Hollywood has long been a cost free publicity machine. Cost free in the sense that it sold its output and therefore required little or no financial input from those who wished to influence the minds of the general public.
Where government is concerned, there have been some costs attributable - the military personnel and awesome fighting machinery is always available to film makers; with the proviso that they show America as the benign victor over grateful populations. Why make a movie showing the ugly side of the American war machine, when you can have thousands of fit extras, air craft carriers galore, hawks, and hundreds of tanks rolling over your chosen hillside for free, merely by coming up with a script that pleases the Generals?
Between two and three million Soviet prisoners were executed by the Nazi’s, hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, the mentally ill and the disabled – yet for many of the younger generation, the horrors of the Nazi regime can be summed up by ‘they killed six million Jews, didn’t they?’ such is the power of the many Hollywood epics that have centered on the horrors suffered by the Jewish people.
Other organisations have sought to avail themselves of the hearts and mind campaign that can be won with the aid of Hollywood. I can remember watching the film ‘The Magdalene Sisters’ without ever querying whether it was a truthful portrayal of life in a Catholic run institution in the early part of the last century. Don’t we all know that every Catholic priest is a paedophile, that Nuns are routinely cruel and uncaring? Why should we be surprised that this is reflected in a Hollywood film?
Possibly because we haven’t gone to the trouble of reading the MacAleese report on the actual Magdalene Laundries. That might be because we picked up on its publication via the BBC, which gave us a selection of quotes from the report that did nothing to disabuse us from our comfortable belief that we ‘knew’ – since it was a Catholic run institution – that it would be full of harrowing stories of abuse and sadism, and we didn’t really need to wallow in all that, did we?
Quote: From the BBC website, from ‘Maureen Sullivan’ – described as ‘survivor’.
In the report I find that some people are still in denial and yet there are other parts that clearly state and people can see we were telling the truth all along.
I ask for an apology from the religious orders and I ask the Prime Minister of my country to give us an apology, they took my education and they took my identity.
The BBC don’t give a link to the full report, I have no idea why – but it is HERE for those who don’t want their prejudices ready-to-heat, but are prepared to create them from scratch.
Googling the MacAleese report comes up with another post entitled ‘How to read the MacAleese report’. Written by a solicitor, it purports to tell you what you should and shouldn’t understand from the report. Fortunately I had already read the report before I read Simon McGarr’s resume of the 1000 page report. He tells me that Martin MacAleese’s introduction ‘runs for eleven pages of disingenuous waffle’ and ‘the Executive Summary is a shameful farrago of guesses, elisions and wilful ignorance’. What could have driven Simon McGarr to such fury against the inquiry into 50, 60 and 70 year old allegations of cruelty, abuse and perversion? Could it be the the final report didn’t quite match up to the Hollywood and media driven expectations?
Where was the evidence of paedophiliac Nuns? Nowhere to be seen. MacAleese could not find one single report of sexual abuse by a Nun. But the beatings and the shaven heads – we’d seen them on our television! Oops! MacAleese had neglected to screen those he interviewed and actually allowed an authentic dissenting voice of a Magdalene girl to appear in his report.
”It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns… I was not touched by any nun and I never saw anyone touched. As long as I was there, I was not touched myself by any nun and I never saw anyone touched and there was never a finger put on them. … Now everything was not rosy in there because we were kept against our will … we worked very hard there … But in saying that we were treated good and well looked after”.
Send that woman to the back of the compensation queue, tar and feather her! None of the women told the Committee that their heads had been shaved, with one exception. The exception occurred where one woman had her head shaved because she had lice:
“When I said it was all itchy they shaved it … If you got lice your head was shaved”. In response to a question on whether hair was ever shaved as a punishment, she replied “Just for the lice”.
Not everyone was off message: Another woman who had been in two Magdalen Laundries reported that, in one of these Laundries, “there was a padded cell, I was put in there 3 times”. Ah the fabled padded cell, star of so many misery memoires. However such comments were a rarity in Chapter 19, which is overwhelmingly women saying ‘it was hard, it was tough, we didn’t enjoy it, but never saw anyone physically abused’.
Undoubtedly life was tough in the Magdalene Laundries, but it can only be truly compared to life in any other commercial laundry in the 1920s, whereas it currently finds itself compared to modern day expectations of employment.
“The floors of the laundry were constantly floating with water – often soapy dirty water streaming out. There was constant inhaling of steam from the large colander (large ironing board). Young women stood either side of the colander for up to two or three hours in the morning and again in the afternoon. Large buckets of boiling water were scattered around the floor used for starching and steaming. The light was poor and their only view from the windows was more iron bars. There was often a foul smell in the air from the extensive, industrial laundry of soiled sheets from hospitals, hotels, convents, farms and more”.
