Why Charles Saatchi was right to accept a caution
Nigel Williams, 20 June 2013
In his own words, Charles Saatchi accepted a caution at Charing Cross police station because “it was better than the alternative of this hanging over all of us for months”. At a stroke, that caution has signalled that he went beyond acceptable behaviour. If he should ever think in future that holding one’s wife by the throat is an acceptable way to emphasize a point, even with “no grip”, or that putting a hand over her mouth is an acceptable way to refute an opinion, the caution will remind him. Even ‘playful’ is a word of choice for dangerous dog owners and is highly suspect when used to describe a marital tiff. If tears are a sign that someone hates arguing, then it is a strong admonition to argue less
But for all the ill chosen words, the caution stands and is now a matter of record. It allows a wife or partner to know that she is not wrong to object. If the behaviour stops, that is progress. Support groups like Respect help some men to do just that. If the behaviour recurs, the victim is not left wondering whether the fault is somehow hers or whether people will believe her story. Whatever he told the papers, Charles Saatchi’s admission to police has potential to limit the damage.
The same week, Stuart Hall OBE, former presenter of BBC’s It’s A Knockout, received a jail sentence of 15 months for indecent assaults on girls aged 9 to 17. The sentencing judge, Anthony Russell QC remarked “your brazen attitude when first charged and the public protests of your innocence have added to the distress of some if not all of your victims”. A caution would not have been enough for offences of this severity. Indeed requests have already been made to the Attorney General’s office to review whether 15 months is too short a term. Maximum sentences have risen sharply since those offences were committed. Each of his 13 acknowledged victims will have been reminded of traumas they would have preferred to forget every time they saw or heard the broadcaster. His initial reaction was to call the accusations “pernicious, callous, cruel and above all spurious”, wanting the victims to feel that they were in the wrong for objecting to the ill treatment. Only when Hall pleaded guilty was the worst definitely over.
The prevalence of sexual offences and domestic abuse remains high and moreover there are huge concerns about the understandable under-reporting. In 2011/12, the Crime Survey of England and Wales found that 4.2 per cent of women (16 to 59) and 3.0 per cent of men reported non-sexual abuse by their partners in twelve months. For women, this included 1.3 per cent experiencing severe force. 3.0 per cent of women reported attempts or actual sexual assault. Those percentages scale up to half a million assaulted women and over a million abused partners. These are highly sensitive and delicate issues. A charity like Refuge are best placed to offer advice to individuals. This recommendation comes from their advice to men willing to seek help:
“Accept that your partner has a right to live her own life without being dominated and controlled.”