Dynamics of Scandal: On facilitating, denying and covering up institutional child sex abuse

In the wake recent sexual harassment and abuse scandals, we take a look back through our archives to consider how other scandals affecting public figures have played out.

Analysing the fallout from the Jimmy Savile scandal in the UK in 2012, and ongoing investigations into historical child sex abuse in the Catholic church, this episode discusses how predators embed themselves in institutions and escape scrutiny.

Professor Chris Greer the Co-Director from the interdisciplinary Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism dissects how scandals break and how the unique combination of powerful individuals, media, public and private institutions interact to cover up or to reveal criminal behaviour.

“One of the interesting questions is, why now? Why has it taken so long for this to come to light? There’s a term from Antonio Gramsci, this notion of conjunctional crisis. Whenever the stars align, if you like, it’s the perfect storm of a scandal. There are various institutional, social and cultural and technological things happening which have all aligned at this moment and the fact that it’s about institutional child sex abuse carries with it a moral force that other types of crime just don’t carry.”

Presented by Lynne Haultain

Producer: Eric van Bemmel Audio engineer: Gavin Nebauer Banner image: Unsplash

This episode was originally published on Up Close on 22 May 2015.

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