Everyone Heard. Nobody Said a Word.

Every one of these stories ends the same way.

An inquiry. An apology. And one sentence, give or take a few words, that turns up in report after report.

Concerns were not properly escalated.

That's what the production company found when it looked at worries raised about Russell Brand in the mid 2000s. The BBC's own review found staff who believed he would always get his way, so they stayed silent. Channel 4 found that a member of staff had made a serious allegation in 2009 that was never properly investigated or passed up the chain.

Brand is in prison now. This isn't about him.

It's about the room around him.

The clearest example is still the oldest one. Jimmy Savile.

When Dame Janet Smith finished her review for the BBC in 2016, she had identified 72 victims connected to his work there. Eight of them were raped. The youngest was 8. Eight complaints had reached BBC staff, starting in the late 1960s. Every one was brushed off or went nowhere. Girls who complained were treated as a nuisance.

Here's the part people forget. The review cleared the BBC as a corporate body of knowing. No senior manager knew.

At the same time, 117 witnesses told the review they'd heard the rumours.

Nobody at the top knew. Over a hundred people below them did.

That isn't a contradiction. It's the design.

Not knowing at the top isn't an accident. It's a structure. It's what you get when everyone who hears something has a reason to keep it to themselves. The star brings in the money. The boss doesn't want the problem. The junior who speaks up is the one who loses their job. Dame Janet put it plainly: some staff were more worried about reputation than the safety of children.

If you think that's a 1970s problem, look at 2023.

In May that year, a family complained to the BBC about Huw Edwards. In November, the BBC was told he'd been arrested over indecent images of children, the most serious category. It kept paying him. He was on full pay of around £475,000 a year, and more than £200,000 of it landed after the arrest.

To be fair to the BBC, it says the police asked it to keep the arrest confidential, and it had been told there was a risk to his health. Paying suspended staff in full is normal policy.

That's exactly my point. The policy worked as written. And the first thing it protected was the star's pay cheque.

It isn't just telly.

In 1982, a report landed on the desks of the people running Christian summer camps. It was about John Smyth, a barrister who had been brutally abusing boys. The Makin Review later found that the people who received it took part in an active cover up. Smyth moved to Africa and carried on. By 2013 the Church of England knew about him at the highest level, and the review concluded he might have been brought to justice if the authorities had been formally told. It took an Archbishop of Canterbury resigning for anyone at the top to feel it.

At Harrods, hundreds of women have come forward with allegations against Mohamed Al Fayed, who died without ever facing a trial. One former employee says that when she tried to report him, a manager told her to get on with it, because she knew what he was like. The store's new owners now describe that era as one of secrecy, intimidation and abuse.

Then there's the other half of the machine. Us.

Rolf Harris was in our living rooms for decades. No inquiry has found that anyone covered for him. Nobody needed to. In 2014 he was convicted of indecent assaults on four victims, the youngest seven or eight. A whole country loved him, and that love was its own kind of cover. Fame makes people doubt their own eyes. If everyone adores him, the problem must be you.

So are the organisations as bad as the men?

Here's where I land. The abuser commits the act. The institution is what turns one act into fifty. Every time a complaint goes nowhere, somebody has decided, quietly, that it can happen again. And it does.

It also does damage of its own. The psychologist Jennifer Freyd calls it institutional betrayal. In one study of 345 young women, those who felt let down by the institution around an assault had worse anxiety and trauma symptoms than those who didn't. The abuser hurts you once. The place you trusted to protect you hurts you again.

It isn't the same crime. It's the same victim, injured twice.

Let me be blunt, because some people still need it said. There is no place for this. Not in the BBC, not in a church, not in a shop, not in a changing room. No amount of fame, money or talent buys an exception.

And spare me the line that it was a different era. It was never acceptable. Most of what these men did was already a crime at the time. What's different now is that nobody gets to pretend they didn't know. "It was a different time" isn't an explanation. It's the cover up, still running, decades later.

Stamping it out won't come from another inquiry or another apology. We've had plenty of both. It comes when the people in the room stop carrying the secret.

There are more of these stories coming. One involves a well known man the courts won't yet let anyone name. When the next name lands, everyone will argue about him. Is he guilty? Is it a stitch up? Can you still watch his stuff?

That's the wrong argument. The better question is who knew, and why they kept quiet.

And then ask yourself the same thing, because I had to.

The warnings started before I was a teenager. Growing up, there was always someone. A man in the area the other kids warned you about. Stay away from him. He's dangerous. He's a nonce. My mum said. My dad said. I didn't even know what the word meant. I just knew to keep my distance, the way you know not to touch a hot hob. I never found out if any of it was true either.

Then, at college, I rowed. I was the new boy on the team. Within weeks the older lads had told me two things about our coach. He was a pervert. And never, ever get a lift in his car. He went after young boys, they said.

He never did anything to me. I don't know what was true and what was teenage gossip. That's the point. Nobody ever found out, because nobody ever asked. It was passed around as common knowledge, handed down to every new boy like kit, and nobody did a thing about it.

Look at what the warning system actually was, both times. A whisper. On the street, then in the boathouse. On the street, the parents knew enough to warn their own children, and as far as I ever knew, that's where it stopped. In the boathouse, it was just us. Either way, the kids were left to keep each other safe, with no power and no idea who to tell.

I don't blame us. We were young. But I'm not young now, and neither are you.

Most men reading this will never be Savile. Plenty of us will be the bloke in the corridor who heard something. The machine doesn't run on monsters. It runs on ordinary men keeping their heads down, telling themselves it isn't their business, waiting for someone more senior to deal with it.

Here's the joke. The people above you are waiting too. Everyone in the building is waiting for someone else to go first.

So next time you hear it, don't pass it on as a joke or a warning. Write down what you heard, when, and from whom. Then take it one level higher than feels comfortable. If a child might be involved, take it outside the building. The NSPCC exists for exactly this.

You don't have to know it's true. Finding out isn't your job. Making sure someone has to find out is.

Everyone heard. Nobody said a word.

Be the one who does.

If you're worried about a child, the NSPCC helpline is on 0808 800 5000. If you were abused as a child, NAPAC's free, confidential support line is on 0808 801 0331, or at napac.org.uk.