Savile

All day yesterday I kept hearing reports about Jimmy Savile and how the BBC was to blame for his crimes. Today the blame is still being laid at the door of the BBC but now it's claimed the royal family, Margaret Thatcher and that strange being 'The Establishment' were to blame for covering up what he was doing.

If I thought about Savile at all in his heyday, I thought he was weird. If anything, I decided he was likely to be either an asexual mummy's boy or a closet homosexual. His TV programmes made me cringe. But that was it - and I suspect many other people thought the same and no more than that.

I am no friend of the BBC or the royal family or Thatcher or the establishment but I want to point out that the only person who should be blamed for Savile's crimes is Savile. He was a clever, devious, manipulative paedophile who got himself into a position of power so that he could abuse children and young people.

Clever, devious and manipulative are words that describe all paedophiles perfectly. Consider the case of Robert Black, the serial killer who recently did us all a favour by dying in prison. He wasn't caught after a police investigation. After who knows how many years of committing abduction, rape and murder, Black made a mistake and was caught through that. Even when he was banged up for life for 3 murders, he refused to give the families of other missing children peace of mind by confessing to his crimes. I've seen various estimates of how many other children he murdered, anywhere between 4 and 13. All the time he was active as a paedophile, I'm pretty sure his neighbours, relatives and the people he worked with thought he was strange. They would have said things like he kept himself to himself, he had no friends and no girlfriends, we knew nothing about him really.

The problem is that most of us can't imagine anyone so lacking in humanity that they would commit such crimes against innocent children. Someone told me this week that police officers who work on cyber crimes 'against the person' are sent for counselling every few months to try to counter the horror of what they are seeing on the computer screen. I'm sorry people have to do these jobs but I'm grateful that they do. What the rest of us can do to help these officers and the victims of people like Savile, Hall, Black and others is:

- accept that paedophiles exist and that they have always been there in our society

- accept that they do what they do because they think they will get away with it

- so create an atmosphere in which victims can talk freely about what has happened to them

- and believe the victims

- set up treatment not just for the victims but also for the paedophiles.

- do more research into paedophilia. I have read that only 40% of paedophiles have been abused themselves. So why do the other 60% start to offend? I don't know if we can break the cycle of offending but we owe it to our children to try.