One of the main complaints is that the girls were paid no wages and never knew when they might be allowed to leave. The no wages bit is described as ‘modern day slavery’ (as is work experience in Poundland!) but reading the report I see that:
Chapter 10 of this Report sets out the circumstances in which some former young women were placed in a Magdalen Laundry during the period of their supervision after discharge from Industrial School. It appears to the Committee that, for many of the women it met, these were the circumstances in which they came to enter a Magdalen Laundry.
The women were either not told or didn’t remember that they were still on licence from those Industrial schools – I can relate to that, I doubt many of the Duncroft girls appreciated that they were still subject to recall to Duncroft until they were 21. I certainly didn’t. Since there is no such thing as a ‘fallen women’ these days, only proudly independent single mothers and young women expressing their individuality, it is difficult to compare the situation for someone leaving such an establishment with its inherent ‘stain on their character’ with modern life. Where else would these women have been employed in rural Ireland in those times? Rage against the times by all means, rage against the prejudice, the injustice, be grateful it doesn’t exist today - but blame the Nuns who had set up a business that was prepared to employ these girls?
Chapter 20 examines the financial viability of the Magdalen Laundries, on the basis of the financial accounts or other financial records prepared contemporaneously by the relevant Religious Congregations.
The results of the financial analysis carried out tends to support a view that the Magdalen Laundries were operated on a subsistence or close to break-even basis rather than on a commercial or highly profitable basis.
You mean the dastardly Catholic church wasn’t making a thumping profit out of these unfortunate women? Is there to be no end to our disillusionment?
The report spoke to 118 women who had experienced the Magdalene Laundries, a small enough sample, but still the largest exercise in collating the authentic memories of those who had actual first hand experience – and it paints a very different picture from the accepted media view. Why could that be? I was sent an interesting link during the week.
Campaigners believe the role such movies (the Magdalen Sisters)played in highlighting the issue justified any artistic embellishment, and this view is shared by Louise Lowe, director of the award-winning play Laundry (another portrayal of the alleged horror), who says The Magdalene Sisters “served an important function at the time”.
This is dangerously close to the view taken by those in the child abuse industry – what does it matter if the original reports from Duncroft were exaggerated, embellished, and in some cases, outright lies? They served a greater purpose, allowing some 400 other individuals to come forward with tales of abuse at Savile’s hands…all grist to the mill.
The constant repetition of advertisements from the NSPCC showing highly vulnerable and obviously prepubescent and unhappy small girls in winsomely oversized nightgowns is drumming the message into our heads – ‘when we say child abuse, this is the picture we want you to hold in your head’ – and a disgusting abhorrent picture it is too, who could begin to defend sexual activity with such an innocent? Yet the reality is that action against child abusers currently comprises a series of arrests of geriatric entertainers who are alleged to have received oral sex from a groupie 30 years ago who now says she was 15 at the time, and her new ‘friend’ says that’s child abuse…
So successful has been the media campaign, that both the expensive reports recently published – Yewtree and the MacAleese report were greeted with howls of rage by the public. ‘Whitewash’, ‘Coverup’ – euphemisms for ‘Where’s our Paedophile Ring. We were promised a paedophile ring!’ Promised by whom? Those who were actually present, or the media?
Who is it that is so insistent that we should loose all faith in religious institutions of any variety and men in general (unless they are safely married to other men!)?
Ms Raccoon lives in the Monbazillac area of South West France, renowned for its fine wines and gourmet food, so she frequently finds better things to do than sit in front of a computer all morning. She is liable to take off traveling at a moment's notice. Consequently this blog only gets updated these days when it is raining - and it doesn't rain very often round here...
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I had the misfortune to go to a primary school run by nuns of the Sisters of Magdalene order. Hanging with piano wire would be too good for those Irish bitches, whose primary mission was to beat God into every child that had the misfortune to pass through their hands…
I am all in favour of protecting the vulnerable. However, the overzealous machinations of vested interests have gone well beyond necessary protection even if you agree with my robust views of what is necessary. We now put 10 year olds on the Sex Offenders register for playing doctors and nurses. The Register was intended for dangerous repeat offenders. Those responsible for excessive laws are themselves abusers. They must be dealt with.
Exuro masculorum concubitores. Emundabo illos in Ignis.
“We now put 10 year olds on the Sex Offenders register for playing doctors and nurses. “
They don’t even have to play that – a simple game of ‘tag’ is enough to cause a fit of the vapours merely through its name alone…
Oh, and that story prompted my favourite nionsensical statement of the week:
“The parent added she did not blame the school, saying it is almost impossible to stop children bringing words into the playground.”
*boggle*
I had a nun teacher at my Catholic primary school. It was common practice then for errant pupils to be rapped across the palm of the hand with the flat of a thin and bendy 12-inch ruler. This fearsome old lady would rap you across the knuckles of the back of your fingers with a thick, wooden and very unbendy six-inch ruler. I’ll tell you what – she only did it to me once because after that, I never misbehaved in her lessons again……..
