I have to say I agreed with most of what he said except - he never touched on the possibility that people get things slightly wrong, memories alter facts, media promotes "good stories" which can exaggerate and expand non stories into great stories. And failed to cover (why should he?) the exploding industry behind these stories. There's a lot of money to be made (by some people) out of child abuse, rape, historical allegations and media exposees.

He mainly blamed corrupt police for past scandals. Nobody seems to think most police in the past were decent people trying to do an honest job. And they whittled out obviously false allegations as well as going along with superiors who perhaps decided the lesser evil was to drop silly charges against people technically breaking unfair laws.

Now those police may have made mistakes. They may not have found evidence of child abuse in a welter of consensual young male sex (often including the "victimless" crime of prostitution - we used to call them Hustlers in those days - check out Midnight Cowboy). So we certainly do NOT assume or claim there was no child abuse. We simply suspect there are now exaggerations, fuelled, of course, by the essential dominant ingredient from the media - A GREAT STORY.

how would he know? all gossip and rumour
jumps on bandwagons as they career along.

He tweets "child sex abuse coverups" not child sex abuse "cover-ups" twitter.com/mwilliamsthomas/status/577794449381711872
www.bbc.com/news/uk-31907201

Perhaps they should ask him the next time if he thinks there's a risk that Twitter could be used to suggest ideas to people. The idea of a coverup could explain away a lot of things, like there being no record of you allegedly reporting something you've only just thought of.