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Introduction
This paper problematises what is, arguably, the most prominent chapter in recent UK cultural history, in which the former BBC entertainer Jimmy Savile[1] is alleged to have sexually abused hundreds of children over the past 50 years. The case has been employed to justify significant changes in policing and criminal justice policy responses to claims of non-recent abuse. The paper explores the origins of the Savile scandal.
The subject of child sexual abuse (CSA) is often claimed to meet the criteria of a moral panic as described in Cohen's (2002) seminal work (Clapton et al. , 2013). Furedi (2013) extends the moral panic analysis to one of "moral crusade", arguing that the enduring focus on CSA does not meet with the transient nature of moral panics and that the Savile case is but another episode in this wider crusade. Jenkins (1998) and Frankfurter (2006) are supportive of the crusade analogy, arguing that a belief that children are subject to existential, demonic threat is a persistent theme throughout history. More recently and despite authoritative critiques (La Fontaine, 1998; Webster, 2005), the satanic ritual abuse controversy, which swept the USA and the UK over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, reprises in the Savile case (Fielding, 2013), suggesting that a belief in demonic threats still has traction in the public imagination.
Against this broader backcloth, a belief that physical and sexual abuse was endemic in children's care homes has become what Webster (2009) terms "an unquestioned orthodoxy" (p. 10). Institutional abuse stories have become reified in various victim accounts and in a growing number of official reports across much of the developed, particularly the Western, world (Australian Human Rights Commission, 1997; Waterhouse, 2000; Ryan, 2009; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). Jurisdictions across the UK have set up major Inquiries into historical abuse. While there is little doubt that sexual abuse occurred in care settings, more than had hitherto been appreciated, many would question whether it was as endemic as is now claimed. Indeed, evidence for the scale of such abuse is questioned: Brunton (1998), for instance, contests much of the Australian Stolen Generation material; Kaufman Report (2002) questions the alleged scale of abuse in a major case in Nova Scotia; Niezen (2013) subjects...