The depiction of what Peter Spindler, a police commander, called a “vast, predatory and opportunistic” record of misconduct offered the latest gruesome indictment in a scandal that has plunged Britain’s public broadcaster, Mr. Savile’s longtime employer, into crisis, drawn in a mounting tally of suspects and victims and raised questions about the protection of children from predators in supposedly safe institutions.
In the process, Mr. Savile’s public image has been transformed. Once seen as a zany national treasure with a near-saintly commitment to charitable work, often of behalf of children, the television star is now openly blamed for one of Britain’s most extensive catalogs of abuse.
The report by Scotland Yard and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children said Mr. Savile used his status as a national celebrity to “hide in plain sight” as he committed 214 criminal offenses in 28 police jurisdictions.
The locations included the premises of the BBC, a home for disturbed adolescent girls, and 14 medical facilities such as hospitals, mental health units and a hospice for the dying. The accusations spanned the period from 1955 to 2009.
At the same time, the Crown Prosecution Service acknowledged that three victims who accused Mr. Savile of abuse in 2009 were not taken seriously enough. “I would like to take the opportunity to apologize for the shortcomings in the part played by the Crown Prosecution Service in these cases,” Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, said in a separate statement.
The joint report by the police and the children’s charity said Mr. Savile’s victims were between 8 and 47 years old. The majority — 73 percent — were children. After 450 people came forward to accuse Mr. Savile since October 2012, police concluded that the number of crimes of which he is accused totals 214, 34 of them rapes.
Most of the victims were aged between 13 and 16 years, and 82 percent of them were female. The offenses peaked in a decade between 1966 and 1976, when Mr. Savile was aged between 40 and 50, the report said.
The bald statistics gave a clearer insight into the accusations against Mr. Savile, drawn from the testimony of hundreds of people who reported their cases to the police after the scandal relating to his behavior ballooned last October.
“He cannot face justice today,” Commander Spindler said. “But we hope this report gives some comfort to his hundreds of victims. They have been listened to and taken seriously.”
The affair began to emerge shortly after Mr. Savile died October 2011 at age 84. A few weeks later, “Newsnight,”a flagship current affairs program on the BBC, canceled an investigation into allegations of sexual abuse by Mr. Savile shortly before the corporation broadcast lavish Christmas tributes to him.
As the scandal grew, it forced the resignation of the former director general of the BBC, George Entwistle. Police officials said last month that 589 people made accusations related to the scandal mostly relating to Mr. Savile but including other high-profile figures. Police detectives have questioned 10 men about sexual accusations that they all deny. Six more men, who have not been identified by name, are under investigation.
Before the report was published on Friday, John Cameron, the head of child protection for the children’s charity, told The Guardian: “It is very clear that Savile assaulted very young children and that he was a prolific pedophile, there is no doubt about that. We want this to mark a cultural shift so that if a child speaks out about someone, we take what they are saying seriously and we act upon it always in future.”
A report commissioned by the BBC concluded last month that lax leadership hampered by “rigid management chains” left the corporation “completely incapable” of dealing with the crisis.
A 200-page report by Nick Pollard, a veteran British broadcast executive, strongly criticized the editorial and management decisions that prompted the BBC to cancel the broadcast in 2011 that would have exposed decades of abuse.
But Mr. Pollard absolved top management of applying “undue pressure” in the decision to stop the broadcast.
The report also did not challenge the assertions of Mark Thompson, then head of the BBC, that he had no role in killing the Savile investigation and was unaware of the sexual abuse accusations until he left the BBC this September. Mr. Thompson is now president and chief executive of The New York Times Company.
The report’s central conclusion was that confusion and mismanagement, not a cover-up, lay at the heart of the decision to drop the Savile segment on “Newsnight.”
A second BBC inquiry into the culture of the BBC over decades of abuse is continuing.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/world/europe/jimmy-savile-sexual-abuse-scandal-report.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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