Speak up and protect vulnerable children

Despite myriad heart-rending revelations about decades of child abuse in this country, yesterday’s report on celebrity paedophile Jimmy Savile, knighted for his charity work, makes for deeply disturbing reading.

Any parent, any person with even a basic understanding of how very vulnerable trusting, star-struck children and teenagers can be, cannot but be struck by how this evil, predatory man hid in plain view and, for six decades, abused young people in BBC facilities around Britain, in schools, in 13 hospitals and even in a hospice. The report detailed some 214 crimes, including 34 of rape or penetration. His youngest victim was an eight year-old boy, the oldest was a 47-year-old person with learning difficulties.

This was abuse on a gargantuan scale and, even though it is natural to recoil from the memory, it cannot but remind us of some of the most active and evil paedophiles uncovered in this jurisdiction. It reminds us too that child abuse, so strongly associated with clerics, is an evil found in all sections of society and that the great majority of abuse occurs in a domestic environment.