attended his fate since the first claims became
publicised back in 2012.
Beginning with the Met police and NSPCC report ‘Giving
Victims a Voice’ findings have been made on the strength of the historic
allegations alone.
Subsequent detailed reports intended to investigate claims
tend not to go further than rudimentary checks, where available, while the
allegations remain vague, replete with stereotyped notions of sexual assault.
On Radio 4’s Today programme, a former friend and employee
of Saville for 40 years had the temerity to question the posthumous
demonization.
Frankly, she said, she could not accept any of the
allegations as true without a proper court case. She did not know what was true, but it didn’t
accord with her experience of him at the time, nor many others she knew.
For the authors of the report however there are no doubts,
and nor had there been.
They proceeded on the basis that all claims were true and
found accordingly. There was no
documentary evidence, and it seems the only complaints made at the time were
seen as ‘inappropriate behaviour’ (in one case giving a 14 year old girl
flowers) rather than sexual assault or worse.
As the presumption of guilt has gathered pace the authors are
casually flippant about the defects in methodology, citing CPS policy and
‘sexual abuse ‘experts in support.
We learn from the report:
6.6 Some of the victims
were confused about dates and on occasions a few provided inconsistent
accounts. However it should be understood that this is entirely normal and
recognised as such by both sexual abuse experts and the Crown Prosecution
Service. In itself this is not an indication that an account is false and is a
frequent feature of statements given by individuals who are reporting events
from a long time ago. Alison Levitt QC, Principal Legal Advisor to the
Director of Public Prosecutions, wrote a report in March 2013 which said “…
damaging myths and stereotypes which are associated with these cases. One such
misplaced belief is that false allegations of rape… are rife”. Alison
Levitt’s research shows that false allegations are rare and current thinking
stipulates that victims should be believed unless there is evidence to suggest
otherwise. In the case of the Stoke Mandeville Hospital victims no such
evidence existed.
6.7 The Investigation
could not find clinical records for each of the patient victims as most of
these had been destroyed. Personnel records for staff victims (who no longer
worked at the Hospital) had also been destroyed and visitor victims left no
traceable evidence behind them to show that they had ever been to the Hospital.’
All the allegations therefore are rubber-stamped as
true without more.
You can see their
point. Why bother to look into claims
when you’ve already come to a decision?
Strangely enough though, there is no mention of
psychotherapist Valerie Sinason’s claim that patients from Stoke Mandeville
told her about 'satanic abuse' at the hospital.
Were
these claims not submitted to the enquiry?
Or were they put aside as being fanciful, undermining the credibility of
other complaints?
Ms Sinason, who is a specialist in ‘multiple
personality disorder’, is an ardent crusader for belief in ‘satanic abuse’
despite its doleful history as a mythical conspiracy theory.
Nevertheless her status as a former NHS
psychotherapist and her publicising of claims ought, one might think, have drawn the
attention of the panel to consider it in some measure.
The Stoke Mandeville report is in fact unique among
the slew of new reports published in that
although it has the most extensive and serious claims, and is likely to be the
most influential, it affords the least effort among the reports in terms of
attempts at substantiation.
Some of the other reports, while nominally more
probative, made findings on the basis of alleged ‘encounters’ or potential
‘sightings’ of Savile as if not only his alleged offending is a worthy subject
of damning enquiry, but his very presence.
The term ‘demonised’ is frequently an over-used
cliché, but the Jimmy Savile ‘legacy’ suggests that he really has become, in
secular terms, the devil incarnate.
Indeed, some of the descriptions appear to resemble
sightings of a mythical incubus, rather than anything happening in space and time,
which may be telling in itself.
Meanwhile in Leeds, a new report builds on the
previous one (which kick-started the mortuary allegations) with fresh
complaints considered at length, that
were prompted by the previous report.
It seems that the Savile legacy will be a
never-ending story, at least until the money dries up.
But in fact there is not a single allegation of any
seriousness against Jimmy Savile that we have read about which could be said to
be evidentially reliable on the basis of the evidence provided.
