Further Confessions of a GP

Jimmy Savile

The exposure of child abuse allegedly perpetrated by Sir Jimmy Savile was a massive shock to me. As a kid in the 1980s, I used to love Jim’ll Fix It and was once greatly envious of those children who got to sit on his knee. Not any more. Although never my greatest hero (Daley Thompson wins that award), Savile was nonetheless an integral part of my childhood. A part that has now been completely tarnished.

Were I not a doctor, these allegations of abuse might have felt like a watershed moment for me. They might have ended a certain naivety bestowed upon me by the good fortune of a sheltered, happy and abuse-free childhood. As a medic, that innocence ended when I first set foot on a psychiatric ward a decade or so earlier. I was astounded at how many of the inpatients of both sexes had been abused as children or young adults. In medical school I had learned that mental illness was something that randomly afflicted people due to a combination of genetics and miss-firing neurotransmitters. I had been taught that in mental illness brain chemicals go wrong in the same way that chromosomes go wrong in Down’s syndrome, or blood clotting doesn’t work in haemophiliacs. Reading through the medical records of the female patients on the acute psychiatric ward, there was not a single one who had not suffered some sort of trauma as a child or young adult. Stories of sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect and usually a combination of all three jumped out from almost every set of notes.

The psychiatrist in charge of the ward told me that she would be out of a job if she could somehow prevent anyone from ever being abused as a child. The psychiatric wards would be empty, she told me. Those wards weren’t empty. They were in fact full to bursting with desperate, damaged, unhappy people and the constant pressure of more people needing to be admitted was always there. Now clearly not everyone abused ends up with a mental illness and not everyone with a mental illness was abused. I’m sure genetics and brain chemicals also play their part, but the association between childhood trauma and mental illness in adulthood is well documented. I wonder if those adults who do the abusing even consider just how much pain and torment they cause and just how long it lasts.

Most A&E departments have regular self-harmers who repeatedly present to the department with cuts on their arms that need stitching up. In A&E, we only asked for the details of what had happened that day and would often feel frustrated spending time mending what appeared to be self-inflicted injuries. Here in general practice, we get the whole life story and soon learn that although the cuts on the arms are self-inflicted, the underlying damage was probably meted out by an adult abuser some years earlier. As a doctor it doesn’t necessarily make self-harm any easier a problem to manage, but at least it goes some way towards helping me understand it.

Of course, everyone’s aim is to prevent children being abused. As with Jimmy Savile’s victims, it has taken until adulthood before many of my patients have opened up to me about the abuse they suffered as children. My constant anxiety is about how many of my young patients are suffering abuse right now. Statistics would suggest at least one or two, which is a sobering thought and enough to persuade me to keep asking questions and stay vigilant.

There aren’t many positives to take from the allegations that flooded the media following the exposure of Savile, but I hope that the current publicity might encourage us adults to remember how common child abuse is and to always bear it in mind when working with children and young people. Even more importantly, perhaps it will inspire one or two children to feel empowered enough to step forward and speak up about abuse they are suffering from right now. Many of us are wondering about the adults who were around during the 1970s, and asking how did they let it happen? Wouldn’t it be a great shame if in 40 years from now people look back on this generation and ask the same thing?