Marina Hyde: Sexual abuse in football a story ignored for too long

In the course of his heartbreaking account of the abuse he suffered at the hands of a paedophile football coach, former Tottenham and Liverpool player Paul Stewart mentioned that he had watched Spotlight, the film about the Boston Globe's investigation of institutionalised sexual abuse with the city's Catholic Church.

As Stewart put it, the revelations in that case started relatively small, but the airing of them caused survivor accounts to snowball. That way, he judged, “the enormity of it became clear”.

Though it may seem the tiniest thing in an interview which contained such unimaginable horrors, I am glad he mentioned Spotlight.

It was a movie whose success at this year’s Oscars caused many journalists to indulge in a preposterous round of self-congratulation about their trade.

This predictable outbreak of self-regard was fanned by the film, which ends with a scrolling roll call of scandals in other national churches, and the tacit, naughty implication that it was the Boston Globe that started it all.

It wasn’t.

By the time the newspaper got around to running the investigation properly, plenty of these church abuse stories appended in the credits had already been big news.

Furthermore, the city of Boston had several vocal victim support groups by this stage, some represented by lawyers, and a number of survivor accounts had been published as books.

In fact, as even the movie cannot but note, the Boston Globe had itself, a few years before, run a story about 20 paedophile priests as a news in brief item. 20!

At the time of the Oscars win, I observed in passing that the latter news in brief item was of similar length to the two paragraphs the New York Times ran in June 1942 – merely tacked on to another story – which mentioned that "probably the greatest slaughter in history" had claimed the lives of 700,000 Jews in Poland.

When I eventually get around to delving into the microfiche, I will be intrigued to see what the NYT decided to splash on that day.

Village newspaper

Spotlight contains the ghastly line: "If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one", and despite moments of self-reflection, the village newspaper gets off more than lightly.

It was ever thus.

Historically, many journalists have always delighted in inserting themselves approvingly into the nobler tales of how stories are brought to the world.

But we must not flinch from putting our trade at the centre of stories of institutional failure too.

Why did we collectively fail to follow up broadcast investigations into allegations of sexual abuse in football?

What was it about crimes of the most serious kind in the national game that didn’t make the media cut?

What do we ignore in the current era that will seem an unfathomably shameful oversight a mere couple of decades from now?

The abuse scandal currently snowballing began its belated journey toward enormity when Andy Woodward waived his anonymity to speak to Daniel Taylor.

That was an act of immense courage and immense significance. One of the unpleasantly enduring facts about our profession is that without a face to the horror, the horror is just the horror, and very often seems too inconveniently faceless to be properly reported.

Sensitive narrative

Over the past few years, progress in the way the media handles highly sensitive narratives has been made, but we kid ourselves if we imagine this tendency toward a certain template for storytelling is not still resulting in other terrible silences.

It already seems almost incomprehensible that the former Newsnight editor Peter Rippon shelved the programme's Jimmy Savile investigation unbroadcast on the basis that all they had to go on was the testimony of some of the late presenter's victims – "just the women", as he memorably put it in an email that subsequently came to light.

But it happened, and some other version of it will inevitably be happening in all sorts of newsrooms now.

It very rarely happens out of malevolence but is down to various degrees of human error. Yet those errors always need the most unsparing examination.

A media bruised from having to constantly defend its priorities in an era of hugely diminished budgets and so on must still leave time for extensive thoughts on the lessons to take from its own deafening silence around the issue.

Of course it is vital to play our part now in reporting the developing scandal, holding the FA and the growing list of football clubs accountable for the still-emerging failings on their part, and in bringing the stories of survivors to the audience they deserve.

But the stories of why some stories were never stories . . .well, those are some of the most uncomfortably important stories of all.

Guardian Service