Sex is in the spotlight, so let's talk about it properly

Our collective failure to articulate what is exploitative and what isn't means every sex claim becomes a carnival
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Illustration by Matt Kenyon

What is a sex claim? It's such a weird term. The sex claims against Chris Rennard are that he touched women inappropriately and then importuned them to carry on their conversation back in his room. Inappropriate is also a weird term. Used by the women in this case, it means touching anyone, anywhere, with whom you do not have a prior touching agreement. Used of Cardinal O'Brien, against whom sex claims have also been made recently, it means something more – nobody knows what.

Hunt for detail, and you will just find more broad concepts with the word "inappropriate" attached to them: "inappropriate behaviour"; "inappropriate approaches"; "inappropriate contact". But we know it is related to sex because nobody leaves their job – never mind recuses themselves from voting for the next pope – because they turned up to a black-tie party in a lounge suit.

The "sex claims" against Jimmy Savile, meanwhile, range from touching young women on the shoulder to raping children and abusing coma patients. It is a curious squeamishness that insists on the terminology "sex claim" when what you're actually talking about is child rape.

As much as it is sex, the running theme of these scandals is the imbalance of power. The women who accuse Rennard were generally on a training weekend, or some other entry point of the Liberal Democrat machine, in which Rennard was kingpin. One ex-priest accusing Cardinal O'Brien said: "You have to understand the relationship between a bishop and a priest. At your ordination, you take a vow to be obedient to him … he has immense power over you. He can move you, freeze you out, bring you into the fold … he controls every aspect of your life. You can't just kick him in the balls." Jimmy Savile was a celebrity, and the potency of that needs no elaboration.

These cases are all drawn together by the umbrella of their shared language, and the injustice as their core – the attempt to leverage professional power in a sexual transaction which, if successful, turns all workplaces into de facto brothels. But even with as much innuendo and as little detail as we have, we can plainly see that these cases are not the same. If you elide all these things – the suggestion of sex, with a suggestion of sex that carries a threat of dismissal or "freezing out", with a physical threat of sex, with the act of rape, with the act of paedophile rape – if you roll these things into one big "sex claim", you render it all meaningless. It is insulting to everybody who's ever been a victim at any point on that spectrum because it suggests that it's not important enough to dissect properly.

Jon Snow called this our watershed moment; we'll look back and pinpoint these last four months as the time people started talking openly about sexual abuse and harassment. But it takes more than a welter of undesirable actions, unconnected, undifferentiated, randomly revealed, to mark a genuine transition from mass denial to mature acceptance.

First, when information tumbles out without distinction, and when sex claims are alluded to but not demarcated, it's because nobody is prepared to say what's wrong and what isn't. If the moral questions here were all about the act of sex itself, they would be really easy to adjudicate – most people have no trouble defining rape.

But harassment is not as simple as "no man can ever make a move on any woman he works with". A lot of couples meet at work; in many cases the man is senior to the woman. A lot of couples get it on without agreeing it in writing first, as a result of one of them touching the other inappropriately. What we understand to be dodgy is not in the act itself but in the context of the act: would person A have a chance in hell with person B were he not her boss? Did person A only fondle person B or also persons C to Z? Can person A differentiate between one letter and another, or is any hole a goal for person A? These questions are easy to answer but very difficult to be seen asking as an institution. Instead, the "professional" course is to pretend to frown on any hint of sex, which in practice means that, if it is hinted at, you ignore it. Institutions, then, do nothing: they don't inquire within, so they don't get to the point where they can make distinctions; and when they are forced by raw testimony to inquire within, they cover up the answers.

We pick over the command structures of the BBC and the church and now, doubtless, the Lib Dems, like hyenas, looking for the person whose final responsibility it would have been to have spoken out. But it's fruitless. This isn't a single person's failing. This is a collective failure to articulate what's exploitative and what isn't.

News shouts "fire" over everything, but only two types of scandal will ignite – the thing that's happening everywhere yet nobody knows (horsemeat), and the thing that's happening everywhere and everybody knows (sexual harassment of women). The newsworthy thing about the second type of scandal is not the event itself but its transformation from unremarked to remarkable.

It's been given legs by the carnival of chaos – the cover-ups, the gory details, the institutional hypocrisy, the sight of respectable, powerful people, resigning and flapping and making ridiculous, arse-covering statements that try to tease out an imaginary difference between "knowing" about something and "being aware of it". But it is just a carnival, and as such, will have no lasting effect; it will simply end, leaving nothing but shamed faces and empty cans.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams

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