SEX CRIMES & VIOLENCE

See Also: CRIME; JACK THE RIPPER; MURDERS; MENU

Classy Paedophilia

Jon Ronson established a successful career as a freelance journalist and television documentary maker. His programmes usually contained him in a faux-na f persona. He went on to also write books. He moved to the United States. There, he became a sometime contributor to the magazine-formatted radio programme and podcast This American Life. Upon one occasion, Ronson participated in a meeting in which possible story ideas were being considered. One of these was about paedophilia. The Americans pronounced the word pedophilia. Initially, Ronson did not participate in the discussion. However, when he did so, he used the British pronunciation - paedophilia. Upon his doing so, Ira Glass, the show s host, turned to him and exclaimed Jon! You make it sound so classy!

Website: http://jonronson.com https://www.rhlstp.co.uk/website.cgi?page=podcasts&id=2271

Jack of Jumps

Over the period 1959-1965 eight prostitutes working in Paddington were suffocated, their corpses stripped, and in a number of instances their teeth extracted. The police claimed that they had identified the killer but that he had committed suicide before he could be arrested.

See Also: PROSTITUTION

Partner Violence

In 1971 Erin Pizzey founded Chiswick Women's Aid, the U.K.'s first women's refuge for battered women.

Rape

The Ealing Vicarage Rape

Three men wearing balaclavas. They were high on drinks and drugs. They demanded money and jewels. When there proved to be very little of either they became extremely violent. Her father and boyfriend were beaten unconscious. She was multiply raped at knifepoint.

A few days after the attack she attended church. A photographer took a photograph that published a few days later in The Sun newspaper with only a thin line covering her eyes. There was a public outcry.

In the court at the Old Bailey Jill Saward's (1965-2017) demeanour was calm. The presiding judge, Sir John Leonard, remarked that she had suffered no great trauma . His sentencing reflected this. The two rapists, Christopher Byrne and Martin McCall, were sentenced to five years imprisonment and Robert Horscroft, their non-raping gang leader, to fourteen. The police had been anticipating that the offenders would receive life imprisonment. Miss Saward's outward composure followed months of psychiatric treatment. Upon his retirement in 1993 Judge Leonard apologised for his conduct.

Saward chose to waive her right to anonymity and campaigned actively on behalf of rape victims. She came to be credited with helping to change judicial colleague so that violence against the person was taken more seriously than property crime. In 1988 the law change to give rape victims anonymity. Her work was a factor in the introduction of the right of appeal against lenient sentences. In 1994 she set up Hurt (Help Untwist Rape Trauma), a support group for victims and their families.

She married twice and had three children.

In 1998 Saward met Horscroft who was seeking her forgiveness. She told him You don t need to say sorry. One of her attackers had made threats against her while he had been in prison. In 1999 she learned that he had been working at the B.B.C. as a security guard and that he had access to a file that had her address in it. She moved.

In 2014 she and Alison Boydell set up Juries - Jurors Understanding Rape Is Essential Standard

The Jill Saward Organisation

The Jill Saward Organisation campaign on issues of domestic and se-based violence and abuse.

Website: www.thejso.uk

Jimmy Savile

Jimmy Savile (1926-2011) was born into an impoverished family in Leeds, the youngest of seven children. As a child Savile tended to play alone. While working as a Bevin Boy in a coal mine, Savile stumbled across the power of oddness. He would go to work in a suit. He would work naked and then wash his hands and feet at the pit and dress again, the rest of his body still being coated in coal dust. He would then walk home, seemingly clean. He is one of the contenders for having invented the discotheque, playing records in dance halls in Mecca ballrooms. He became a nightclub manager and then a radio disc jockey. As a disc jockey he was able to determine whether people would dance quickly or slowly. This minor power exhilarated him.

He became central to the media's interface with the music scene. He presented the first Top of The Pops. In the late 1960s pop and rock scene, he was clearly older than most of the leading acts. Rather than try to identify himself with either strand, he opted to reinvent himself as a serious broadcaster who specialised in youth. The strategy worked. In parallel he engaged in considerable charity work and acted as a porter at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. With the passage of time he increasingly became someone whom the Establishment courted. His connections stretched to the Prince of Wales and Prime Minister Thatcher.

Savile had a solipsistic personality. He valued people only in what use they might be to him materially. The mores of the 1960s entertainment furnished him with numerous opportunities for consensual sex with women. However, he developed a predilection for having sex with children of both genders and was prepared to assault them in order to have what he wanted. Within his own mind he appears to have developed a belief that his charity work more than offset the sins that he was amassing.

His offending was so frequent that rumours about it were in circulation. However, whenever he was challenged by an individual he proved to be highly adept at implying that the connections that he had developed would mean that he would not be the first who would come off second best if the individual wanted to press the matter further. He had an immense talent for manipulating people in power structures. Therefore, a spectrum of institutions across British society, ranging from police forces to children's homes, failed to move against him.

Savile never spoke about his father. He was obsessively devoted to his mother, whom he referred to as The Duchess . He declared that the five days that he spent with his mother's corpse were the happiest of his life. His success within the entertainment world enabled him to embark upon a parallel career of sex abuse. He was to be indiscriminate with regard to age and gender. One of his brothers, Johnnie, was to lose his post in a psychiatric hospital for abusing a patient.

Savile reinvented himself as a television presenter during the 1970s, most notably with Jim ll Fix It (1975-94). He fronted the Clunk Click road safety and a campaign for British Rail. He became a celebrity, someone who was famous for being famous.

He was friendly with Margaret Thatcher. She lobbied for him to receive a knighthood. Both Prince Charles and Princess Diana used him as a confidant. He crafted a charisma and a system of establishment contacts that rendered effectively immune from being investigated.

Savile had a very close relationship with his mother, living with her much of the time. However, he once remarked that he thought that she had never trusted him. She died in 1972. He watched over her corpse alone. Subsequently, he stated to a journalist that the experience had been the best five days of my life .

His funeral was a quasi-state occasion. The epitaph that was carved across the bottom of his headstone was It was good while it lasted.

Location: Broadcasting House, 2-22 Portland Place, W1A 1AA (red, yellow)

B.B.C. Television Centre, 101 Wood Lane, W12 7FW

See Also: RADIO Radio 1, Jimmy Savile

John Worboys

John Worboys is a multiple rapist who drove a black cab. His modus operandi was to pick up a woman later at night as a fair. While driving he would get into conversation with her, assessing whether she had been drinking. He would claim to have had some really good news, that he had bought some alcohol but that as he was so late that night that he had no one share it and would she like to do so. The drink would be drugged. One she was unconscious he would assault her. He is believed to have had well over a 100 victims. He was put on trial and convicted of twelve rapes. He was given a -year sentence.

In 2017 Parole Board claimed that he was safe to be paroled. This triggered a campaign by the Centre for Women's Justice and some of his victims to make the body reconsider its decision. It was pointed that he had committed far more rapes than he had been convicted of. There was widespread public disgust at the way the Board had conducted. It reversed its decision and subsequently was reformed.

David Backhouse 2024