Those my age remember Rolf Harris as the most lovable entertainer. He provided us with good and clean fun on TV when transmission hours were still limited and the pictures was just black and white. I clearly remember him playing Australian indigenous instruments.

Now we know that there was another aspect of Harris’s personality, an aspect which has just landed him for almost six years in prison. Harris, now 84, was found guilty of 12 counts of assaulting four girls, some as young as seven or eight, between 1968 and 1986. The prosecution presented Harris as a repeat abuser. In one particular case he abused a woman for her entire teenage and young-adult life. (For more details see the printed version of today The Times of Malta, 5 July, page 11.)

Following the Jimmy Saville, of BBC fame, scandal police authorities launched an investigation that netted more than a dozen ageing British celebrities.

This court sentence comes hot on the heels of the laicization of Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, the former Vatican ambassador to the Dominican Republic. He is the highest-yet ranking Church official to be dismissed from the priesthood following an investigation into his sexual abuse of boys. He will now face a criminal trial in the Vatican and if found guilty can be sent to prison. He may also face charges in the Dominican Republic and in his native Poland.

These cases, among others, highlight an attitude present for too long a time in society which used to turn a blind eye on such an abuse, considering it not to be something that will perpetually harm children and adolescents. Authorities in several institutions, even the most respectable ones, used to turn a blind eye to what was happening. Victims were doubly abused. First by the predator who abused them sexually and then by society which did not believe them.

Many cases of abuse happened in a situation of an unequal power relationship.  Persons in position of authority felt that abusing children was one of the perks of the job. Ironically enough the fact that abuse also happened in respectable institutions made the position of the abused weaker and that of the predator stronger. Such things cannot happen there, many believed. This made complaining and reporting more difficult.

Society’s lack of adequate response was also a sign of the emerging culture of the trivialisation of sex. Given the importance of our sexuality for our humanity the trivialisation of the former always includes the trivialisation of the latter. While society is today giving a lot of importance – and so should it be – to a zero-tolerance policy of sex abuse, it is still trivialising sex and consequently giving rise to other forms of abuse mainly through media products. These forms of abuse should be fought with the same vigour that other forms of abuse are being resisted. Otherwise hypocrisy will reign supreme.