Handbook on Sexual Violence (70 page)

A question of definition

The term ‘sexual murder’ potentially includes a wide variety of deadly violence. If sexual murder is defined as all murders which are in some way linked to a sexual motive, then paedophiles who kill children fall within this category. So do the mass rape and murder of women by enemy soldiers

frequently associated with genocide (Maguire 1998). Serial killers who engage in homosexual necrophilia with their victims, such as Dennis Nilsen, clearly belong within this category (Masters 1986). Indeed, the more common forms of murders associated with domestic violence may also include a sexual motive. McNeill (1996), for example, has made a connection between so-called ‘honour killings’, in which husbands kill their unfaithful wives (and in some cases their lovers too) in defence of their honour in non-European cultures, and men in the UK who utilise the infidelity of their wives or girlfriends as both an excuse and defence for killing them.
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The issue of women as perpetrators of sexual murder is periodically debated, most commonly in the wake of an individual (and very rare) high- profile case being uncovered. Such cases typically involve the woman in the role of an accomplice while her male partner is regarded as the main initiator and instigator. While examples of the ‘female serial killer’ operating alone have been identified intermittently throughout history,
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there is little or no evidence to suggest that such women killed to satisfy their sexual desire.
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Even when women take on the role of accomplice in what have been identified as sexual murders, their motives appear more ambivalent, due to their existing relationship with the main male perpetrator of such crimes. One example of such ambivalence can be seen in the case of Myra Hindley, who was found guilty of being Ian Brady’s accomplice in five cases of child murder during the 1960s (Cameron and Frazer 1987: 24). Thompson and Richard, in their study of women’s role in serial killing teams, note that there was ‘no evidence to suggest that Hindley would have committed murder or participated in any serious criminal activity if she had not been in a relationship with Brady . . . Hindley’s role in the murders was solely based upon her relationship with Brady’ (2009: 270).
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Thus, while this
chapter does not seek to deny women’s involvement in sexual murder, it nonetheless maintains that there is no ‘ ‘‘gender equivalence’’ in sexual violence’ (Bourke 2009: ix). Apart from the massive statistical imbalance between the men and women involved in such crimes – for example, ‘men commit 86% of domestic murders’ (Morrison 2008: 22) – the motivations, levels of emotional involvement and indeed physical participation are simply not comparable. This lack of ‘gender equivalence’ can be understood as being linked to women’s subordinate position within a heteropatriarchal social order:

Patriarchy defines reality in masculine terms and women’s worth is identified in relation to her male counterpart – she derives her social status from her relationship with men. When women internalise this ideology, they see their social status as contingent upon their maintenance of relationships with men.

(Thompson and Richard 2009: 273)

Thus, within the context of the male/female sexual murder dyad, women’s involvement in such crimes is frequently linked to misguided attempts to maintain their relationship with their partners. With regard to Hindley, for example, Thompson and Richard argue that ‘she worried Brady would lose

interest in her and seemed willing to do anything to maintain the relationship’ (2009: 270). This is not to imply that Hindley, and other women in similar positions, were not willing participants. On the contrary, overemphasising women as irrational, overemotional and victimised beings ‘rather than responsible agents’ ‘reinforces their inequality, and lack of full citizenship, and hence stands in direct conflict with the feminist struggle for gender equality’ (Ballinger 2008: 50; Morrissey 2003: 25). As Morrissey notes, ‘many portrayals of women who kill depict them as so profoundly victimised that it is difficult to regard them as ever having engaged in an intentional act in their lives’ (2003: 25). Thus, it is important to avoid overgeneralising women’s oppression, and instead take into account the ‘multiple determinants’ utilised by individuals to ‘act upon themselves and order their own lives in numerous and variable ways’ (McNay 1992: 65). Within this context, the analysis adopted here aims to acknowledge ‘the reality of power without presenting woman as eternal victim and insists on the agency of the oppressed without denying the reality of oppression’ (Connell 1987: 149). In other words, while acknowledging female agency within the constraints of heteropatriarchy, the sheer statistical disparity between women and men involved in violent crime and sexual murder should also be recognised. For example, men commit 90 per cent of all violent crime in the UK (
Guardian Weekend
10 December 2005) while ‘nine out of ten women prisoners have been convicted of non-violent offences’ (
Guardian
3 May 2006). With specific regard to sexual violence, it is estimated that 50,000 rapes occur annually in Britain (
New Statesman
18 June 2007), and in the London area alone, gang rapes rose by a third between 2001 and 2002 (
Guardian Weekend
5 June 2004).
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With regard to specific types of sexual murder, for example the killing of

sex workers, at least 60 such women were murdered in the UK between 1992 and 2002, and ‘many more are missing’ (
Guardian
16 September 2002). Indeed, such statistics are mirrored internationally, for example in Canada, where just one man, Robert Pickton, was suspected of having killed 60 prostitutes over two decades, although he eventually stood trial for ‘only’ 27 of these murders (
Guardian
5 August 2005). Moreover:

