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Official Secrets Act. James Badenoch is a senior British lawyer who has handled a number of cases
involving the sexual abuse of children.
JAMES BADENOCH: The idea that they were terrorized in the way alleged doesn't surprise me at all.
What surprises me, like so many other citizens of this country, is the idea that people so high up would
have been, A, involved in it and, B, willing to cover it up.
BARKER: Those trying to parse these new allegations of that long-ago abuse speak of a different time
and age of a white, male British elite largely educated at boarding schools where bullies and pedophiles
found fertile ground, of a culture of deference and an establishment that instinctively protected itself.
JON BIRD: So, yeah, I mean, this is all ambitious business plan.
BARKER: Jon Bird helps run the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, or NAPAC.
For decades, he says, its hotline has been hearing from men who say they were abused as children at
Dolphin Square and elsewhere. The few who went to the police at the time got nowhere.
BIRD: The police are now taking it seriously. For years, they didn't. Now they have realized they've had
to look again at all of these old stories.
BARKER: The publicity surrounding the late British DJ Jimmy Savile, posthumously exposed as a
prolific pedophile in 2012, helped open a floodgate. Hundreds of men and women came forward and
continue to come forward to say they were victims. Yesterday's revelations are unlikely to be the last.
Operation Hydrant is among at least 16 police, government and independent inquiries into historical
pedophile abuse now underway in Britain. For NPR News, I'm Vicki Barker in London.
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