A report conducted by police and the NSPCC, released on the 11th of January, revealed the full extent of Jimmy Savile’s sexual abuse over a period of 50 years. The late BBC presenter committed 214 crimes including 34 of rape or penetration, many of which were on children. Such incredible figures have prompted the public and media to label Savile as a vile animal, as someone who should be permanently erased from the public memory for actions which can only be described as opportunistic, heartless and disgusting.

It is undoubtedly true that Savile’s actions were horrific, and that his victims must have gone through unimaginable distress and suffering. Nobody disagrees with the fact that it was ridiculous that he was able to get away with what he did for so long, and that serious investigations are absolutely necessary to determine quite how this was possible. To stop at this point, though, at which we conclude that Savile was a sick criminal who should have been stopped much earlier, does not make any attempt to determine quite why Savile acted in the way he did, and what caused his savage crimes.

The media’s view of Savile is that he was simply a bad egg, an innately vicious person whose actions prove his evil nature. This is in line with much of the media’s view of crime in general: it is caused by savage beings who should be locked up and kept away from moral people who are able to obey the law.  It is important, though, to distinguish between a person and their actions: crime is never just a product of somebody’s innate nature, and is always heavily influenced by environmental factors such as family upbringing and economic situation.

In attempting to build a greater platform of knowledge on the causes of crime, therefore, society must go further than simply bash criminals as vile animals. Labeling Savile as a bad egg is unhelpful if a broader and more sophisticated understanding is to be had.

In his book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains how molesters have an inability to feel empathy for their victim’s feelings, and instead project their own fantasies of a cooperative child onto those that they abuse. These fantasies stem from a loneliness and depression caused by their real-world experiences. Goleman states that these empathic defects could have a biological component (such as a disconnection between the verbal cortex, which recognises words, and the limbic centre, which processes their emotional meanings), as well as significant environmental influences, such as the way someone was treated by their parents as a child: harsh punishments and beatings result in children showing a similar lack of empathy towards their classmates. We could then argue about why their parents treated them like this: is this just a cycle of bad parenting, or are there wider social and economic reasons?

These are just some potential causes of empathic deficits, which molesters are likely to possess in extreme portions. Savile may  or may not have suffered from these exact problems, but what is certain is that he would have had at least some form of emotional difficulty; he was clearly not a settled being at peace with the world, and the reason for this was not as simple as being innately and irredeemably vile. Goleman highlights some successful rehabilitation programmes for molesters, in which the abuser is asked to write down what they think their victims were feeling at the time of the crime, and to watch back videotapes of crimes like their own from the victims’ perspective. The crucial point to make is that molesters are not necessarily innately bad people who society should automatically shun, but individuals who are capable of being reformed, and of overcoming the emotional difficulties with which they are struggling.  

The “bad egg” explanation fails to grasp the complexity of crime, and makes no attempt to gain a greater understanding of possible causes of abusive behaviour in the way that Goleman’s book (among many others) does. When Boris Johnson responded to the 2011 summer riots by fiercely arguing that “we’ve heard far too much of the sociology of this,” he was neglecting the chance to have a serious and insightful debate about the potential social and economic reasons for the violence – poverty, increasing inequality, police relations (and, according to some, single-parent families.) This is the typical stance of the right-wing press.

As a society we must move on from primitive explanations of crime which label criminals as innately vicious thugs who should be locked away forever, and attempt to understand quite why a tiny minority of individuals act in abusive and violent ways. The “bad egg” explanation of Jimmy Savile’s molestations is an unhelpful one, which misses the underlying influences on such actions.  Of course, sexual abuse is always vile and disgusting, but Savile’s reign of terror was not a forgone conclusion of his birth.