The BBC Panorama child sex abuse fall out: No one yet knows the truth | David Hencke
Elm Guest House: One of the alleged venues which Panorama debunked.
Child sex abuse is by its nature a private act between two people-one who is not capable of giving consent.
The person who is abused is likely to be damaged for life by such an experience and could find it difficult to relate to other people. So prior to the Jimmy Savile expose hardly anybody believed them.
The perpetrator who would suffer huge damage to his or her reputation if found out will go to any length to cover their tracks -including, if the current Met Police criminal investigation , Operation Midland, is to be believed, murder.
Rack this up and say you wish to uncover acts more than 30 years ago- when mobile phones and the internet were science fiction- involving very, very powerful people in high places who can pull strings and you have made it doubly difficult.
That is why it is absurd for the BBC to put out a documentary claiming to reveal the truth about the Westminster paedophile ring when the story is only half complete, when the police haven’t finished their investigation, and nobody has tested the evidence.
The result was a documentary that probably left the public confused, the police visibly annoyed because it could have put off new people coming forward to help them complete their investigations and the survivors who were interviewed by the BBC worried they had been traduced.
Source: The BBC Panorama child sex abuse fall out: No one yet knows the truth | David Hencke
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I worked in social services in London in the 80s. There were rumours then of certain important individuals, some of whom have been mentioned as under investigation more recently. I refrain from mentioning any names now as I have no proof, though I believe that some senior establishment figures were involved and that an organised ring existed.
Certainly that was the general belief held by manyof my colleagues. Some of those recently proven to have been guilty of this appalling crime were among the names suspected then.
On the other hand I am also aware of a number of cases where individuals have been falsely accused of abusive behaviour and I believe some who have been convicted or who have had their names dragged through the mud, unfairly, were innocent.
Child abuse is a wicked crime and the guilty should be severely punished but the mechanism for investigating allegations including trawling through records to locate people who may have been in the vicinity of alleged victims is unsafe. There is an awareness of large sums of compensation available for victims and very little in the way of sanctions when allegations are proven to be false. I know of cases where false allegations were made in an attempt to get some of the free money.
In my mind this is a difficult circle to square – On the one hand we want as many victims as possible to come forward in order to build a case against often powerful people and they should be confident that their allegations will be believed and that they will be properly respected and on the other hand their motives must be questioned if large sums of money are involved.
Many children end up in care because they have been abused, mostly by family members or friends. Some children are abused while in care. Some children in care resort to extremely risky or self harming behaviour due to the psychological damage and low self esteem they feel and seek ‘love’ making them easy prey for predatory abusers. The attempts made to protect these young people, sometimes from themselves risk becoming oppressive as they may find that restrictions are placed on them to stop them repeating dangerous behaviour. All these children are victims and should be treated as such.
Many teachers or people in the caring professions have had false allegations made against them for malicious reasons and have had their reputations and sometimes their whole careers ruined.
I don’t pretend to have any answers as to how to proceed with this other than to urge caution particularly when seeking corroboration from possibly unreliable ‘witnesses’ with ulterior motives.
The Panorama programme should never have been made during several on going police investigations. At least however the programme only scratched the surface and did not mention most of them.
What bothers a lot of people is the thought that anything involving senior Tory politicians, including previous Prime Ministers, or members of the Windsor family, is going to be swept under the carpet by the Establishemnt.
The government and their cronies are trying like hell to bury this and make it all go away, May was supposedly going to move heaven and earth to find out the truth before the election but when they got back in again, she suddenly shut her gob and said no more about it, no further word or update about the investigation, complete silence, there is obviously something that they don’t want us to know about, it must be something pretty severe and volatile that if we did all find out about it, we would all be out in force demanding justice to victims and prosecutions to be made.