@ Who is it that is so insistent that we should lose all faith in religious institutions… @
On a movie-related theme I would venture Ken Russell and Vanessa Redgrave were the devils in some of the detail…….
Also in response to the Cat that is Jabba
In my very secular, council run school, in Primary 6 and 7, we had a book from which, every night, we had to learn the correct spelling of 10 words (having already been through the complete book once in Primaries 3 to 5). Next day, first thing, we wrote those down as prompted by our lovely lady teacher, late 50s, at whose feet most of us would have happily worshipped. We were then belted – with a proper leather tawse – by this angel, if we made an error. The lady teachers at our school were all very accomplished with their belts. And all with not a Catholic in sight. Looking back, of course, the same two or three kids who got belted just about every day were almost certainly dyslexic, but who knew that then….
A nice blog post though, and I concur fully with the comments about the worst elements of the ‘child abuse industry’ The consequences of some of what they are doing now are going to be very sad
You beat me to it Ho Hum. PNEU School Christchurch New Zealand, circa 1959 – not a Catholic in sight, but the memory of that cane flattening my knuckles has enabled me to remember that 9 times 8 = 72 each and every time I have needed that information…..
My mum (aged about 70) says that teachers at her state, secular, primary school would throw wooden blackboard dusters at talking pupils. I’m not saying this was a good thing, but if you go back in time everything was cruel and unjust. Why single out some nuns for running an institution that, we now see, was no worse than any other institution of the day?
We had a teacher who did that. Some of us at the back would deliberately do things in the hope that he WOULD throw the blackboard duster at us…..
Childish amusements akin to “Knick-Knock” wherein we would ring people’s doorbells, or rattle their knockers, and then hide round the corner. Sometimes an irate man might suss us out and then chase us. We were good runners back then… I never got caught……
During my time at an excellent grammar school in West London if any of us dared to nod off or look out of the window in one teacher’s class, he’d lob a wooden board rubber at us. After years of practise he was deadly accurate. Another would spend most of the lesson sharpening his chalk into a point. If any of us fell foul of him he’d playfully grind the point into our scalps. It was an excellent school with very attentive pupils!
Is this a game of top-trumps ?
At my independent grammar school, the wild-haired art/woodwork master, of pre-war Austrian origin, had spent some previous time as a circus performer, developing unusual skills, to wit knife-throwing. If he spotted you committing any ‘joinery sin’, you could expect a flying chisel to thud into your precious work-piece from many feet away – I still recall once being observed using a file, when a spokeshave had been specified….. thud !
“Is this a game of top trumps?”
When I were a lad, if you as much as looked out the window in school our teacher would gouge your eyes out with a spoon he had hand crafted from old brillo-pads then squirt TCP ointment into the sockets. One boy who cheeked the teacher was ordered to the headmaster’s office and was never seen again. It was a great school and I have many happy memories!
Sounds like a movie adaptattion of that true story would make a good double-header alongside “Hostel”.
Duncan Disorderly and Moor Larkin,
“My mum (aged about 70) says that teachers at her state, secular, primary school would throw wooden blackboard dusters at talking pupils”
Lol, i’m 28 and there was a teacher at our primary school who did that (perhaps a few, though I think they were usually only one off events due to them being really angry), and yes, we found it hilarious too.
Though there was one, an old man, who would actually deliberately hit and man handle some of the children, he asked me to put my hand out and hit it with a ruler for speaking out of turn when we were gathered round his desk getting ready for him to hear our reading and he’d told us to be quiet. He finally got the sack/dismissed, whatever, for man handling a boy out the room and (apparently) throwing him so hard he hit his head on the rather large and hard coat hangers outside the classroom.
The class was mostly between the ages of 8 and 9 at the time and he was only a supply teacher filling in for a teacher who was off with back problems (another duster thrower), but I have to admit that some of us, including myself, loved getting him as a teacher specifically because of his little out bursts (the more outrageous the better) and were usually more cheeky to him than any other teacher because we knew there was a chance he would kick off and we found the whole thing hilarious, and a great distraction from maths (which I never done).
Sad, I know… :/ :/ :/
Of the truism “there’s always two sides to every story”, I can depend upon Madame Raccoon to present a version that balances the ‘populist’ MSM version.
Rule number one – Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Hollywood’s only motto!
There was an interesting documentary on Ch4 (I think) quite a few years ago. It concerned an Irish woman who claimed nun-abuse and before that, father-abuse. She was published author of Mis-Lit. The structure of the programme was that we were presented with her story and it all seemed utterly convincing. Then, for the last third, her family were introduced. None of them accepted her story about their father. The sisters were at the same Institution and denied they had seen or heard of anything like what their sister described. The authoress said they were all in denial. Her siblings said she was not just delusional but actually making a living from lying. The crunch was that the programme-makers offered a Jeremy-Kyle-style Lie detector test. her older brother agreed to take it and did so. The authoress said she would, but the programme ended with the commentary that she had phoned at the last minute and cancelled.
