On a Sunday morning, in the carpeted calm of a television studio, a government minister said something that few of her predecessors would have risked: that she could not, with her hand on her heart, promise the public that the abuse was over. Lisa Nandy, Britain's culture secretary, was speaking days after a jury found Russell Brand guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, offences drawn from allegations by several women across a decade, from 1999 to 2009. He is due to be sentenced on Monday. The verdict, Nandy suggested, should be read less as an ending than as a symptom.

"If I had to wager, I would say it is," she said of ongoing abuse, adding that since taking office she has been approached by many people inside the industry, the BBC among them, who say that similar things happened to them. Her diagnosis was structural rather than merely moral: women who come forward, in media as in politics, often find no protection and pay a heavy price, because power is concentrated in a few hands while livelihoods hang on short-term contracts that can quietly go unrenewed. The warning arrived against a darker backdrop. Channel 4 cancelled its reality series Married at First Sight after the BBC revealed rape allegations connected to it, a reminder that the problem is not confined to one famous man or to one era.

Nandy praised the BBC for joining the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority, a body meant to shield whistleblowers, and urged other broadcasters and producers to sign up. The BBC, for its part, said it had made a significant commitment to improving its culture and had set out clear behavioural expectations after an independent review. Yet commitments and codes are easily written; trust is harder to rebuild.