Heretic TOC has now read the official Metropolitan Police Service report on Jimmy Savile  in its entirety. As suspected, there is much sound and fury, signifying nothing very much except the virulence of moral panic in the UK right now.
Far from being the worst “paedophile” offender in UK history, Savile may not have been a paedophile at all, and any offences could well have been relatively trivial. The report admits, in a coy footnote, that some respondents “don’t wish the matter to be reported as a crime”, inviting the suspicion that at least some of those involved as minors at the time wanted to tell the inquiry they still do not regard themselves as having been abused. Actually, the figure could be quite large. The report says “about 450” people gave information on what the police apparently regarded as offences by Savile but only 214 criminal offences were formally recorded. Several reasons for the shortfall are given, but no numerical breakdown is given. In the absence of this important detail, we are left with the possibility that 200 or more people reported incidents that happened when they were under-age and which they regarded as consensual.
Writing in the Guardian, feminist writer Deborah Orr raised this issue obliquely, only to be dismissive: “One still comes across the occasional person who will claim to have been sexually abused as a child without it doing them ‘any harm’. If you are able to dismiss the suffering of others so cavalierly, then I’m afraid that indeed you were harmed.” In other words, never mind what you feel about your own case, I know better. Or, listen to the children (or ex-children) only when they support feminist dogma.
The verdict of Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail was much closer to Heretic TOC’s view. Glover felt the report, entitled Giving Victims a Voice, was wrong to speak of mere allegations as definite offences. He accused the police of “grandstanding and…attention-seeking remarks”, such as the assertion that Savile spent “every waking minute” thinking about abusing children. How could anyone know? Glover said this was “the excitable language of a low-brow fiction writer, not of a person responsible for an official report that is supposed to concern itself with verifiable evidence”. Ditto the hyperbolic claim that the former DJ had “groomed the nation”.
But by far the most interesting, if appalling, press response seen by Heretic TOC was in the Sunday Express, which reported that:
“Jimmy Savile beat and raped a 12-year-old girl during a secret satanic ritual in a hospital. The perverted star wore a hooded robe and mask as he abused the terrified victim in a candle-lit basement. He also chanted ‘Hail Satan’ in Latin as other paedophile devil worshippers joined in and assaulted the girl at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. The attack, which happened in 1975, shines a sinister new light on the former DJ’s 54-year reign of terror. The girl kept her torment hidden for nearly 20 years…”
Yeh, right! These paedophile Satanists get everywhere, don’t they? Or at least they did about 20 years ago when “Satanic abuse” was all the rage in the media – which by a curious coincidence is when this “rape victim” told a therapist about her “ordeal”.
But how had the poor girl known her attackers included Jimmy Savile, what with the masks and all?
“She recognised him because of his distinctive voice and the fact that his blond hair was protruding from the side of the mask.”
Ah, so, of course! But for the final clincher we need to know one further vital detail: the name of the therapist who heard the girl’s story. This turns out to have been a certain Dr Valerie Sinason, a lady with considerable form as a Satan buster. She has been hearing, and believing, such stories for decades.
Fortunately not everyone has been so credulous: when this particular story was reported to the police in 1992 they wisely decided to take no further action. After a three-year Department of Health inquiry by the anthropologist Prof. Jean La Fontaine into 84 alleged cases of ritual abuse, she found no evidence to support such claims. Dismissing Sinason’s findings, she said, “There is good research that shows the ‘memories’ of abuse are produced in and by the therapy.”
But still the press keeps willfully falling for this colourful crap. Like a vampire without the necessary stake through its heart, Sinason and her ilk keep coming back to suck all bloody sense out of the media. Just one more example from my bulging files. It’s a cracker. In 2001 The Independent ran a story that started thus:  “British detectives are trying to close a website showing pictures of a man eating a dismembered baby, further evidence of the extent of child abuse and exploitation published on the internet.”
And who put the paper onto this sensational story of an appalling crime? The story continues:
“The existence of the websites was revealed by two patients at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in Harley Street, central London. The clinic is run by Valerie Sinason, a psychotherapist who specialises in the treatment of adult survivors of child abuse.”
Bingo!  Wouldn’t you just know it? And here’s the best bit, a week or so later in The Independent:
“It turns out, as several readers have brought to our attention with notable glee, that the pictures on the Californian website show, not human sacrifice, but a Chinese performance artist who has been shocking audiences in the Far East with his images of cannibalism. Distasteful as his pictures will seem to most people, they are not evidence of Satanic abuse.”
Small wonder, then, that later in the same month The Independent took the opportunity to run another Sinason story, this time doubtless generating a fair bit of glee of their own. They were able to announce that Valerie Sinason had won world-wide recognition, no less. They reported that a poll of 200 specialists in mental health from around the globe has produced a selection of the worst publications in the history of their discipline. Sinason came second, with her 1994 book Treating the Survivors of Satanic Abuse, which a nomination described as “Credulous, superstitious, iatrogenic [illness-inducing], self-righteous, incendiary garbage”. First prize went to Ralph Rossen, for his 1943 classic Acute arrest of cerebral circulation in man. This was based on “An extreme experiment involving almost strangling 100 prisoners and 11 chronic schizophrenics to test the effects of stopping blood flow to the brain.”
We can easily see that Rossen was an extremely dangerous person. Like those mental health award judges, Heretic TOC would put Sinason not far behind. Compared with either of them Jimmy Savile was a saint!