With the resignation, today, of the head of the BBC, one is reminded of how the organisation, authorities and people in general, simply ignored, or turned away from, taking seriously allegations of sexual abuse of young women by one of the Beeb's high-profile celebrities. The consequences for the young people has been devastating. Parellels can be drawn with the imbroglio involving the Catholic Church, its priests and a variety of authorities, especially those charged with looking after minors.
"No one listened to Deborah Cogger’s story. Not her teachers, who dismissed it as no big deal. Not her social worker, who accused her of making it up. Not the newspapers she called decades later, which said it was too explosive to publish.
It was not until this fall, nearly 40 years after she left a reform school in Surrey, England, that Ms. Cogger finally got anyone to believe her account of how she and other girls there were routinely molested by one of Britain’s most powerful celebrities, the eccentric, cigar-chomping television host Jimmy Savile.
“If you moaned about it, you were told not to say those awful things about Jimmy — ‘Oh, that’s just Jimmy, that’s his way; he loves you girls,’ ” said Ms. Cogger, 52. If you said he had touched your breasts, she added, “they’d say, ‘Don’t be wicked, he would never do that.’ ”
The revelation last month that Mr. Savile, who died last year, was most likely a child sex abuser with perhaps hundreds of victims has profoundly shocked a country that now acknowledges that all the signs were there, if anyone had cared to see them."
"No one listened to Deborah Cogger’s story. Not her teachers, who dismissed it as no big deal. Not her social worker, who accused her of making it up. Not the newspapers she called decades later, which said it was too explosive to publish.
It was not until this fall, nearly 40 years after she left a reform school in Surrey, England, that Ms. Cogger finally got anyone to believe her account of how she and other girls there were routinely molested by one of Britain’s most powerful celebrities, the eccentric, cigar-chomping television host Jimmy Savile.
“If you moaned about it, you were told not to say those awful things about Jimmy — ‘Oh, that’s just Jimmy, that’s his way; he loves you girls,’ ” said Ms. Cogger, 52. If you said he had touched your breasts, she added, “they’d say, ‘Don’t be wicked, he would never do that.’ ”
The revelation last month that Mr. Savile, who died last year, was most likely a child sex abuser with perhaps hundreds of victims has profoundly shocked a country that now acknowledges that all the signs were there, if anyone had cared to see them."
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