Anyhow, I could find no reference for that show and it was probably a good ten years ago, but I did find this – which might be referring to the same woman.
http://www.irishsalem.com/irish-controversies/the-magdalene-laundries/kathy-dailytelegraph-08mar08.php
The Channel 4 programme was Lie Lab which was broadcast in June 2007.
In late 2007 Hermann Kelly produced a book “Kathy’s Real Story: a culture of false allegations exposed” in which he exposed Kathy O’Brien’s story as fiction. But apparently that didn’t stop Hodders publishing further editions.
When Kelly & O’Briene appeared on a TV show Kelly produced O’Briene’s birth and education records which were at odds with the account given by Kathy O’Briene in her book.
Coming up to date: with relevence to allegations relating to Duncroft scholars, you’d think a producer of a programme would wonder how someone could be 14 if an alledged incident took place 16 years after they were born.
Going through certain birth & marriage registrations make interesting reading but in the present climate the media won’t go there.
http://www.irishsalem.com/irish-controversies/the-magdalene-laundries/kathy-dailytelegraph-08mar08.php
http://www.alliancesupport.org/news/archives/002466.html
Rocky Raccoon,
It’s utterly ubsurd that the people in television and newspapers don’t think to check people’s birth certificates and when the allegation is meant to have taken place (i.e when a certain show was filmed) before repeating, and allowing someone else to repeat on their show, allegations that could land people in a lot of trouble. Very stupid.
I also think people like Kathy O’Briene are immoral and perhaps even mentally ill to spread false and harmful accusations like that…
>> So successful has been the media campaign, that both the expensive reports recently published – Yewtree and the MacAleese report were greeted with howls of rage by the public. ‘Whitewash’, ‘Coverup’ – euphemisms for ‘Where’s our Paedophile Ring. We were promised a paedophile ring!’ Promised by whom? Those who were actually present, or the media? <<
The same is true of our much loved institution the NHS. Suddenly every other nurse is a vicious bitch looking to murder their patients; not something that I recognise when in the care of the NHS.
As far as the extermination of jews is concerned, I once met a jew who got through a whole sentence without mentioning the holocaust.
My ex-partner was schooled by nuns and she said that they were the most vicious bunch of women that she has ever come across. She hates catholicism and all that it stands for now.
I do find that certain media groups do love Christian bashing in particular, I grew up mostly atheist (there was a lot of propaganda and it is quite dull to be honest).
But in a darker sense, the atheist awakening and anti-religious fervour has to some extent caused a cultural massacre. Within one generation entire religions have been decimated.
Now personally I believe religions are just social engineering based on relevant social issues. Which can easily be replaced by sensible ethical media perhaps. But it is noticeable how the Christians are being ethnically cleansed (mentally). The big question is, who is driving it and are their intentions honourable (remove superstition) or dishonourable (ensuring an idiot race of materialistic slaves who choose to be slaves).
Good read
The BBC don’t give a link to the full report, I have no idea why…
I find this also to be a common phenomenon in UK newspaper sites like the Daily Mail and The Guardian and The Telegraph. The reason is presumably that they don’t want to help readers to challenge the propaganda line that the publication has chosen. A possible secondary reason is that the reporters who summarize the reports have only read executive summaries and do not have the link to the full publication.
You would expect better of the BBC, but the BBC these days is not the BBC of yore.
Part of the problem is that when there are real issues, such as Mid Stafford hospital having a higher mortality rate than surrounding hospitals, this is a serious enough issue, but not very “sexy” so media like to give the impression that had you visited the hospital, you would immediately have been greeted by a stench of urine, the odor of unwashed bodies, and the screams of the damned. The reality is that most likely it would have seemed just like any other hospital on any given day and only an analysis of statistics on death rates for people admitted with various conditions at various ages would show that the hospital was underperforming.
It’s interesting how the non-fatal ‘horse-meat scandal’ is being bigged-up in the media to divert attention from the emerging, very fatal, NHS truths.
*sigh* I wish you wouldn’t do this to me y’know. I really don’t like the catholic church and nuns in particular and now I’m going to have to go off and bloomin’ read this report and possibly – possibly, mind, not definitely – be fairer to them….. dammit all!
And the other question to ask is, even though those laundries may not have been havens of pleasantry, what would have been the quality of life out-turn for many of those girls elsewhere at the time ?
Anna
have you seen this?
Mike
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/02/bbc-chief-mark-thompson-jimmy-savile-scandal?mbid=social_twitter
No, just read it thanks to your link.
I nearly gave up after the first paragraph – so Duncroft had bars on the windows did it? They just can’t help themselves embellishing the story can they?
