This model is also applicable to past scandals of this type it shows how the Savile case, far from being anomalous, has in fact followed an established pattern. Through an empirical examination of the Savile story, we have been developing a model of how institutional child sexual abuse scandals unfold. Since the 1980s, a succession of scandals has exposed the sexual abuse of children in care homes, schools, universities and various religious institutions, and forced the problem of institutional child sexual abuse onto the political and journalistic agenda. Yet because news coverage of abuse continued to focus on the dominant idea of “stranger danger” and the powerful image of the “predatory paedophile”, still little attention was paid to the more prevalent problems of institutional and familial abuse. These taboos were only challenged in the 1980s by sustained feminist campaigning, media coverage, and public testimony from individual survivors, finally making open allegations possible and the pursuit of justice for victims a political priority. Institutional CSA scandals emerged only recently as a focus for sustained public concern because of the longstanding taboos that for decades kept child abuse hidden from ‘official’ visibility and marginalised from UK public debate. The media and justice systems’ treatment of the affair is only the latest example of a relatively new type of scandal: the institutional child sex abuse scandal. For all its extraordinary impact, the Jimmy Savile scandal has not unfolded in an exceptional way.
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