Handbook on Sexual Violence (72 page)

‘‘prostitutes’’ had been murdered’, there was public outrage, suggesting a change in attitude towards women working in the sex industry (Smith 2008). In relation to the key themes discussed above, however, there is little or no indication of such positive change. Thus, just as Sutcliffe had turned out to be ‘an ordinary bloke’, so Wright was described ‘as quiet and unassuming, inhabiting a world that . . . revolved around his local pub and golf course. He was ‘‘a good bloke’’, and the police were as surprised as anyone when his DNA led straight to him’ (Smith 2008). This was reiterated by his former friend who described Wright as a ‘nice, lovely guy . . . We drink together, play golf together, go on holiday together. It’s unbelievable – I’ve known him for years’

(Harrison and Wilson 2008: 199).

Descriptions such as these demonstrate the durability and continuing relevance of the insistence by early feminists that, far from deviating from normal masculinity, the sexual killer is an exaggeration of it. Indeed, the impact of this argument has secured its absorption into mainstream discourse as illustrated by forensic psychologist David Canter’s observation that men who commit violence against sex workers ‘are not an unusual sample of the population . . . [but] can include senior army officers, businessmen, doctors, pillars of the community’. Similarly, Britton, another psychologist, notes ‘that the majority of men who murder prostitutes are ordinary and mundane . . . ’ (cited in O’Kane 2002).

The enlightened opinions of these experts have, however, failed to make an impact upon woman-blaming explanations of such crimes. Wright’s murderous acts have been blamed on his mother, who left the family when he was a child, supposedly leaving him ‘in perpetual search of a mother figure’ (Cochrane 2008). Little attention was paid to the wider context of his father’s exaggerated masculinity which meant ‘that the marriage was violent and that Wright was afraid of [him]’ (Smith 2008). His crimes were also blamed on his partner who ‘emerges as an older partner no longer interested in sex, and who is therefore presented as a reason why Wright chooses to buy sex from younger women’ (Harrison and Wilson 2008: 253).

Far from being confined to the Wright case, such woman-blaming explanations for extreme forms of male violence are as common in the twenty- first century as they were during the twentieth century, as exemplified in the cases of Mark Dixie and Levi Bellfield. Dixie, who was found guilty of five sex offences and the rape and murder of Anne Bowman, had been abandoned by his mother ‘outside a care home when he was 12’. Bellfield, convicted of the murders of Marsha McDonnell, Ame´lie Delagrange and Millie Dowler as well as the attempted murder of Kate Sneedy, and a suspect in 20 other unsolved crimes against women, ‘including five rapes’, had a mother who was ‘a ‘‘strong-willed matriarch’’, and her ‘close relationship with him . . . contributed to his psychiatric problems’ (Cochrane 2008).

Such examples illustrate how woman-blaming explanations for male violence continue to serve an important function in the twenty-first century, by distracting attention away from, and mystifying, the inherently misogynistic personalities and attitudes of its perpetrators. Wright, for example, had a long history of domestic violence against his ex-wife, including banging ‘her head against a wall as punishment for folding some sheets’

incorrectly, suggesting that his violent father may have had considerably more influence over his future criminality than his absent mother. Bellfield believed that ‘girls who dyed their hair blonde were ‘‘impure sluts’’, who ‘‘deserved to be messed around with.’’ ’ That misogyny was taken as a given within the culture in which these sexual killers operated is illustrated by the fact that, ‘without fear of redress or chastisement’, Bellfield could boast to his friends ‘he had shaved himself from top to toe to ensure he didn’t leave any DNA behind at the crime scene’ (Cochrane in 2008). Rather than indicating a reduction in misogynistic attitudes in the twenty-first century, such statements would appear to be on the same continuum as the chanting by football fans in the 1970s, outlined above.

That such woman-blaming explanations continue to flourish suggests the fratriarchy between sex killers and ‘ordinary’ men is alive and well, and that criminal and non-criminal men still stand on the same terrain of hegemonic masculinity within a wider culture of misogyny. This claim is supported by both general observations relating to the law and the criminal justice system as well as individual cases processed through that system.
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For example, that same culture bears witness to the fact that ‘only 5.3% of rape cases ends in a conviction or that one in five women are abused in childhood . . . [which] mostly . . . goes unpunished’ (Cochrane 2009).