“We are all going to have to be very careful now about what we all publish and air,” says Vanity Fair’s London libel attorney. I wonder if we can sue them for insinuating that we lived in a building with bars on the windows?
Anyway, minor gripes over, all in all, a reasonably balanced version of events, not too many examples of hyperbole, and a damn sight better than most of the British media have managed.
Maybe suing would be a wake up call…
I went to two Catholic boarding schools. The first, in the late 1970s, was my prep school. It was housed in an Arts and Crafts country house which has left me with an abiding love of the style. The education was superb and led to me gaining common entrance to a major public school with ease. My history and English teacher was Wing Commander Ashcroft, who had flown Shackletons out of RAF Kinloss. He and his wife had no children and they treated us like we were their own. The housemaster, Mr Collins, was an ex-army NCO who came across as a gruff disciplinarian. Twice a term we had “EXEAT” weekends, where we were expected to go home to our families. A bit of a problem for us expat kids. He would take us under his wing; a lie-in at the weekend, made sure the cook served up something special, ice-cream, air rifle shooting on the lawn, stay up watching telly till late at night, and so on. Heaven for 10 year olds.
The public school I went to never rates highly in academic terms but regularly receives plaudits from Ofsted for its pastoral care and sense of close community.
I went to a catholic nursery run by nuns for a short time when I was four. They held me down and force fed me sponge pudding with currants and made me violently sick. Come to think of it, it might not be too late to sue.
I still think sarcasm was the most dreaded teacher weapon against recalcitrant young male students. – 1950 era.
Whats more the rest of the class weould join in on the side of ‘sir’.
We were rather proud of the accurancy of the teacher who was a chalk hurler.
JOHYN MALPAS,
“the teacher who was a chalk hurler”
I’m starting to think these things were taught at teacher training college throughout the country.
One of my primary teachers was a ‘chalk hurler’ too, the same one as I was talking about above…
Damn Anna, how could you let all these inconvenient facts get in the way of yet another media witch hunt? It’s jolly inconsiderate of you.
Anna, unfortunately you’ve made the usual mistake of assuming that a) “Hollywood” is a monolith with a single brain and b) equating “Hollywood” with every English language film produced.
Here’s the list of financial backers/Production Companies for The Magdelanie Sisters:
Scottish Screen
Film Council (as The Film Council)
Bórd Scannán na hÉireann
Momentum Pictures (in association with)
PFP Films (as PFP Films)
Temple Films (in association with)
Dumfries & Galloway Council (with the support of)
South West Scotland Screen Commission (with the support of)
Scottish Enterprise Dumfries & Galloway (with the support of)
UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund (with the support of)
Element Films (uncredited)
Irish Film Board (funding)
None of them were even US companies, let alone “Hollywood”. (Momentum is a UK company whose parent company has since been bought by a part-US company but at the time the parent company was Canadian).
None of this of course has any bearing on how accurate or otherwise the film is but all the creative and financial impetus behind the making of the film was UK/Irish.
Most interesting John,
I was referring to Hollywood as a generic term, but I am more than grateful for your input as to who precisely was interested in seeing this vision of 1920s Ireland brought to a wider audience. Fascinating.
Peter Mullen (writer/director) says that he wanted to give the “victims a voice”. I suspect that he heard the stories, they fitted into his worldview and he swallowed them whole.
As for the money; Momentum and anyone else who put in commercial equity probably just thought there was a lowish-budget compelling story in what was then becoming, after Angela’s Ashes, a mini-genre. It wouldn’t be that much of a financial risk and it would have looked like an award-worthy proposition which will get sympathetic reviews and lots of free editorial coverage in the press. It would have been obvious to do the rounds of the “usual suspects” for such a semi-arthouse subject, like the assorted Arts funds. With an up and coming Scottish writer/director who was already an established actor the Scottish Funds would be likely to kick in a few quid, especially with a bit of shooting in Scotland. Shoot the rest in Ireland and hoover up some soft money from there. It really isn’t unusual for this type of patchwork quilt of financing to come together.for non-major studio pictures and it’s becoming more common even for them.
I doubt that most of the funders thought much further than here’s a worthy project we should be backing. I’d be surprised if any thought to seriously question whether the whole story was true or not.
