Monday, December 11, 2006

Ipswich Serial Killer. (Updated)

I don't wish to make light of the horrific events happening in East Anglia at the moment, but I just want to put on record a prediction- Before the end of the week at least one column will appear in each of Britain's two left wing 'quality' papers, the Guardian and the Independent, to put forward the idea that these killings are symptomatic of society's misogeny and lack of resources available to 'sex workers'.

Update: The Guardian publishes this piece-
The cost of our callousness

'Serial killer in Suffolk' makes sensational headlines, but the real story is why we make it so easy for men to kill prostitutes.
It even ends with an echo of Dr Heinz Kiosk's refrain "We Are All Guilty!":

Prostitutes get murdered because their lives are held cheap and they are easy to kill. Usually, no one takes much notice. Only when there's talk of a serial killer do people get excited. But the truth is that we're all responsible.
Meanwhile at the Indy Thomas Sutcliffe* adds his thoughts:
The woman whose body was discovered on Sunday just outside the Suffolk town of Nacton didn't remain a woman for very long. By Monday morning that neutral description, the only one available before a proper identification of the body, had been displaced by the term "prostitute" and a subtle demotion in her victimhood had taken place.
Given that the profession of the victims is one of the threads connecting them to each other it cannot be improper to mention it surely.
With any other profession, you might be mildly taken aback by this sense of priority. A murder report that first identified the victim as a traffic warden or a chartered account, and only subsequently got round to telling you whether it was a man or a woman would surely seem mildly perverse in its approach.
If there was a killer who was targeting chartered accountants then it would be bizarre not to report that as a key fact about the victim .

*no relation to Peter Sutcliffe, although the Guardian might get him to pen an article given their history of publishing op eds by Osama Bin Laden and Gerry Adams.

1 comment:

Ross said...

I saw your post on the subject earlier today, and it did remind me of this prediction, although I don't actually disagree with the premise that making something which is always going to exist illegal puts the people who partake in the activity at greater risk.

The illegality of prostitution does make it more dangerous and although you don't specifically mention it, the illegality of drugs helps push some women to prostitution.

The two articles I'm going to link to in an update to the post are more the sort of thing that I was predicting