Operation Yewtree has had another success this week with Rolf Harris having been found guilty with the possibility of further charges. This is off the back of success two months ago in convicting Max Clifford. However, there is some difference between these two men.

As wrong as media agents are for charging “oral sex” for a part in a film, it seems unsurprising, that they were under-age is what shocks. Reality is there are still agents out there doing the same thing. What is worse is our show of public outcry over Clifford just seems like our attempt to absolve our own collective responsibility. After all, we demand attractive young women on screen and this keeps these men in their jobs. Worse still this is at the acceptable end of the problem. Are we in fact terrified of turning our public gaze to the real horror agents, those in the pornography industry. Spiked-online ran a story about Stead exposing the workings of the pornography industry recently — it makes Max Clifford look tame.

Where is the tabloid coverage? Where is the elevated police budget to tackle the porn industry? I don’t disagree that these men are pigs, but are we in danger as a reader in rewarding a media that forces the police to bias resources into tackling an easier problem, as we search for our absolution to our less public consumptions of pornography?

Further, Max Clifford’s sentencing was just, but different to that of Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile. They were in trusted positions with children, supposedly helping to educate and inspire them. I’m not trying to suggest Clifford’s victims deserve less justice, simply that we had the right to expect more of the accused. Our reaction is stronger still when they were people we idolised at a similar age to the victims. I never particularly liked Jimmy Savile, he always looked like a dirty old man to me, but Rolf Harris seemed different. Although for those who liked him, to publicly moan about our collective loss of a childhood role-model seems trite relative to the trauma of the victims. It is just sad.

On the the surface it appears as if the post war generation took advantage of the “love generation”. Is this true? Have times just changed? Some suggest the standards are now different and we are just holding people to account.

I’d say yes, and no.

Operation Yewtree has an extraordinary level of funding at the moment, and this is a good thing. It does mean though that we are seeing a skewed level of reporting in the press. Every week someone new is brought into the limelight. We do need to be careful about how we react to this.

1. There is the chance of us developing fatigue, seeing the crimes as all the same, with the later trials courting less outrage and sympathy — we must not. All the stories are very different, and the victims just as hurt.
2. We might be left thinking that post-war generation men are all just perverts — they are not. Worse still we might assume younger men are better — they are not. It is true that what is socially acceptable has changed, but it is unfair to suggest that there is equivalence between patting someone on the bottom and manipulating someone into performing sexual acts, or that one leads to the other.
3. The reality is that operation Yewtree has 70 or more suspects. To bring them to trial they will have ranked them, bringing the cases with highest chance of success first. These will be those with the most serious and most numerous of allegations. This is going to skew the list to the older suspects as they had more time to build up a number of victims. So there might be plenty of younger suspects in the 70, we just don’t know.

We are in a peak of prosecutions in one area of society and we need to take care not to draw generalisations. More importantly we shouldn’t assume it is a problem from the past, I’d say in many ways society is now worse. The pornography industry is so much more developed that is was 50 years ago, exploiting far more people.

Is it going too far? Some people seem to be getting smeared and their lives destroyed. Should we offer anonymity to the accused?

Of the 70 stars considered so far, the lucky ones are those whose names have not bubbled to the surface. Others like Jim Davidson and Freddie Star (in May) have come close to having their names tainted forever. Whilst some have ended up with the full weight of a court trial on their shoulders to be found innocent — e.g. Bill Roache, Dave Lee Travis (although only 10 of the 12 charges) — their lives have been decimated and reputations they spent years building destroyed overnight.

Don’t get me wrong, the ones who are truly guilty need to be caught, but the casualties have led some high profile celebrities to suggest this has become a witch-hunt — e.g. Chris Tarrant and Terry Gilliam.

This problem is not just confined to operation Yewtree cases. The most recent being the MP Nigel Evans who has just been acquitted of all nine charges against him. He has ended up with no job and having exhausted his life savings in defending himself.

Further, this does not just affect those with a public profile, an example is Christopher Jefferies who was wrongly accused of the murder of Jo Yeates in Bristol in 2010. Eight national newspapers ended up having to pay out in libel cases to him, and the Bristol police force had to make a public apology for the way they handled the case.

Operation Yewtree’s glut of acquittals along with these others has already led to the debate over anonymity for those accused, in a similar way to that extended to victims. The jury still seems to be out on this debate, with there being strong arguments on both sides; yes, it would be nice to protect those wrongly accused, but it would stop other victims from being able to come forward as they are not aware the accused is being prosecuted. Here are two interesting disucssions from the Guardian and Huffington.

However, this argument in my view gets skewed when the accused is famous or wealthy. Young, attractive opportunists can look vulnerable and make up stories, with the potential to decimate reputations.

Some have also sought to draw parallels with murder cases. Suggesting that we are not considering anonymity for murder suspects. However, this argument is flawed. The stigma of acquittal from murder and sexual assault is very different. The latter tends to have a living victims, so there tends to be far less doubt that the accused was at the scene of the crime. Further, there are virtually no mitigating circumstances: you can’t commit sexual assault in self defence or to protect your family, so the affect on peoples lives even in being acquitted seems to be potentially far worse.