Women who sell sex in the UK have standardised mortality rates six times higher than the general population, the highest for any group of women; they are 18 times more likely to be murdered ... 54% of women in the sex industry have suffered violence and 34% have been raped.

(Smith 2008)

Once again, the lack of ‘gender equivalence’ hardly needs stating. Rather, it is statistics such as these which ensure that no further justification is necessary for concentrating on the subject of sexual murder committed by men against women in the remainder of this
chapter. More specifically, these statistics also justify a particular focus on murders involving sex workers.

As with violence towards women in general, violence towards prostitute women in particular also has a long history, as exemplified by the case of Jack the Ripper, who killed five prostitutes in 1888, and the Peter Sutcliffe case which concluded in 1981 when he was convicted of murdering 13 women and

injuring another seven. In the aftermath of the Sutcliffe case, a number of authors developed feminist analyses of the gendered nature of sexual murder. Thus, apart from Kelly’s book
Surviving Sexual Violence
, other important works were also published during the period 1987–1992, which sought to theorise sexual violence and murder. It is to these works this
chapter now turns.

Killing for pleasure

The fact that sexual killers are without exception male has attracted no sustained discussion that we are aware of. Some writers manage to leave it out completely, while others, implicitly recognising it, nevertheless treat it as totally natural and unproblematic. For a feminist, of course, it is neither of those things. It is a fact about our culture that cries out for explanation.

(Cameron and Frazer 1987: 30)

Cameron and Frazer opened their book
The Lust to Kill
by stating, ‘we regard ourselves as seeking out not objective truth, but rather an alternative interpretation of the world’ (1987: xi). True to their word, they went on to produce a sophisticated, and arguably underrated, analysis of sexual murder which placed gender at the forefront of their thesis when they maintained that, far from being an aberration, sexual violence is characterised by its normality, albeit at the extreme end on the continuum of ‘ordinary’ masculinity.

Similarly, Caputi introduced her book
The Age of Sex Crime
, published a year later, by promising ‘to provide a political analysis and demythicization of this most extreme form of patriarchal violence’ (1988: Preface). Together with Smith’s
Misogynies
(1989) and Radford and Russell’s edited collection
Femicide
(1992), these books provided a powerful challenge to traditional, androcentric accounts of violence against women – built on feminist theory, method and epistemology.

Caputi identified the persona of Jack the Ripper as instigating the
type
of killer closely associated with sexual murder (1988: 12). In between killing and mutilating five women in the Whitechapel district of London in 1888, he is assumed to be the author of letters sent to the Metropolitan police which allowed him to be characterised as a man of ‘irony and wit . . .a stylish and likeable rogue . . .rather than the repulsive and lethal misogynist his actions reveal him to be’ (Caputi 1988: 21). He has subsequently been described as ‘the hero of horrors in Victorian times’ (Caputi 1988: 50), thereby illustrating an important discourse within androcentric and misogynistic culture – the murderer as hero – signifying the admiration and celebration frequently surrounding serial killers in both the UK and USA (Caputi 1988: 50–62; Cameron 1992: 186–7).

Smith added another important strand to the history of sexual murder when she identified the film
Psycho
as the first to market ‘female fear as a commodity’:

In 1960, the shower scene in Hitchcock’s
Psycho
. . .shocked audiences who had never seen anything like it on their cinema screens; today such scenes are ten a penny. Terror, torture, rape, mutilation and murder are handed out to actresses by respectable directors as routinely as tickets to passengers on a bus. No longer the stock in trade only of pornographers and video-nasty producers, they can be purchased any day at a cinema near you.

(1989: 16)

The move from the porn industry to mainstream cinema of the sexualisation of violence had begun, with the consequence that acts of sexual violence had also been moved ‘from the sphere of solitary, unadmitted fantasy into the domain of shared experience’:

The viewer is no longer alone, those acts which he may have imagined privately, perhaps with a degree of shame, have also been visualised by the screenwriter, the director, the special effects man, and the hundreds of other people involved in the making of a film. And here, sitting in the seats that stretch in front and behind, are dozens of other men who have, like him, paid money to see them.

