Treating every allegation against Jimmy Savile as a ‘fact’ undermines justice

For a different slant on the Jimmy Saville Affair see the article written by Charles More published in the Daily Telegraph which is reproduced in full below

The lead headline on the BBC website yesterday said: “Jimmy Savile scandal: Report reveals extent of abuse”. Well, I have read the whole of the report, and I can assure you that it does not.

Like most people, I believe the gist of the report – in the loose sense that I believe that Jimmy Savile did horrible, criminal things to young people, mainly to girls. But this is not exact knowledge: it is based on the stories which keep being repeated in the media and on the feeling, which one got from anecdotes, interviews and documentaries about Savile when he was alive, that he was sexually sinister. What would be valuable from an official report, surely, would be actual evidence. This report contains none, in a sense which a court would recognise.

The central problem crops up as early as the fourth paragraph. This states that the investigation – Operation Yewtree – has “collated all the allegations against Savile, irrespective of where the offences took place”. It jumps straight from “allegations” to “offences”. It assumes that because allegations were made, the offences were committed. It declares that 214 incidents have now been “formally recorded” as crimes. It treats allegations as facts. By doing so, it undermines justice.

Aware of a bit of a difficulty here, the report admits that “the information has not been corroborated”. Corroboration would be “considered disproportionate”, it goes on, given that criminal proceedings cannot now be brought because Savile is dead. So all we have are claims. The report seeks to justify itself by saying that “the patterns and similarities” of his “offences and behaviours” reported have “given police and NSPCC staff an informed view that most people have provided compelling accounts of what happened to them”. So, it suggests, the rest of us must believe them.

All we know that we did not know before is a series of statistics – the number of people who have come forward, the number and nature of offences alleged (126 indecent assaults, for example), their incidence over years, and their geographical spread. Where does this lead?

The report is called Giving Victims a Voice, and it says repeatedly how dreadful it was that Savile’s victims were not believed. But one of the odd things about it is that it does not give such a voice. No victim is identified (which, in itself, is understandable, but does undermine the report’s declared purpose) and hardly any are quoted. So what the report is really doing is saying, “We’ve talked to these people, and we believe them. We know what we’re doing, so you’d better believe us.” How can we test such assertions? The police have often been wrong in the past on these matters. The NSPCC, however expert, cannot know for certain. This is an exercise designed to show that those conducting the report have talked to a lot of people and take the subject very seriously.

But if they take it seriously, they should interest themselves seriously in establishing truth. The report is correct when it says that there used to be an attitude of mind which dismissed accusations of sexual abuse far too easily. But it cannot be right to go so far the other way that every accusation must be considered true. Yet this is effectively what the report does. It insists that everyone referred to in the statistics be described as a “victim” rather than a “complainant”, yet it cannot know whether this is an accurate description. It never expresses the slightest doubt about any accusation which it has recorded.

I wonder how the inquiry would have treated a liar. I have never been abused by Jimmy Savile (though I did meet him once, in the BBC). Suppose I had pretended that I had been his victim when I was a teenager in the early Seventies, surrounding my lie with accurate, checkable facts about when Savile was where. Would I have been believed? If so, would that have classified me as yet another victim to be “given a voice” by the inquiry?

Of course, it is highly unlikely that most, or even many, people who came forward were making everything up, and it would be very distressing for real victims to be accused of this. But it is certainly not at all unknown for some people to say things which are not true, especially where celebrity and the prospect of money come into play. If the police and the NSPCC absolutely deny this possibility, then they really are unfit to investigate iniquity of any kind.

But because this report subjects these stories against Savile to no tests, it puts potentially unfair moral pressure on the other, related investigations now taking place. Suppose that the forthcoming BBC or NHS investigations come across a claim which they conscientiously believe to be false. Suppose – even more likely – that they encounter a claim which they simply feel they cannot judge accurately. What will happen? If they refuse to find against Savile, and therefore refuse to reprimand staff for errors or omissions, will they then be excoriated? Will they be accused of ignoring victims because they insist on sticking to facts? And will all the people who say Savile abused them, because the report calls them victims, be able to sue, regardless of proof?

Only 15 months ago, Jimmy Savile died. Then, he was “a proper British eccentric” (Ricky Gervais), “a real character” (John Prescott). “We have lost a ray of sunshine”, said Carol Vorderman. He was “working miracles for more than 1,500 children”, reported the Daily Mail. Jeremy Hunt, then the minister for culture, media and sport, paid tribute to Sir Jimmy’s “sense of fun” and said he would leave “a lasting legacy”.

It is now generally accepted that all this praise was wrong. Today, the same Jeremy Hunt, now Health Secretary, is dealing with the Savile legacy that really has lasted. He is responsible for the resulting inquiry in the NHS. Savile, once feted, is now a pariah. Yet in a strange way it feels as if we are making the same mistake the other way round. People are as keen to distance themselves from Savile as once they were to associate themselves with him, and so they are showing the same disregard for truth. The tragic fact about child sexual abuse is that the truth is not easy to establish – if it were, it would be much less of a problem. Operation Yewtree’s report is not a contribution to the truth, but to the official obsession with being seen to be on the good side.

You can observe this, too, in the way that it has been covered and commented on. Yesterday on television and radio, I did not hear a single person raise any of these points. No one dared to question the report’s methods or conclusions. No one pointed out that the problem of unfairness to victims is not solved by unfairness to those accused. No one asked how, if every accusation is believed, any sane person will ever again want to be a teacher, nurse, doctor, priest, child-care assistant, charity worker, scoutmaster or children’s television presenter.

Part of the great wickedness of people such as Jimmy Savile is that they know how to plant doubt. At the end of the extraordinary programme called When Louis Met Jimmy, made in 2000, the presenter Louis Theroux raised with him the claim that he was a paedophile. Savile denied it, but added, “How does anyone know whether I am or not?” This uninformative and self-righteous report is not making it easier to answer this question, when – as they certainly will – future Saviles arise.