Unforgiven?
Last year, allegations about Jimmy Saville sexually abusing children became big news; Saville had been a very significant figure in television aimed at the young, and was a fixture of the youth of many of us. They were assuredly true; he had been a prolific sexual offender behind the public face of entertainer and very significant philanthropist, and most of his victims had been under age. It would appear that he used his position and status to indulge his tastes. He was perhaps best known for hosting the TV programme “Jim’ll fix it” in which children were given experiences they had only been able to dream of, often seriously ill or disabled children. He gave them the “experience of a lifetime” – and I am now wondering if that expression is more barbed than I would once have credited in many cases.
Following that, police investigations continued, and many other well known figures have been similarly accused. I rather suspect that Operation Yewtree is to a considerable extent a reflex reaction to the fact that the ire of society cannot now be taken out on Saville; suddenly when it was announced there were a very large number of scared rock stars, DJs and other “personalities” of the 60s and 70s, certainly (when the absolute boundary of 16 as an age of consent was for a time not taken terribly seriously). This week, Rolf Harris has appeared in court, similarly charged (though with only a small fraction of the offences which could be laid at Saville’s door).
Very many people felt a huge sense of betrayal by Saville, who had been immensely popular up until his death in 2011. I was not actually one of them; I didn’t like his flagrant self-promotion, and his public manner grated on me. Quite a few people have told me since the allegations became known that they didn’t like him because they “found him creepy”; I didn’t tend to hear that much beforehand, and I’m not sure it isn’t reconstituted memory. I don’t know that I “found him creepy”, but I definitely didn’t like him, while having to acknowledge that he had done huge things for a number of charities. Of course, hindsight tells us that these were largely childrens’ charities, and part of the motive was probably to increase his ability to molest young people.
This is not the case with Rolf Harris, however. Him, I have always liked. He had a talent for writing somewhat humorous songs of the kind which (sometimes irritatingly) stick in your memory, he has an engaging personality and is an extremely talented artist; an excellent all round entertainer. I would so like the allegations to prove unfounded, but I fear they won’t (I’m particularly concerned about an apparent pornographic image from 2012; the impact of 40 year old matters with no further bad deeds can, perhaps, be somewhat discounted, but this is fresh). Seeing pictures of him going to court, I noted that I’d never seen him in public looking anything other than ebulliant. He did not look ebulliant, he looked hunted. Perhaps he deserves that, perhaps not – but something which I used to treasure has been damaged, perhaps broken.
Saville was a well known Catholic (and was honoured by a previous Pope), so the issue of weighing good deeds and bad is particularly apposite in his case. Of course, his position is between him and God now, but there has been a huge amount of public vilification and I’m confident that if you took a vote, the consensus would be that he is damned. I’m not sure the same would have been the case had it emerged, for instance, that he had been a prolific wife-beater or something of the sort. Sexual offences seem to loom larger in our weighing of good and evil than non-sexual offences, and sexual offences against children are, for many, the “unforgivable sin”.
This is very much the case within the prison system; sexual offenders generally are picked on, and frequently end up in “vulnerable prisoner” units or wings; convicted child molesters are virtually guaranteed physical violence with a considerable risk of fatal violence unless they are on a vulnerable prisoner unit from start, and even then paedophiles are not safe. Rapists regard them as untouchable too. There is nothing so reviled as a “nonce” in prison, where murderers and armed robbers are looked up to. I’m inclined to think that prison attitudes just write large those of society, but largely without the morality – except in the case of sexual offences.
The law more generally puts sexual offences in a different class. Aside those crimes carrying a life sentence and the sometime iniquitous IPP sentence, many of those who serve their sentence and wait long enough are effectively absolved by the system under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. Sexual offenders, however, go on the Sexual Offences Register for life.
There is some logic behind this; sexual preferences are not readily (if ever) changed, and if these are directed to the young or are otherwise illegal, the law cannot, it seems, assume that sexual offenders are ever “safe”. I’m not convinced that larcenous preferences or violent tendencies are readily changed either, mind you; there is, however, an expectation that the impulses can be controlled.
Society, therefore, does not forgive sexual offences or consider that the guilt can be expiated by prison, time or good works. To listen to some Christians, neither does God. Some even consider that the mere fact of being homosexual is sufficient to damn you unconditionally (and as a sexual preference, that too cannot readily if ever be changed). Society more generally seems to think that crimes can be expiated, or that good deeds may outweigh crimes which have been “paid for” (there is one well known actor in the UK who has a past conviction for murder, which is now not much mentioned, for instance) – but not in the case of sexual offences. In Saville’s case, he did, I have to acknowledge, an immense amount of good raising charitable contributions, but it is now as nothing when he is remembered by most people.
And yet Christianity in general holds that any sin can be absolved, can be washed clean, can be saved from. There is nothing so horrendous (with the possible exception of “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” whatever that may be), that it cannot end in redemption. Saville, as a practising Catholic, was presumably given absolution and is therefore presumably “saved”, though society would never have accepted him again had he still been alive. If Harris proves to be guilty, what about him? Indeed, if we take Matt. 5:28 seriously, what about most of the rest of us? I assume that the passage can be modernised into gender equality, and that a modern Jesus might have said “if you look on someone with lust in your heart, you are guilty of rape” rather than adultery (which has rather lost its sting these days).
Without wishing to deny justice to anyone wronged, I hope that Harris is found not guilty. But if he isn’t, I am going to need to wrestle with the balance of the combination in one person of a lot of good and a taboo failing, and to lament the fact that society will probably not feel able to see any balance there.
But is this not really the position of many, most or even all of us, our own faults perhaps not, quite, being taboo?
Lord, have mercy.