The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Abuse stories grow after BBC TV host’s death
Broad criminal inquiry under way in England.
LONDON — No one listened to Deborah Cogger’s story. Not her teachers, who dismissed it as no big deal. Not her social worker, who accused her of making it up. Not the newspapers she called, decades later, who said it was too explosive to publish.
It was not until this fall, nearly 40 years after she left a reform school in Surrey, that Cogger finally got anyone to believe her account of how she and other girls there were routinely molested by one of Britain’s most powerful celebrities, the eccentric, cigar-chomping television host Jimmy Savile.
“If you moaned about it, you were told not to say those awful things about Jimmy — ‘Oh, that’s just Jimmy, that’s his way; he loves you girls,’ “said Cogger, 52.
The revelation last month that Savile, who died last year, was most likely a pedophile with perhaps hundreds of victims has profoundly shocked a country that now acknowledges that all the signs were there, if anyone had cared to see them.
The disclosures al- so have spurred a broad criminal inquiry involving numerous police departments; caused institutions, including schools, hospitals and the BBC, to investigate their ties to Savile; and encouraged hundreds of people to report their own experiences to abuse hot lines.
They also have highlighted how much Britain’s attitude toward sexual abuse has changed since Savile’s heyday, in the 1970s and ’80s. It was a time when it was not uncommon for women to be groped and harassed at work, and when show business celebrities openly leered at, if not preyed on, the teenage girls who idolized them.
“There was a massive cultural difference then,” said Donald Findlater, director of Stop It Now, which works to prevent child sexual abuse. “We hadn’t really properly discovered child abuse yet.”
But, bolstered by increasingly strict legislation, attitudes have swung drastically in the other direction — to a fault, some believe. Police background checks are now required of anyone working with children, including parents who volunteer in schools. Teachers are advised not to be alone with students and to be wary of touching them.
Some playgrounds refuse admission to adults without children. Some schools forbid parents to photograph sports events or plays, lest the pictures end up in the wrong place. In 2000, a tabloid anti-pedophile campaign led to vigilante attacks in which, at one point, a crowd confused the words pedophile and pediatrician and vandalized the home of an innocent doctor.
Given the current climate, it is hard to believe Savile could have gotten away with so much for so long, even in a society burdened by collective, willful blindness. But the account of Cogger shows how for victims, the abuse was compounded by the realization that anyone who complained would be ignored, scoffed at or punished.
Cogger is not the only one from the reform school, the Duncroft Approved School for Girls, to have come forward with a tale of what Savile did and how he got away with it. At least six former students have told the British news media how Savile assaulted them in places that included his Rolls-Royce, the school’s dormitories and in London on schoolapproved “treats.”
“Jimmy treated Duncroft like a pedophile sweet shop,” one former student, Toni Townsend, told the Daily Mirror.
In 2007, the Surrey police investigated Savile’s conduct at Duncroft, even detaining and questioning him. But he was never charged.
Duncroft, which closed in the 1980s — it is now a luxury apartment complex — was a privately run boarding school, operating under state control, for academically promising but unruly girls. Cogger was sent there in 1974, when she was 14.
She said the institution was in thrall to Savile, a wealthy benefactor whose money it depended on and whose picture was prominently displayed on its walls.
Carrying armloads of records, cigarettes and candy to hand out, Savile would pull up in a huge car, greeted by a “little posse of the older girls,” Cogger said. He would have cocktails with the staff before being left free to roam the school — dormitories, recreation rooms, wherever.
“He was like a kid with a box of chocolates,” she said.
His behavior was an open secret. “We all discussed it: ‘What did he do to you this time?’” Cogger recalled. But the school did not seem to care, and girls who complained were stripped of privileges. If they became hysterical, they were shut into a padded isolation room, sometimes for days, Cogger said, until they “calmed down and changed their mind.”
A spokeswoman for the Home Office, which was responsible for supervising and inspecting Duncroft, said Friday that the agency would make no comment “while there’s an ongoing police investigation.”