However the BBC have a duty of care to all visitors to it's facilities as well as their employee's, and as much as the hospital patients, nurses and managers and knew about Jimmy, it's likely so did BBC executives.
How do you define 'duty of care'? My guess would be that it will be slightly different to how it was defined back in the 1980s for instance; different by more if you go further back. Groping was a part of life up until and including the 1980s. I know. I was old enough to work back then and I was a late teen/early 20s woman in the 1980s. Groping of young women whose future employment was in the power of the men who groped went on in offices, in factories, in hospitals, in the media, in the entertainments business - everywhere. Women rarely spoke about it because nobody was listening, usually because it was men who were the only people in positions of power to stop it and more often than not those men would either not believe the women, be of the same mindset as the gropers, or not care. Some did. Some always have cared. But they were the unknown minority. Women just learned how to deal with it.
That lots of women are now coming forward as having been abused by Savile is no surprise because today what went on back then is now classed as abuse. Back then generally speaking what went on was termed 'taking liberties'. Real abuse was rape and the stuff that dads did to their children or teachers to pre-pubescent students. I'm not talking about that area because although one or two accusations of rape against Savile have been made, most of what has been said appears to fall under the heading of groping.
To focus upon the BBC in terms of the groping culture is to err completely because ALL organisations will have had their gropers, of that I am 100% certain. Instead of turning this into a witch hunt against the BBC, what should really be under discussion is how to ensure nothing like the times before the 1990s, when gradually people began to wake up to what was happening, should ever be allowed to happen again and where it does, women and men alike should ensure that the groper is disciplined and, if appropriate, fired. This doesn't simply apply to underage girls, who back then were often seen as being willing because often they were adoring. It should apply to all women (and men obviously) regardless of age, regardless of their employment status and regardless of their response to celebrity (in the case of teenagers).
Edited by Saintslass, 14 October 2012 - 03:40 PM.