Is British society in the throes of a mass sexual hysteria?
by Kathy Gyngell, MercatorNet:
The latest news to confront us is that we have all been subject to sexual abuse in our childhoods. We are all ‘victims and survivors’ now.
I exaggerate, but still the new received wisdom is that half a million women were victims of rape or attempted rape when they were children – and a staggering one in ten women claim to have suffered child sex abuse, when other types of ‘sexual assault’ (for example, unwanted touching or indecent exposure) are brought into the rubric. More than 330,000 women and men claim this happened before they were even nine years old.
How do we know this? Well, for the first time in its history, the British Crime Survey decided to include a question on historical abuse and the Office for National Statistics has totted up the numbers.
Releasing the results at the same time as Dame Lowell Goddard’s abrupt resignation from the public inquiry into child sexual abuse gave them an additional resonance.
You’d be forgiven for believing these numbers confirmed our worst fears that child sexual abuse was now the key or defining characteristic of British culture.
Taking them at face value, these figures tell me that when I started at my girls’ grammar school back in the 1960s, I would have had a least three classmates who had already been sexually abused, if not raped. Since middle class professionals were more likely, the ONS explained, to report such assault, then, at my meritocratic school, there were probably even more – ‘a victim’ on every row. In fact, come to think of it, I was one of them, if seeing some weirdo expose himself once when I was a child – which I did but had completely forgotten since it had such limited impact on me – counts me into the grand statistic.
Or not.
I hope I am neither in denial nor viewing my school years through a rose-tinted haze, but are these figures not more indicative of our current collective obsession with searching out victims, finding culprits and creating a media sex abuse drama? Why, but for the febrile atmosphere created by the Savile Inquiry and followed by a series of legally unproven and well as proven cases, ask the question at all?
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