My point exactly in the thread on rolf harris..Tellyland back then seems to have been quite a place for anything from groping to rape and everyone was afraid to say or do anything.
I think or I hope that nowadays that things are very different. And I'd like to think that people are less intimidated.....hopefully the culture of silence has been burned to a crisp.
Not by a long chalk, sadly. Nor will it easily happen.
This is going to be a long battle, and one that will never be won: the day before Savile died, there will have been just as many people abusing others as there were back in the 1970s, etc. And the day the revelations about Savile came out, there will
still have been just as many people abusing others. Perhaps these revelations may have stopped a few, as the realisation dawns that there is a way in which they can be caught (I bet most abusers never seriously thought that, simply by different unconnected victims testifying against them to corroborate their patterns of abuse, a conviction could result), but most will, I suspect, carry on.
The only way that abuse is going to be prevented is by continually sending the message to everyone that it's OK to disclose abuse, and people will listen, and that when someone tells us they're being abused, we
have to take it seriously. We are still a long way from that - that culture of silence will always be waiting in the wings to rush back in and convince us that ignoring the problem and hoping it'll go away will be a good strategy.
Sexual abuse/assault says something about us that is deeply uncomfortable, and that is the primary reason for the "culture of silence" - everything else stems from there, in my view: we don't like to admit that someone whom we perhaps respect has some very nasty ways, so we are uncomfortable about telling others; they, in their turn, don't like to admit such things either, so they are reluctant to hear. Society, as a whole, doesn't like it either - look how easily we characterise and dehumanise these abusers as "monsters" - so it tends to shy away from confronting an uncomfortable truth.
And if that process is allowed to operate - or if we are not constantly vigilant to ensure that it doesn't - that culture of silence will be, silently, there again before we know it.
The first step is what we're already telling kids (and should be telling adults): "if someone touches you or does something to you that you don't like, TELL SOMEONE".
The next step, which I think we are still struggling with, is to LISTEN when people do tell us stuff. We still have a long way to go, there - let's not start patting ourselves on the back prematurely.
