UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail
By STEVE DOUGHTY FOR THE DAILY MAIL
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.’
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