Bindel and Bennett on attitudes to the Ipswich murders
I'm sure that by now the Ipswich murders are known far beyond the UK – for those who have not heard, five young prostitutes have gone missing from the red light district of Ipswich in the last few weeks, of which four have been found murdered in rural areas around the town, while a fifth body is awaiting identification as I write this. The tabloid press has dubbed the person responsible, yet to be caught, the "Suffolk strangler", and the case bears some resemblance to that of the notorious Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliffe), who killed 13 women, mostly in the Leeds-Bradford area of northern England, in the 1970s and early 1980s, except for the fact that Sutcliffe did not kill as many women in anything like as short a time. Julie Bindel, the noted lesbian and feminist activist, wrote this article in yesterday's Guardian, claiming that the response to the Ipswich murders shows that nothing much has changed since the 1970s:
Once it came to light that there was potentially a serial killer stalking the streets, though, the tabloid press started having a field day. Over the past few days front-page headlines have included "Ripper", and "Vice Girls Missing", accompanied by the usual photographs of women in mini-skirts peering into cars on deserted streets.
And when police gave a press conference after Alderton's body was discovered, advising women to "stay off the streets. If you are out alone at night, you are putting yourself in danger", we could have been right back in 1977, when police effectively put a curfew on women during Sutcliffe's killing spree. In issuing that curfew, women in West Yorkshire were made to feel responsible for preventing male violence, just as women in Ipswich are now. "It makes us feel as if we are to blame," one street prostitute in Ipswich noted on the news yesterday, "but it's him who is making the streets dangerous – not us."
Catherine Bennett, another feminist, writes in today's (Thursday's) Guardian in a similar vein, with some amusing observations on the banal conclusions of some of the "experts" hired by the tabloids, including a so-called real-life Cracker (that's Fitz to US readers; example: "he probably used local knowledge to conceal the bodies before dumping two of them in a stream"), but generally voicing similar whines to Bindel about how much of the writing dehumanises the victims. One such example is a "behavioural investigative analyst" who told the Today programme on Radio 4 that he thought the murderer "has been targeting prostitutes rather than women", an obvious slip of the tongue; "prostitutes in particular, rather than women in general" is likely to be what he meant), but clearly this doesn't fit with Bennett's preconceptions – that people think the prostitutes are trash, less human and less deserving of sympathy than other women.
The facts suggest that an awful lot has changed in people's attitudes since the early 1980s. It's well-known that the police investigation into the Yorkshire murders was beset by contempt for Sutcliffe's prostitute victims and that they allowed themselves to be led astray by the notorious hoaxer, John Humble AKA "Wearside Jack", who sent tapes to the police claiming he was "Jack" (the Ripper) and that they would never find him, despite one of the surviving victims telling the police that the attacker was local and not from Wearside at all. The reaction of some local men to the ripper was amusement, some even boasting about his exploits in football chants – but then, tragic deaths and murders often inspire jokes. What does "Diana" stand for? (Died In A Nasty Accident.) What's the difference between a Dando and a dodo? (One's an extinct bird found on tropical islands; the other … oh, is the same. The reference is to Jill Dando, the presenter of the BBC's Crimewatch and holiday programmes, who was murdered in 1999.)
Yet this time round, much of the coverage suggests that people saw the prostitutes as human beings, not as dirt or scum, and the murders as heinous crimes by someone the public needs off the streets right now. Much has been made of the fact that the women had families who loved them, even if some of their relationships had broken down somewhat; the Independent reported yesterday that the small group of women are known to the local community, particularly the bus drivers, whose depot is nearby, who "offer them tea on cold nights". One of them said of the prostitutes, "they are just friendly, pleasant girls doing their job, a strange job but a job nevertheless". Despite the conservative nature of society there, a writer for the Times yesterday noted that locals' revulsion for the murders outweighs any censuriousness they might have towards the victims and their "profession".
Of course, if the killings continue, each new one is not going to become headline news. As Bindel notes, prostitutes "often turn up dead"; it's an inherently dangerous way of making money, particularly if you get into men's cars (getting into a stranger's car is dangerous for anyone, particularly a woman). A few years ago a truck driver was killed when some local lout threw a heavy object at his windscreen as he approached on the M3 motorway in Surrey; this did make headline news, as it's not at all a common occurrence. If it were, yet another such fatality would have a much lower profile, unless there was a spate of such attacks over a relatively short period, which might indicate that there was a serial killer targeting truck drivers in that area. The second and third attacks, which tell us that this a mass murderer, are headline news; the fifteenth and sixteenth often are not. That's life.
