Thursday, February 26, 2015
More hysterical nonsense about Cliff Richard and Jimmy Savile
A further nonsense 'report' about Jimmy Savile is published just as the process which led to this witch-hunt travesty is being rehearsed all over again with Cliff Richard by the ever useless South Yorkshire Police and the BBC, stung into further wild flailing fantasy by the lambasting they received this week.
When will anyone learn that if you carry out a police-media trawl of any and every celebrity, then inevitably a line of variously motivated complainants comes forward? This is just as would be expected no matter how clearly innocent is the target. And they don't come much more obviously innocent than Cliff Richard.
It's not as though this phenomenon is unknown or non-researched. It's taboo, of course: Professor Keith Soothill's findings about the amazingly trivial varied motivations of women making false rape allegations is never even mentioned in the media. And that's before you consider the research on the hopelessness of human memory even for events which have just happened, never mind putative occurrences of 30 or 40 years ago, for which 'false memories' are readily constructed. The media spotlight and financial recompense enter the fray with high-profile police-media trawling; as does the issue of the sheer volume of individuals – the entire population – from which there are significant numbers of psychologically disturbed women seeking a peg on which to hang their aberrant life histories, supposed PTSD, etc. When you have literally thousands of sexual encounters in your past, then it's a fair bet that a lot of now ageing females are going to redefine consensual and, indeed their initiated advances, as now somehow non-consensual.
The report on Savile is merely yet further cataloguing of mere allegation, on the spurious grounds that parallel allegation must be mutually corroborating. It's profoundly false to rely on the very phenomenon your investigative methods in themselves were bound to produce as justification for your investigation and its mode. It's a 'self-fulfilling prophecy' almost certain to result in miscarriage of justice.
It's not that all there is here is invention, of course; it's not least the exaggeration of behaviour which appears to be nothing out of the ordinary for a very high-profile youth-cult celebrity. At worst, Savile was described as a "sex pest". No doubt he had a presumptive attitude that a kiss or cuddle from him usually would be welcome. That's because usually obviously they were. But it is madness to extrapolate the likely high volume of sex he had with young women and older girls in his trailer by the TOTP studio to try to make out that somehow this was with unwilling partners, and that he transferred this behaviour to a hospital setting. Someone at the time in Savile's position would have had an endless stream of girls throwing themselves at him. It would require saintly behaviour never to have misread signals and never to have unwittingly had sex with an under-age girl (when girls by the thousand lied about their ages to get into the TOTP studio). The normal behaviour of such males at times might now, in our crazy era, pass for misdemeanour as 'sexual harassment', but hardly so at the time; and if it would have been thus considered it would be regarded as mild. It's not 'rape' or serious sexual assault. And still less was it 'paedophilia', even on the non-scientific current absurdly loose definition of the term – 'paedophilia is an exclusive sexual interest in pre-pubertal individuals, and Savile had a non-exclusive sexual interest in post-pubertal girls (he had sex with fully mature women).
History, and very recent history included, is littered with appalling witch-hunts of male sexual behaviour. It is not long ago that we had the utterly risible 'satanic sexual abuse' hysteria. This was found, eventually, to be 100% bogus. It was a wholly non-existent phenomenon. Now we have a recapitulation of that ridiculous hysteria to try to convict any male ageing celebrity through inviting bogus allegation or to goad anyone who has any sort of social or willing sexual encounter to redefine it as assault. So it is that Rolf Harris – Rolf Harris of all people – is in prison on the basis of nothing substantive. Ditto several others, not to mention the many cases too absurdly flimsy that even in the current climate the sex-fascists at the CPS couldn't persuade some hapless jury to convict.
I need to add, it should go without saying it (though in our numptie-coddling era it's necessary), that it may be that Savile indeed was the serious predator he's being made out to be, but there is in place of evidence only allegation. Therefore, no such conclusion can be made. But more than this, the likelihood is that surely he was 'a bit of a lad' but worse than that he was not.
This debacle will be looked back on by future generations as an object lesson in how crazy a society can become..
# posted by Steve Moxon @ 12:14 pm 
