Remembering

Lest We Forget

What do we forget when we remember 

What are the stories left untold 

What do we think each November 

As we march down that glory road 

As we march down that gory road 

One hundred million 

Don’t come home from war 

Another eight hundred million 

Who lived to bear its scar 

Who lived to bear its scar 

Lest we forget 

What they were dying for 

Lest we forget 

What they were killing for 

Lest we forget 

What the hell it was for 

  

What do we forget when we remember…

Owen Griffiths

This Remembrance Day I have mainly been shouting at the newspaper, radio and television.  The Long Suffering Husband asked what was making me so angry, then declared I was annoying him and fled to the golf course.

The news that has made me so cross is the BBC bashing that is currently going on over the Newsnight programme.  When the Saville story broke I thought it had only become newsworthy because the two BBC programmes could argue between themselves about who ran the story and who bottled it.  It wasn't enough to believe the victims.  Their stories were not what was making the news.  Everyone knew what he was.  They knew what he'd done.  They knew how millions of girls had suffered and no one cared.  The girls had been told they wouldn't believed and unfortunately that was the truth.    Panorama only ran with the Saville story because they could say that Newsnight had buried the story.  They weren't interested in the victims only point scoring.

So, when Newsnight got another story about child abuse that had been covered up they had to run it, didn't they?  They had a victim, the subject of serial abuse throughout his time in care, who was prepared to tell his story and say that there were people who abused him who were not charged or properly investigated at the time.  He told Newsnight who they were but the programme didn't name them.  

Straight after the programme Twitter was full of names. People who had been  rumoured to be abusers for many years. Now the victim claims that he was mistaken about the person who Newsnight didn't let him name.  It wasn't that person after all.  The world is outraged, baying for blood.  "The poor soul who was falsely accused," they say.  

But memory is a funny thing.  What we remember or don't remember isn't always true.  I have a very vivid memory from when I was 3 years old.  I remember waking up and finding no one in the house, the table was set for breakfast.  I went outside and got on my tricycle and cycled all the way around the house.  I would swear that this is true, that it happened but my parents tell me it didn't and couldn't have for two reasons; We never set the table for breakfast and the house wasn't detached.  I probably didn't have the tricycle either.  A friend told me that she would swear on her life that she was in a particular shopping centre when Hillsborough happened but now knows that she couldn't have been because she wasn't living there in 1989.  But mis-remembering doesn't mean that everything that people say is untrue.

On the Sunday Politics show today, Andrew Neill said that the victim's evidence was wholly false. That's not true.  He was abused, he was in care and he did have a terrible childhood.  He was probably abused by someone he believed to be a senior Tory M.P. and the abuser could have told him that to keep him quiet,  "They'll never believe you, I'm a powerful man." or he could have actually been a powerful man who was able to make the world believe that he had been falsely accused.  Then David Mellor accused the victim of being a "wierdo"  and said you only had to look at the accused to know that he wasn't a paedophile.  This is why victims suffer in silence.  The abusers are right.  No one believes them and then they say horrible things about them and apparently sane people think paedophiles have a large P tattooed on their heads.

It's quite staggering what we forget when we remember.

Let's try not to forget that children need to be protected and believed and encouraged to tell. Let's not forget that accusations need to be thoroughly investigated, so that they don't have to wait until they are adults and so damaged by their experiences that their memories are unreliable.