Claims that ‘everybody knew’ he was a sex pest or a
paedophile appear to be post hoc reminiscences, possibly based on vague rumour
or exaggeration, since he was certainly tactile and given to kissing ladies’
hands or arms in public.
The ‘paedophile’ rumours surrounded him for some years
before his death – but again there was no reliable evidence and plenty of
people who now claim ‘they knew’ were happy to hobnob with him at the time.
The fact is we don’t know the nature and extent of
his alleged offending. What we do know
is that there are numerous claimants seeking compensation from private and
public resources. Some of these have
already been sifted as unreliable using minuscule resources compared to the
official reports.
Even a few dogged individual researchers on the
internet have been able to find evidence to contradict claims – often through
critical scrutiny of publicly available news reports and documents – which are,
to coin a phrase ‘in plain sight’.
They
in turn have been contacted by people who did know Savile and are bemused and
sceptical.
But outside
the blogs, it appears that these plaintive witnesses are given no voice by the
media or the enquiries.
Of course
there are many claimants, but nearly all have come forward since the broadcast
of the Exposure documentary, which has been investigated as being critically flawed.
The
presumption that numbers necessarily dictate truth is wrong.
Whatever the
actual truth in individual cases there are numerous ways mass claims may be
false.
Firstly,
none of the claims are truly independent.
They have come in the wake of the original claims. When it is claimed
complaints were made at the time, there is no proof that this was the case, or
if so, that the complaint at that time was similar to that made now.
Collective
delusions and mass hysteria are well-known psychological phenomena. While they
generally affect confined communities, in the age of mass and social media, they may travel across a wide community.
Anyone who met
Savile, or might have, may then ‘remember’ an alleged assault, or exaggerate an
innocuous event. Being told he was a
very bad man, may invite radical memory reconstruction.
Then there
are people who are fantasists and habitual liars. These may be a minority of
claimants, but can be significant, particularly when it comes to dramatic
claims.
Then there
is the previous history of rumour surrounding Savile. The fact that rumours
were already in circulation prior to his death, is an invitation for people to
make false claims. That is the nature of
rumour. Celebrity may attract this, just
as claims of child incest were levelled against Marie Antoinette on the basis
of her position and profligacy (and of course her alleged sexual licentiousness
was the subject of numerous published pornographic libelles).
As judges
used to say, experience shows that people do make false allegations of sexual
crimes.
Whether
there is something particular about the subject matter that turns heads, other
than being hard to refute, is an open question.
Freud
thought his patients had all been sexually abused having presumed this was the
case. Then he decided that women have
sexual incest fantasies. But whose were
they? His implanted in their minds, the women’s, or true experiences?
Perhaps a
mixture, but bearing in mind the age old ideas about demonic sexual predators –
the incubi – there may be something in the idea that fantasies about sexual
experiences are more prevalent than might be the case in other domains.
Yet it was
the Freudian heritage that concentrated modern minds on the idea of the
ubiquity of sexual abuse, the supposed unique effect undermining
psychological well-being and, finally, the belief that ‘memories’ of assaults
can lie frozen in the mind for decades until ‘defrosted’ by a ‘trigger’ event.
The theory
of ‘repressed’ and recovered memory for significant adverse experiences has no
scientific standing. Yet many of the
alleged Savile victims claim it was only when they saw or read about his
alleged offences that they ‘remembered’.
In all
cases, the prospect of significant compensation payouts without being held to
account has to be seen as a significant incentive to exaggerate, lie or
fantasise.
Yet for the
report writers no such possibility appears to either be contemplated or to be
worthy of consideration.
Given the
incentives to make false allegations and the effect of the publicity
surrounding the initial claims, this complete absence of scepticism is
staggering, if predictable.
For as the
report says, this is what the CPS and the police consider to be right in
addressing sexual allegations, while constantly appealing for more people to
make claims. It is true that many sexual
assault victims do not report their experiences, but this is usually because
they are relationship based where understandable factors may inhibit.
But as the
ease with which claims such as those in Stoke Mandeville are accepted without
scrutiny becomes more widely recognised – and with it the CPS and police policy to this
effect – it is inevitable that yet more false allegations will be generated, to
the further detriment of justice in the UK.
