ABSTRACT
This chapter explores on how celebrity culture and institutions have acted as a protective 'bubble' around a number of very-high-profile male public figures. It mainly focuses on the sexual abuse of women and girls, though this is not meant to deny in any way the abuse by Savile faced by men and boys. In particular, the HMIC review was tasked with looking explicitly at which police forces received reports at the time regarding Savile or other men investigated by Operation Yewtree, whether any such allegations were robustly investigated and whether police failings were evident. Labelling Savile and the other Yewtree offenders as institutional child abusers is to divorce sexist culture from sex offending, and to view the problem solely as one of child abuse rather than one of gender inequalities. Institutional sexism within large institutions, and the overlaps this has with sexual harassment, needs to be brought back into the picture in order to understand sex offending within institutions.