“The epilogue to the film gives a brief description of the lives of four of the inmates after the girls leave the asylum by the late 1960s but according to one source these “biographical details” are fictitious. They are actually details of real women interviewed who “inspired” the characters in the film, even though the stories in the film were fictionalized and varied substantially from the true stories (for example, the real women did not all know each other, and one, not herself a Magdalene, was raised in an orphanage associated with an adjoining Magdalene laundry). It is noted that the last Magdalene asylum closed in 1996.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318411/synopsis?ref_=tt_stry_pl
We saw a very cruel film about Irish nuns running a laundry. We had the chance to see a DVD of it again, but politely declined the offer. We felt that either it was too cruel to watch, plus I have my doubts the full veracity of it’s relentless cruelty. The Irish girls I did my training with said nuns were ‘hard’ women. Everything was hard in those far off days. The nuns and their charges came from a hard place. They did not bang on about cruelty, as far as I recall. A staunchly Catholic close friend, at mass thrice weekly, told me the reason she left Ireland to train as a nurse in England, was that it was ‘priest ridden’. Everyone knew and wanted to know your business. Your life was not your own and so on. It can be so easy to put propaganda into some people’s heads and manipulate opinion to some kind of covert agenda. Hugely wealthy men of power run the media. It dances to their tune. I personally value the BBC. It has been there all my longish life. Like a cosy cushion against all those silly adverts. Isn’t a lot of management currently unable to cope with fast moving news spillage, and knees jerking in all directions???? Horse DNA anyone?
Just heard on the radio that the Irish Prez is apologising to all the old people today. Sounds better than the UK at least. Over here, we’re arresting them all….
Also looks like the biter’s going to get bit……………
@ In an interview on CNN Thursday, actress Thandie Newton spoke out about an abusive casting director who exploited her when she was just 18….. The British actress, then at the beginning of her career, was at a screen test for a project when the casting director began acting inappropriately. Because of the professional environment and her inexperience in the industry, Newton said, she was confused about how to respond…… Though Newton declined to name the director, she noted that it was only the most explicit incident in a long chain of uncomfortable situations. @
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/thandie-newton-abused-casting-director-article-1.1265472#ixzz2L3fZo3v9
Most women when young or as children had various ‘uncomfortable’ experiences of one kind or another. I had to give up a nice well behaved boyfriend because I was not safe on the way home after I had seen him in Liverpool. I was prodded by roving fingers on tube trains. Naughty words whispered in my ear on the underground escalators. Rude words used to me at a Christmas dance when in earshot of matron!! So I am sure lovely girls trying to be film stars ran the gauntlet of lascivious, advantage taking males in the film industry. You have to tell yourself not all men are like that, and get on with it or get away from it. Mostly you couldn’t make a fuss, as they were so clever at choosing their moment. Or you wait till years later, then disgrace them when they are older by telling the truth; not lying about incidents that never happened.
I had a girlfriend years in the late 60′s, who looked younger than her years, she was in fact 20. This was the time of miniskirts, and apart from her boss giving her a very suspect nickname (he never went further), her most troubling time was being assaulted on the escalator of a tube station, by another woman. It certainly went beyond the “inappropiate touching” we are hearing about nowadays.
No, she didn’t report it.
As for stars and the film industry, I have to tell you that a high proportion of impressarios and people in the film industry are gay. Girls are not the only ones preyed upon. Example below (not mine, and redacted)
“I used to watch J B from the ******* fawn over my then boyfriend…many years ago…as a then up and coming singer, my then bf put up and shut up for a headline slot….he would then drink himself into oblivion with self loathing and drive us both home at 4am
There’s an interesting cache of documents attached to this NYT article from 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/world/europe/25vatican.html
One thing I found especially interesting is that one aspect of this case was the claim that one reason the old priest was not pursued more in the Nineties because he was old and infirm, just what the purported letter from the CPS, that cropped up in the abortive Newsnight show, was to say about why Jimmy Savile was not pursued in 2007.
One thing that struck me was that browsing the documents left me feeling the NYT report interpretations of what it all meant was more a matter of their reporter’s opinion, than it was irrefutable *fact*. There is a “victim’s letter” from 1974 that has some intriguing aspects – especially that it is strongly suggested the boys were interfering with one another…. I have wondered that the past problems of child abuse in childrens homes might have had as much to do with other inmates as the staff, but the staff would be *blamed* for not preventing it. One of the eventual five convictions directly linked to Haut de la Garenne was actually a man who was 15 at the time of his crime, and he was basically convicted of abusing fellow *children*.
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One thing that struck me was that browsing the documents left me feeling the NYT report interpretations of what it all meant was more a matter of their reporter’s opinion, than it was irrefutable *fact*. There is a “victim’s letter” from 1974 that has some intriguing aspects – especially that it is strongly suggested the boys were interfering with one another…. I have wondered that the past problems of child abuse in childrens homes might have had as much to do with other inmates as the staff, but the staff would be *blamed* for not preventing it. One of the eventual five convictions directly linked to Haut de la Garenne was actually a man who was 15 at the time of his crime, and he was basically convicted of abusing fellow *children*.
I agree I believe a lot more of this kind of behaviour came from the inmates, (if that is the correct term) with perhaps only a small number of staff allowing it to keep order and perhaps to procure the best ones probably based on their silence.
Is this not a little like the public school fag system?
Typo…private
Flip had heard everything. Instantly her voice came screaming after me:
‘Come here! Come here this instant! What was that you said?’