(Smith 1989: 18)

Smith had thus identified the historical context to the massive expansion of the sex industry which has taken place during recent decades and which, in turn, has brought with it a corresponding increase in the sexualisation of popular culture (Smith 2008; Walter 2010). By implication, she had therefore also provided historical context for the association between sex and violence which, supported by the porn industry, has entered a hitherto unprecedented symbiotic relationship during recent decades (Walter 2010: 102–18).

Radford and Russell termed their edited collection
Femicide
‘an anthology on the politics of woman killing’ (1992: xiii). The collection focuses on six important themes within misogynist killing: the history of femicide; the private sphere as a more dangerous place for women than the public sphere; an understanding of femicide as crossing the boundaries of ‘race, class and culture’, hence, it cannot be confined to any one group or nation; media representations of femicide; the criminal justice system’s response to femicide; and the way in which feminist activism plays a crucial role in organising challenges to this crime (1992: xi–xii).

Radford stated that ‘one purpose of this anthology has been to name femicide and to identify it as an urgent issue for feminists and others concerned with violence against women’ (1992: 351). It did much more than that, demonstrating that this crime is ‘as old as patriarchy itself’ (1992: 25); that far from being ‘unusual and isolated incidents, [femicides are] a recurring expression of male sexual violence’; that woman-blaming explanations for this crime are used so frequently ‘that they have become a credible part of mainstream discourse, even encoded in law’; that the state has failed and continues to fail to protect women from femicide; and that media representations of the perpetrators of this crime as psychopaths or ‘mad

beasts’ (1992: 352) ‘masks the sexual politics of femicide’(1992: 4).

Thus, taken together, apart from placing the crime of sexual murder within its historical context, and exposing the ‘transgressive hero’ status of its proponents within a misogynistic culture, these authors had identified a number of other key themes relevant to this subject, including the normalisation and acceptance of sexual violence against women generally and prostitute women in particular; the emphasis on explanations of sexual murder which focus on the pathology of individual offenders to the detriment of the wider culture of masculinity and phallocentricity; and the prevalence of woman-blaming explanations involving significant women in the life of the offender such as mother, wife or the victim herself.

In contrast to the commonsensical comparisons made between Jack the Ripper and the so-called Yorkshire Ripper in true crime literature and the media, these early works presented a feminist challenge to populist representations of sex killers which made a major contribution to gender analyses, as will become apparent in the following
section, where the relevance of these key themes is illustrated through the case study of Peter Sutcliffe.

‘Normal’ men, ‘normal’ violence: early feminist analysis of sexual murder

The murderer is different from other human beings only in degree and not in kind.

(Cameron and Frazer 1987: 64)

Is this violence really aberrant, or is it somehow in tune with the workings of our society?

(Cameron and Frazer 1987: 32)

A key aspect of early feminist analysis of sexual murderers was the challenge to mythical stereotypes of the ‘sex-beast’ or ‘psychopath’ who is pathologically driven to commit exceptionally violent and gruesome murders; or, alternatively, ‘the loner’, likely to live with an elderly relative, as suggested by police during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (Smith 2008). The firmly (but wrongly) held belief that the sexual murderer is recognisable from the outside, showing visible signs of his wickedness, and hence stands out as a result of his
difference
to other men, has repeatedly proved to be inaccurate. In relation to the Sutcliffe case, for example, Smith commented:

One of the chief ironies of the whole Yorkshire Ripper case is that the police spent millions of pounds fruitlessly searching for an outsider when the culprit was just an ordinary bloke, a local man who shared their background and attitudes to a remarkable degree.

(1989: 124)

Similarly, Bland observed:

Sutcliffe, rather than being the loner of the Ripper myth, was a man who was regularly immersed in a normal male culture of drinking, prostitution and violence.

(1992: 251)

Caputi too noted that ‘the actual man, Sutcliffe, clashed utterly with the image of the Ripper that had been so pervasively and unforgettably projected’ (1988: 44). Instead, it was ‘his very ordinariness’ which fooled police nine times (Bland 1992: 250). Thus, feminist theorists were able to demonstrate that ‘the enormously powerful popular stereotype’ of serial killers and/or sexual murderers as ‘monsters’ or beasts who have nothing in common with ‘ordinary’ men plays an important role in the maintenance of the heteropatriarchal social order, because it serves to draw attention away from the gendered aspect of such crimes, and instead ‘obscures the phenomenon it appears to be explaining’ by ignoring the fact that the ‘beast’ is inevitably
male
(Cameron and Frazer 1987: 35, original emphasis).

