Blinkered vision on matters of sex

The involvement of celebrities in the sexual abuse of young people raises fundamental issues for modern society. Rolf Harris is the latest example, and the extent of the Jimmy Savile scandal continues to grow alarmingly. These issues are not just about child protection, vital though that is, but about the whole sexual culture. Time and again, institutions failed to heed the warning signs and turned a blind eye to what was happening, apparently taking the view that casual sexual relations with teenagers were unlikely to do them much harm and therefore did not matter. In the absence of physical violence – and sometimes even where it was present – their willingness to participate was presumed.

  The paradox is that in an age when the sexual empowerment of adult women was being hailed as a breakthrough, their younger sisters were in fact being disempowered, treated as mere fodder for the desires of rich and famous men. In so far as these adolescent children – that is all they were – were groomed for sexual victimhood, this was as much the result of the entire pop and entertainment culture as of specific acts by the perpetrators. Helping themselves to what seemed to be on offer was regarded as a perk of the job. Institutions, sometimes as grand as the BBC or certain famous hospitals, unwittingly provided facilities where the abuse could take place.

  Many of the cases recently before the courts happened decades ago. Like Harris, many of the men standing in the dock are elderly and infirm, and their victims are now mature women. It is possible that a minority of complainants are motivated primarily by the hope of financial compensation. But by and large the victims’ claim that they were done lasting damage, and that they want justice as a crucial element in their recovery, is entirely credible. Often they have displayed great courage in coming forward, and in the witness box have suffered from having to relive traumatic events as the trial process coldly dissects what happened.

  There is also a lesson here for the child-abuse scandal inside the Catholic Church, where so-called “historic” cases continue to come to light sometimes several decades after they occurred. It is clear that the invasion of a young person’s sexual space for the gratification of an older person’s lust, whether by full  intercourse or by touching and groping, can do severe harm to the victim’s emotional and sexual well-being which could haunt them permanently. Society has been slow to recognise this. The evil lies not just in the exploitation of an unequal power relationship, though that makes complaining and reporting more difficult. The hallmark of the sexual culture that emerged from the 1960s was the trivialisation of sex, and hence the trivialisation of the  humanity of the young people concerned. That has proved psychologically very difficult to overcome.

  The Catholic Church has no right to feel superior in this respect. It too tended to forget about the long-term damage to victims, and concentrated on the sexual sin itself. If the young person had not “cooperated” in the sin, their role was thought to have no further significance. As happened so often, celibate clergy found it hard to grasp what sexuality was about. It was seen as a source of temptation, not as a vital, intimate and therefore vulnerable element of the whole personality. And on the evidence of the Vatican’s instrumentum laboris published last week, and that summarises the sexual and relationship issues presenting before the forthcoming Synod of Bishops on the Family, this is not about to change. The matters are to be discussed by a roomful of elderly celibates, not by married women and men who know at first hand what they are talking about. Is that not another form of wilful blindness?