‘I said it didn’t hurt,’ I faltered out.
‘How dare you say a thing like that? Do you think that is a proper thing to say? Go in and REPORT YOURSELF AGAIN!’
This time Sambo laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time that frightened and astonished me — about five minutes, it seemed — ending up by breaking the riding-crop. The bone handle went flying across the room.
‘Look what you’ve made me do!’ he said furiously, holding the broken crop.
I had fallen into a chair, weakly snivelling. I remember that this was the only time throughout my boyhood when a beating actually reduced me to tears, and curiously enough I was not even now crying because of the pain. The second beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and shame seemed to have anaesthetized me. I was crying partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.
I knew the bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The second fact I was personally aware of, and the first I did not question. It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be something that happened to you. I do not want to claim that this idea flashed into my mind as a complete novelty at this very moment, under the blows of Sambo’s cane: I must have had glimpses of it even before I left home, for my early childhood had not been altogether happy. But at any rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good. And the double beating was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined. At any rate, as I sat snivelling on the edge of a chair in Sambo’s study, with not even the self-possession to stand up while he stormed at me, I had a conviction of sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt before.
….
So much for the episode of the bed-wetting. But there is one more thing to be remarked. This is that I did not wet my bed again — at least, I did wet it once again, and received another beating, after which the trouble stopped. So perhaps this barbarous remedy does work, though at a heavy price, I have no doubt.
[George Orwell: Such, Such Were The Joys.]
The interesting thing about the above is that in the 1960′s when it was first published after the death of the headmistress in 1967 made it possible to safely publish, the word “abuse” had not yet been invented, at least not in its ubiquitous sense as used today.
Other contemporaries of Orwell at the same school, such as golf writer Henry Longhurst, an avid defender of St.Cyprian’s School brushed off the whole thing as a gross exaggeration, yet scored something of an own goal when he himself remembered the cold pewter bowls of porridge with the thick slimy lumps, into which I was actually sick one day and made to stand at a side-table and eat it up (!!!).
Of course these days the emphasis might be more on the pewter bowls because low grade pewter used to contain lead, rather than on the ecological implications of being forced to eat your own vomit.
Here’s another example of historical crimes, although nothing to do with sex.
I did A levels at school in the summer of 1968 in French, German, and English Lit.
A week before the exam, we did our last test of interpreting a passage from a French set book, Le Chef D’Oeuvre Inconnu by Honore de Balzac. The passage was one that I confidently predicted would never come up in the exam, because there were too many footnotes. But it did. What luck!
On the morning of the Shakespeare paper, the invigilator for the morning exam accidentally distributed thirty or forty copies of the afternoon exam paper, before the error was noticed and the papers were collected up. But not before a number of people had identified the passage from King Lear that was to be commented on in the afternoon. What luck!
Because I implicitly trusted the teachers, thirty or forty went by before I realised what you will already have spotted–that the school had a pattern of organised cheating so as to get better exam results.
Maybe they all did back then, but the headmaster of my school was selected in 1969 to take up one of the most prominent posts in the English education system, no doubt based on his exceptional record and achievements, and subsequently had a very distinguished career. He died in 2005.
Now imagine if I went public with these allegations at this late date. It goes without saying that many distinguished people would come forward to say that I was mistaken, and possibly a few of my contemporaries would come forward with similar stories. What would the general public think (in the unlikely event of the story hitting the Daily Mail or The Guardian)?
Suppose it went to court (unlikely I know) and the surviving teachers were placed in the dock. I would be accused of lying and I would probably start to doubt myself, unless others had also come forward with similar tales, in which case I would be patting myself on the back. Even now I have a hard time believing that they cheated in this manner, but they must have. Mustn’t they?
The year I was due to take my Degree examinations we were all instructed how to find “Past Paper” questions at the library. At least three of the questions I used as a structure for some revision actually came up on my papers that year. If it’s a crime, I’m struggling to see who was “the victim”.
You might enjoy this story, to illustrate that the only thing new under the sun is *outrage* …..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9672500/Superhead-knew-teachers-were-fiddling-registers-to-boost-school-results-tribunal-hears.html
Moor Larkin,
The ‘victims’ we’re the ones who never got the chance to see the ‘past papers’…
@ The ‘victims’ we’re the ones who never got the chance to see the ‘past papers’ @
People in other institutions would have been the “victims” of a bunch of instructors who failed to give them the best chance of succeeding if they were never told. The past papers were openly published and in the library. If our lecturer hadn’t bothered to tell us, we would never have known they were there of course. Notwithstanding the fact that we were told, more than one of my contemporaries “couldn’t be bothered” to go the library. They might have made victims of themselves I suppose.
When I learned to drive, the Instructor told me about the four Testers in our area, and advised me about little *secrets* about each one. He also gave me strong tips about the exact locations I would be taken to, when the Test was for real. We spent extra training time manouevering in those particular places. Was that *cheating*? Using knowledge he had, that I did not have, so that I could do the best I could? Isn’t this what we used called “Education”, rather than the more modern pupil-centred edukayshun…. ?
