Archbishop of Canterbury blames TV for making the culture of abuse acceptable, by Steve Doughty, Daily Mail (December 3, 2014)

Archbishop of Canterbury blames TV for making the culture of abuse acceptable

The Archbishop of Canterbury said today that the television industry condoned an era of ‘nightmare’ child abuse.

The Most Reverend Justin Welby said the Church of England is trying to clear up the legacy of an age in which the sexual abuse of children was considered ‘relatively acceptable’

In an interview in which he spoke about the Church’s efforts to deal with past abuse by its own clergy, the Archbishop said the crimes stemmed from the time when television and organisations in other areas did not ‘make too much fuss’ about the sexual exploitation of children.

His charge against the television industry follows a two-year period in which a number of former BBC stars have been accused of serious sexual offences and the Corporation has come under fierce criticism for its failure to curb the criminal excesses of some of its heavily-promoted celebrities.

Jimmy Savile, once a children’s TV presenter highly-prized by the BBC, has been exposed since his death in 2011 as one of the country’s most prolific paedophiles.

Rolf Harris is serving a five years and nine months prison sentence for sexually assaulting four girls, and former disc jockey Dave Lee Travis was given a three-month suspended sentence in September for a 1995 assault on a 22-year-old television researcher.

The Archbishop told CNN: ‘The biggest issue for us is the legacy of vast abuse in the days when in, if I may say so, also, television and all kinds of areas, it was considered relatively acceptable.

‘We, you know, so-and-so was known to be a bit dodgy, but nobody made too much fuss.

‘We’ve gone through every file, back file of every living clergy person in the Church of England and looked for any signs that there was a problem and followed them up where there was.’

Archbishop Welby spoke to Christiane Amanpour in the wake of a damaging report on abuse in the Church of England and the humiliation of one of its most senior clergy, former Archbishop of York Lord Hope.

Lord Hope surrendered his position as a bishop in the Diocese of Bradford at the end of October after a judge found he had protected a senior paedophile priest, the Very Reverend Robert Waddington, from exposure, investigation and prosecution.

Waddington, who rose to become Dean of Manchester, in charge of the city’s cathedral, was a lifelong paedophile who had attracted complaints in every decade from the 1950s. It suggested the suicide in 1989 of a former Carlisle choirboy may have been connected to abuse by Waddington in the 1970s, and it said a complaint laid against Waddington by Manchester Cathedral’s organist in 1989 was ignored.

But Lord Hope deflected queries about Waddington, wrongly told other bishops that Waddington was too sick to carry out any further abuse, and allowed him to continue taking services and befriending choristers at York Minster.

In another case The Bishop of Gloucester, the Right Reverend Michael Perham, was questioned by police in August over indecent assault allegations dating back to the early 1980s involving a woman and a girl. Police said in October that there will be no charges. Bishop Perham ‘stepped back’ from clerical duties earlier this year.

In 2011 a review by retired senior judge Lady Elizabeth Butler-Sloss said the Church had failed to take allegations of abuse in Sussex seriously. A bishop apologised for his diocese’s failure to stop the activities of two paedophile priests.

Archbishop Welby said in the CNN interview his realisation of the extent to which things had been covered up was the most traumatic part of his job.

He said that new allegations of abuse are now instantly reported to police and council children’s services.

The Archbishop also repeated his warnings to politicians not to turn immigration into a menace, warning there was a danger of simply using language that appealed to emotion.