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I’m watching the Jimmy Savile documentary. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse myself, the thing that intrigues me is how many signs there can be about a person, and even more shockingly, how often society ignores such red flags.
As an example, I reported our garden landscaper to child services for endangering his children some years ago. He had brought his young child to work on our property with an open industrial cutting blade in operation… and as we later found without any insurance. I was deeply uneasy about the child essentially working on our property and eventually my husband asked him to take his kid home because though he was ‘spending time with dad’, he was also doing so unsupervised and anything could have gone wrong. When it became clear that he had no intention of completing our garden, I started to gather screenshots from his social media to pass on to the authorities as evidence. It was then that I found pictures of both kids from when they were even younger regularly ‘helping dad with work’. He even bragged about one of them getting better with their garden skills, amd that is when I decided to raise my concerns with child protective services.
Because if I know one thing to be true; whatever questionable material someone is willing to post online, is the merely tip of the iceberg in terms of what they’re actually willing to do, or have done.
In our guy’s case it turned out money laundering, was also something he was willing to engage in—yet he isn’t in prison or on probation, he’s out there possibly looking to line up the next victim because I think conmen seldom know how to do anything other than con. Manson, Bundy, Zodiac, Madoff, Ponzi, Delvey, Holmes, Shkreli, Epstein, Maxwell, and Savile are all united in the sense that the accumulation of power and a desire to wield the hammer of power is at the heart of all acts of abuse. As the saying goes: absolute power, corrupts absolutely.
Though our conman has been reported via the appropriate channels, the wheels of justice in a country that is supposedly a first world nation, move painfully slow. And I’ve learned by baptism of fire, that the wheels won’t move at all unless you make enough noise—in my case I was forced to act as an unofficial coordinator amongst the victims at the urging of government agencies. Had I not used up my own time in this manner, the case against this person would have never amounted to anything at all.
And yet this is just a straightforward case of a cowboy builder… which begs the question of what hope do the victims of physical crimes stand? Or worse, those that are so vulnerable, that they cannot defend themselves?
Whether it is sexual, physical, psychological, emotional or financial abuse, it seems to me that there are always enablers.
For Jimmy Savile it was the BBC, the media, and his connection to public figures such as the Royal Family to all manner of celebrities, that likely stopped the CPS from investigating him several times throughout his career. For my conman I had every ‘bloke’s bloke’ in the village tell me off for “ruining” this man’s livelihood , including many verbally abusive messages from one of his mates undoubtedly with the intention of intimidating me. And yet I was not the one who had chosen to defraud members of our village to the tune of over £50,000, though I’m sure the true figure is likely much higher. And so many people who I got in touch with, told me that they’d simply written their financial loss off as a bad experience.
Here is where I take issue. For if every person before me had reported this man, chances are he would not have been free to continue his grift for as long as he did. And, it seems people don’t give much thought to elderly people who if conned, cannot simply go out and earn more money—they go without basic things like food and heating during the winter. Which in my mind to have contributed in any way toward the suffering of another is frankly unconscionable, even if the link is not direct, our failure to act on knowledge is to enable someone.
For my part I wish every person who looked the other way, was were forced to wear a Cone of Silence for upholding the Code of Silence that goes hand in hand with all instances of harmful conduct. If I witness a crime, flee the scene, and refuse to give testimony, then I would be perverting the course of justice (a fitting, yet unintentional pun).
This is not to say that the person committing the crime is not solely to blame for their actions, or to shame the victims. I’m saying that for every Jimmy Savile; there is at the very least one person who knew something and failed to do anything about it. The look the other way mentality that allows many abusers the freedom to keep abusing.
Abusers do not truly act alone, the Code of Silence becomes their co-conspirator and in my opinion those who areof sane mind who enable abuse of any kind should be held to account for their silence. And we as a collective society set the stage for perpetrators to more easily get away with abuse by upholding idioms and credos like “bro code”, “snitches get stitches”, “don’t tattletale”, “what was she wearing”, “stay in your own lane”, and that festering old chestnut “it’s a family issue”.
It is for this reason in my opinion; that as long as society continues to justify looking the other way in this manner, abuse will be here to stay.
#Abuse #AbuseSurvivors #DomesticAbuse #DomesticAbuseSurvivors #EmotionalAbuse #PsychologicalAbuse #SexualAbuseSurvivors #SexualAbuse #ChildhoodSexualAbuse #ChildhoodEmotionalAbuse #Trauma
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