children

Jimmy Savile, Boris Johnson and the Slow Burial of the Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse

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An 8 minute read by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale.

We have recently published two posts about the wall of silence that has long protected sexual abuse in Britain. The first was about the Archbishop of Canterbury and dozens of other church officials covered up the gruesome physical and sexual abuse of many boys and young men. The second was about how Jimmy Savile’s abuse was covered up for decades. This post looks at another example of that wall of silence – the way that the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the sexual abuse of children was effectively buried. 

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Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Saville and the Wall of Silence

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A 6 minute read by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale. This is our second post about the wall of silence that has long protected sexual abusers in Britain. Our first post was about how the Archbishop of Canterbury and dozens of other church officials covered up gruesome physical and sexual abuse. We argued there that the protection of sexual abusers in British institutions is not a glitch in the system. It is how the system works. This post tells the story of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, several police forces and dozens of managers protected Jimmy Savile over several decades.

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Gang abuse in Oxford

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

Last year seven men from Oxford were convicted in court on multiple counts of rape and abuse of young women and girls. They were part of a criminal gang that prostituted the girls for money. They concentrated on needy and vulnerable girls. The rapes usually began when the girls were between eleven and fifteen. The recent official report estimates, conservatively, that a total of 370 girls in Oxfordshire have been abused by gangs since 2005.

All seven of the men convicted were Asian. Six of the survivors testified. The fascist English Defence League has called a national demonstration in Oxford on April 4. They say that the council and the police did nothing because they were protecting Asians.

Unite Against Fascism and the local trades council have called for a mobilisation against the EDL on the same day, to prevent them from using the suffering of Oxfordshire children for their own ends. They are right to do so.

However, we need more than that. The local Labour MP, Andrew Smith, has called for an official inquiry to investigate how abuse on this scale was allowed to happen. He too is right.

But we also have to face the question of who is to blame for allowing the abuse to continue. In this blog we confront the racist arguments about abuse head on. In doing so, we have to say who is to blame for allowing the abuse to continue: the senior managers in the schools, the social services and the police.

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Punishing bad boys: intersections of race, class and gender

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale look at Ann Arnett Ferguson’s Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (Ann Arbour, University of Michigan Press, 2001).

This is a very good book about the depth of American racism behind the school to prison pipeline, the Ferguson and Black Lives Matter protests, and the new civil rights movement which is emerging in the United States. Bad Boys should also be read as a model for sociological research and theory. It is a brilliant example of how to do intersectional analysis.

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