Truly, it seems that scarcely a day now passes without our being informed of yet another celebrity accused of sexual depravity.
We were all appalled enough by Jimmy Savile and his five-decade rampage abusing women and under-age children (horrifyingly, we now learn he may have sexually assaulted four five-year-olds).
Since then, a steady stream of male celebrities has been arrested on suspicion of sexual offences including comic Jim Davidson, DJ Dave Lee Travis, publicist Max Clifford, entertainers Jimmy Tarbuck and Rolf Harris, Coronation Street actor William Roache and the former BBC compere Stuart Hall.
We were all appalled enough by Jimmy Savile and his five-decade rampage abusing women and under-age childrenNor is that all.
Claims of groping by the Lib Dem grandee Lord Rennard seemed to raise the floodgates on a deluge of stories of sexual harassment of women in the workplace.
The House of Commons Deputy Speaker and Conservative MP Nigel Evans has been arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual assault against two men.
Eddie Shah, founder of the now defunct Today newspaper, is facing trial on six counts of rape in the Nineties against a girl aged between 13 and 15.
HorrificA new book claims that two senior male staff on the BBC children’s show Doctor Who sexually preyed on young male fans during the Eighties. All this against the backdrop of a number of horrific trials of men accused of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and killing children.
Of course, we don’t know whether all these accusations are true. In law, after all, everyone is presumed innocent until they are proven guilty.
And there are also grounds for unease about the way some police have been going about all this, with arrests conducted in the most high-profile manner.
DJ Dave Lee Travis (left) and PR guru Max Clifford (right) are among the celebrities to be arrested under Operation Yewtree on suspicion of sexual offencesIt is almost as if they have set out to bury the fact that for years they ignored accusations of sexual assault made by disadvantaged women and children, who were written off as being unreliable.
But far too much has been established to ignore. Stuart Hall, for example, has pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting 13 girls, the youngest aged nine.
And from the details of that sordid case, we learn that the BBC effectively facilitated Hall’s crimes, with a member of staff shepherding a steady stream of girls and women to a ‘medical room’ in the BBC’s Manchester HQ where Hall’s assignations took place.
A number of people knew what was going on there; no one did anything.
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So should we conclude that the BBC was a den of vice, a kind of public service brothel of the air?
Yet the BBC and entertainment industry were clearly not alone in this. No fewer than five distinguished music schools are currently facing investigations into claims of sexual abuse of their pupils by members of staff.
And let’s not forget the relentless trickle of Christian clerics subject to such accusations. One reason this is all coming out now is that the social climate has dramatically changed from indifference about sexual permissiveness to panic about sexual abuse.
The real reason no one at the BBC did anything about Savile or Hall was not just the fear of destroying their lucrative stars. It was also that, especially during the Seventies and Eighties, sexual licence was considered acceptable and anyone who spoke against it was treated as a pariah.
This was, after all, what the sexual revolution was all about. All constraints on sexual behaviour were removed. ‘Lifestyle choice’ meant the right to have sex with anyone.
No one had the right to judge anyone else’s sexual behaviour. Those who warned this would unravel not just traditional morality but the very bedrock of decency and order were scorned and insulted.
This permissive attitude was extended to children, too. The young were greedily viewed as a huge consumer market, and so were cynically targeted by sexually suggestive pop lyrics, clothing and magazine articles.
PredatorsAt school, young children were subjected to grossly inappropriate ‘sex education’, which was a green light to sexual activity. Such lessons presented sex as a kind of sport, telling children in effect:
‘Here are the pleasures, here are the risks, now enjoy yourself but be careful.’
Accordingly, when 14-year-old fans threw themselves at pop stars and other celebrities, no one disapproved.
With the ‘rights of the child’ supreme, children’s homes couldn’t even discipline their young residents without being sued or prosecuted.
So children wandered out of these homes more or less at will to go on the prostitution game and fall victim to sexual predators.
Comedian Jim Davidson (left) and Rolf Harris (right) are two well known personalities to have been arrestedAnd everyone carefully looked away from gay paedophilia; even to raise it as a problem was to be vilified as an anti-gay bigot. The legal age of consent thus fell into general disuse. In the past few days, there has been a hue and cry against the barrister Barbara Hewson, who suggested the age of consent should be lowered to 13 to end the prosecution of ageing celebrities for ‘low-level’ sex offences.
Eddy Shah founder of the now defunct Today newspaper, is facing trial on six counts of rape in the NinetiesHer remarks have caused outrage and led to an inquiry by her own chambers. The idea that 13-year-olds might legally have sex is, indeed, deeply undesirable. But why are people so shocked at Ms Hewson’s comments? For such calls are unfortunately now commonplace.
Back in 2006, Terry Grange, the Association Of Chief Police Officers’ spokesman on child protection, said having sex with children should not be classed as paedophilia if the child was aged between 13 and 15.
Three years later, Professor John Spencer, a law fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge, argued on BBC radio that the age of consent should be reduced to 13.
And in any event, the age of consent has been progressively eroded. Irresponsible teenage magazines — which are read by much younger children — endlessly promote a bordello menu of sexual activity.
Schools dish out contraception and abortion advice to pubescent children — advice blessed by paediatricians, who claim that if a child is old enough to ask for it, she is old enough to give her meaningful consent.
Culture Barbara Hewson advocatied reducing the age of consent to 13 to 'end the persecution of old men'So it would seem that the outrage directed at Ms Hewson is not so much over her proposal to lower the age of consent — but rather that she has taken the side of the men who are accused.
Indeed, the current wave of sexual abuse revelations has put a spring in the step of bash-the-men feminists.
Last October, the writer Joan Smith exulted that Savile and similar scandals had ‘lifted the lid on a rage that’s been simmering for years’ over ‘a wider culture that was sexist, out of control and for the most part unchallenged’.
In a Guardian article last week, Kira Cochrane, while careful to say most men abhor male violence, nevertheless claimed that the root problem was ‘the threat of male aggression we all live under’.
This is all staggeringly perverse. Man-bashing feminism has much to answer for in creating a climate that came to tolerate the abuse of women and children.
Demonising men as at worst violent and at best irrelevant, it told women they could and should go it alone.
Men took them at their word and started routinely playing the field — thus treating women and children increasingly as objects to be used and discarded.
So why are people now shocked by the debauchery that has been unleashed?
If you remove constraints on sexual behaviour, this is precisely what you get. Permissiveness and sexual abuse are two sides of the same coin. We are now merely reaping what we have sown.
m.phillips@dailymail.co.uk
