Commend him for announcing the Savile investigation
This week Michael Gove, the education secretary, took the bold step of announcing to Parliament investigations into historic child sex abuse by Jimmy Savile at local authority, Roman Catholic and charity children’s homes and schools.
His decision is to be commended and the full Parliamentary statement can be seen here. It names council homes in Bournemouth, Devon, Gloucestershire, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham.Nottinghamshire, Surrey and the London boroughs of Hounslow, Islington, Southwark and Tower Hamlets. It also names Barnados in Redbridge; the Henshaw school for the Blind in Leeds and the Notre Dame Grammar School in Leeds and Sevenoaks School in Kent.
The Savile scandal has been one of the worst child abuse scandals to come out affecting not only schools but the BBC and even Broadmoor Hospital. It also extended outside England to Jersey.
I hope that all the authorities do a thorough review and uncover every fact possible – even though it dates back to the 1960s,70s and 80s. It will also mean tracing the children who had been there. I hope also the authorities know that if they do approach people they must be given proper and adequate support – something that has been noticeably lacking in current historic paedophile inquiries I have been covering.
Nothing must be hidden. It is scandal in the unrelated historic paedophile inquiry in the London borough of Richmond ( which did not involve Savile) that it has taken over 40 years for anybody to be brought to court to answer such crimes. It should also look at whether Savile had any accomplices that allowed such things to happen. The time for cover up is over.
Westminster Confidential 
Reblogged this on Vox Political and commented:
The most important part of this is the hope that anyone in authority approaching people who may have been victims know how to provide proper and adequate support.
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Reblogged this on Beastrabban’s Weblog.
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As a senior police officer said to me on Wednesday after a lengthly discussion ‘this is what we are up against’. We all know what he meant but people in the media and politics also know only too well there are organisations and affiliates much more powerful than themselves…the Clubs that dare not speak its name – apologies to Oscar Wilde.
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I believe this was an important move my the Minister and his department to require the local authorities to become involved in a proactive manner rather than defensively as they did in the past. It is important that child protection workers and the police work closely together in the interest of the victims, only some can be said to have survived well.
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This is both a brave and commendable step by Gove. As in the comment above there are forces at work determined to keep this forever hidden and it is vital that adequate support and protection are given to all survivors of this. Reliving these terrors are hard enough without having to worry about personal safety.
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As the most basic search for “Sevenoaks School sexual abuse” will reveal, there is a huge amount of detail available about widespread sexual and physical abuse there, including the published accounts of Gerd Sommerhoff (yet another OBE) abusing the smallest of boys. The search will also show that the chaplain to Sevenoaks School was Peter Hullah, who presided over widespread sexual abuse at the Chetham School of Music and is now a Bishop in the Church of England. How the Fallen have become Mighty.
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Hullah is now no longer a bishop after he moved Northampton Academy. He is now involved in various charitable campaigns according to the latest information and at St Martins in the Fields in Trafalgar Square, London.
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