@Moor Larkin
I think the driving test is a bit different, because that is competency based and the examiner has to determine whether you have sufficient skill to go out on your own.
An exam like an A level is different, because, assuming that 100% is impossible to achieve, you are competing against other candidates to see who can get closest to the maximum. I have no doubt that in the two subjects mentioned I and others at my school scored more points that we would otherwise have done. Presumably this would have pushed down the grades of some candidates from other schools.
Of course the other schools may have all cheated too.
It is interesting, all the same, because at the time I would never, ever have queried the probity of the teachers at my school. It would not have occurred to me that the teachers would look at the exam papers when they arrived in the mail several days before the exams and then fine tune their teaching to pinpoint anything that would have thrown us for a loop.
It took 35 or 40 years before the penny eventually dropped (not that I spent a lot of time thinking about the matter in the interim). It’s interesting to compare this to the sex abuse cases where the girls concerned may at the time have been rather proud of the fact that they were having sex with glamorous teachers who were musical maestros rather than grubby teenage boys from their cohort, because it would not have occurred to them to be critical of the teachers. Only in much longer term retrospect, perhaps when they had teenage children of their own, did they see what seemed like a mark of high status at the time as something much shabbier and venal.
@ Jonathan Mason
It’s a bit of a leap to go from philosophising about how teachers did their best for their own pupils to pass their exams, to comparing it on some kind of moral equivalence basis to the morality of other teachers engaging in sexual foreplay with their pupils. I think you’re beating yourself up unecessarily about this….
Insofar as coaching goes – no matter how much extra French revision you gained from a teacher on the QT, YOU still had to write the essay. Don’t put yourself down.
Jonathan Mason,
I wonder how on earth they thought that belting him would have any effect on his bed wetting?
Surely some advice on not drinking and making sure you go to the toilet before bed might have been more useful/helpful…? lol
@Lucozade
Well, this was before World War 1, so God knows what they thought. Actually the text is quite controversial and other contemporaries of Orwell have denied that this happened to Orwell. (For example, they don’t think it is possible that a riding crop was used.)
Possibly the anecdote came from another source and was retooled to fit Orwell’s agenda. He wrote this around the same time he was writing Nineteen Eighty Four and one can readily detect thematic overlaps.
Written about 30 years after the events described ostensibly took place, it is yet another example of the dangers of establishing the truth about what happened 30 or more years earlier, especially when the memories of the young person may have been distorted by subsequent life experiences and ambient political attitudes, influence of others, etc.
I think it is entirely possible that Orwell was not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about this particular episode, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate other parts of the essay.
This is the trouble with all this historical rape that is coming to court now. The testimony that we hear may be partly true, or things may have happened, but not necessarily in quite the same way that they are related, and there is really no way to test the truth. We see this, for example in the Savile/Duncroft allegations where one could perceive Savile as a sexual predator, but other contemporaries think that some of the girls were the predators who would all too readily exchange sex for cigarettes or cash.
The issue of cigarettes at Duncroft is an interesting one. Did Savile see that the girls smoked and decide that he could use gifts of cigarettes to influence the behavior of the girls (he was a non smoker), or did the girls suggest to him that he should bring cigarettes next time he came?
Jonathan Mason,
“Did Savile see that the girls smoked and decide that he could use gifts of cigarettes to influence the behavior of the girls (he was a non smoker), or did the girls suggest to him that he should bring cigarettes next time he came?”
Has anyone else other than the accusers themselves said they remember Jimmy Savile bringing the girls cigarettes? E.g a former member of the staff or a former resident who has made no actual allegations of abuse or having witnessed any abuse?
Personally I haven’t ruled out the possibility of him being completely innocent, at least as far as the Duncroft accusations go, and probably the vast majority of the other’s too, if not all of them, especially the worst ones…
When we took 11+ in the nineteen forties we were taught by a very gifted woman teacher how to take the 11+ exams. At a large village primary school. She did not shout, throw chalk or board dusters either. I remember the problems put to us 10 and 11 years old kids as mind blowing. Probably because I am not as brainy as the really lucky ones. Many people think the age of criminality is too low, but those mental arithmetic problems were, to me, horrendous, yet us little scraps were supposed to do them under time pressure and strict invigilation at exams. Was it ‘cheating’ to stream pupils? For pupils to have a gifted teacher to rehearse them, as an exclusive group for months on end? Eventually the Crossmans of this world had their wicked way and sunk the grammars. Now we ‘reap the whirl wind’ as a remote result. A decision made politicians who had a good education themselves; then stole it from those in education behind them. I struggled to grammar school without extra tuition. By the way, thank you, Mr Wilson, for The Open university.
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