Not only did Sutcliffe turn out to represent all the key aspects of ‘normal’ manhood by being ‘a married man living in a semi-detached house in a good suburb’ and in full-time employment (Smith 1989: 188), he also engaged in culturally normalised levels of violence against women regularly – another theme identified by feminists in their analysis of sexual murder. Contemporary statistics such as those cited in the introduction, demonstrate this normalisation of violence against women. This was as true three decades ago as it is today. For example, 12,505 attacks on women were reported in London in 1981. Taking under-reporting into account, the actual number of attacks suffered by women annually in the capital alone was estimated at 50,000 (Smith in Bland 1992: 251). As noted earlier, such statistics increase up to 18 times where prostitute women are concerned. Once again, the Sutcliffe case exemplifies the validity of these statistics since, long before he began killing women, he appears to have considered them fair game for casual, apparently unproblematic violent assaults, as can be seen from his friend Trevor Birdsall’s recollection of one such attack:

He had a sock and I think there was a small brick or stone in it . . .I think [he said] he hit her on the head . . .But Peter never showed any hostility to prostitutes and there was nothing unusual in his attitude towards them.

(Bland 1992: 251)

In short, engaging in casual violence against sex workers did not make him ‘the monster the police sought. It actually made him an admirable exponent of social values.’ As such, ‘far from ‘‘deviating from the norm’’, Sutcliffe was an exaggeration of it’ (Bland 1992: 252). So normal in fact were both his attitude towards women, and engagement in violence against them, that they were openly shared by various sections of the male population. For example, the police officers working on the case ‘made the same distinction between ‘‘respectable’’ women and prostitutes’ as Sutcliffe did, encapsulated by the infamous statement by Assistant Police Chief Constable, Jim Hobson:

He has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls. That indicates your mental state and that you are in urgent need of medical attention. You have made your point. Give yourself up before another innocent woman dies.

(Caputi 1988: 93–4)

As Caputi notes, ‘from such official statements we learn that it is normal to hate prostitutes. The killer is even assured of solidarity in this emotion.’ Only when he starts killing non-prostitutes is his behaviour regarded as problematic. Furthermore, the murderer’s motives and actions are matter-of- factly aligned ‘to larger social interests as well as police goals’ (1988: 94), again emphasising the existence of shared values between a sex killer and the wider non-criminal male population.

Further evidence of the shared ‘moral standards’ between a notorious serial killer and ‘normal’ men is demonstrated by a male journalist who wrote in 1981:

It is the main grief work for the families of Jack’s non-professional victims to try to understand how their girls came under this man’s hands. By having the same killer as the prostitutes, their daughters have somehow been tainted.

(Martin in Caputi 1988: 94–5)

A final example of the prevalence of misogynistic attitudes within the entire male population demonstrates not only the acceptance, indeed approval, of violence against prostitutes, but also one of the themes identified by feminists

- the sexual murderer as a ‘hero’ to be admired and celebrated. When the police attempted to play a tape sent to them – supposedly from the ‘Ripper’ – over the Leeds United football ground’s loudspeakers, ‘it was drowned out with chants from fans of You’ll never catch the Ripper. 12 nil! 12 nil!’ (Bland 1992: 239).
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In order to explain this fratriarchy
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between Peter Sutcliffe – a sexual serial killer who terrorised women for several years – and ‘ordinary’ men, including the police officers working on his case, feminist theorists increasingly paid attention to the wider culture of masculinity within their theoretical framework. In the following
section I elaborate upon this framework.
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Theorising sexual murder

While the focus of this
chapter so far has been on authors who specifically analysed the subject of sexual murder, a number of other authors were producing wider forms of gender analyses during the period 1987–1992 which were to become extremely influential for decades to come. Among these were Connell’s
Gender and Power
(1987) and Smart’s
Feminism and the Power of Law
(1989). By fusing the work of these authors with the analysis provided by the authors already under discussion, a gendered analysis emerges which

challenges populist representations of individual sexual murderers as ‘monsters’ or ‘beasts’, and instead provides a wider context which takes heteropatriarchy and phallocentrism into account.