How are we to account for this stubborn persistence of male fratriarchy and cultural misogyny a decade into the twenty-first century, despite the fact that ‘women have undoubtedly benefited from greater economic, civil and political freedom’ since the 1970s, when Peter Sutcliffe was at large? (McNay 2004: 171). In an attempt to explain this persistence I shall conclude by returning to one of the themes identified by early feminist theorists – the normalisation of violence against women.

Conclusion

The world has caught up with me and surpassed me. Ninety years ago I was a freak ... now I’m an amateur.

(fictional Ripper in
Time after Time
, cited in Caputi 1988: 29)

In 1988 Liz Kelly wrote:

The increasing entry of women into the public sphere of work and the revival of feminist campaigning for sexual equality has undoubtedly been accompanied by an increased public sexualisation of women throughout the mass media. Several feminist researchers have suggested that increasing demands from women for greater autonomy and equality will increase sexual violence in the short-term as men attempt to reassert their dominance.

(1988: 30)

While even Kelly may have underestimated the massive intensification in the sexualisation of mainstream culture, and with it a huge expansion of the sex

industry in the twenty-first century, her words were nonetheless apt and prophetic, because a key discourse within this intensification and expansion has been the portrayal of ‘the sexual act in violent terms’ – reflected at its most basic level in the language utilised to describe it – ‘as a matter of banging, drilling, ramming, pounding and thrashing’ (Morrison 2008). Similarly, albeit in reverse order, the ‘portrayal of violence is now often laced with either explicit sex or sexual innuendo, making aggression seem an intrinsic part of the erotic experience’ (Cluff
et al
. 1997: 301).

These developments have not only confirmed but also cemented the

normalisation of violence against women identified by early feminist writers. Arguably, the biggest change which has taken place since the 1970s is the colossal expansion in information technology – particularly the arrival of the Internet, which has rendered campaigns and protests against pornographic images in the public sphere almost meaningless, since the entire range from soft to hard-core porn can now be delivered directly ‘to everyone’s desk’ (Walter 2010: 102). Put simply, the Internet has enabled a massive expansion in, and normalisation of, the porn industry which in turn has, arguably, made the biggest single contribution to the increasing sexualisation of popular culture and wider social relationships. That sexualisation is both inspired and informed by porn and can be understood as operating on a continuum around women’s bodies from pubic waxes, bondage-inspired clothing and footwear, surgically enhanced breasts and lips through to extreme forms of sexual violence:

Through the mainstreaming of pornography and the new acceptability of the sex industry, through the modishness of lap and pole-dancing, through the sexualisation of young girls, many young women are being surrounded by a culture in which they are all body and only body.

(Walter 2010: 125)

In turn, this ‘pornification of our culture’ is tolerated, indeed celebrated, because it is being sold back to us as evidence that full equality between men and women has finally been reached (Walter 2010: 117). Women have become ‘liberated’ to the point where they now have the freedom to explore ‘their bodies more’ and ‘to concentrate on their sexual allure’ (Walter 2010: 103, 108). The particular form this liberation has taken can, however, equally be understood to reinforce existing inequalities within heteropatriarchy, because what is being sexualised is the power relationship within which women are subordinate, objectified and dehumanised. In short, the specific form this hypersexualisation takes reinforces the dominant heteropatriarchal social order by eroticising male power and female subordination. Tracing the history of porn, Power supports this argument when she observes that silent pornographic films made between 1905 and 1930 ‘abound in sweet expressions and moments of shared affection’, which in the twenty-first century have been replaced ‘by a combination of artificial and destructive antagonisms between men and women’. Hence, in modern porn films, ‘it is rare to see a woman smile, or laugh’. What is being sold back to us is ‘the worst of our aspirations: domination, competition, greed and brutality’ (Power

2009: 53, 55, 56).

The argument that the growing acceptability of porn into mainstream culture contributes to increasing levels of objectification, brutalisation and dehumanisation of women is supported by both male consumers of porn and female sex workers. One male respondent in Walter’s research reported:

It had a huge effect on my behaviour with women. I was unable to think of women except as potential pornography. I looked at them in a purely sexual way ...I had no idea how to interact with women as people.

(cited in Walter 2010: 110–11)

Meanwhile, Angela, a sex worker, observed that:

What was extreme five years ago is commonplace now. I get enquiries about being tied up, being gagged, they want to tie you up, they want threesomes . . . Basically you’ve consented to being raped . . . for money.

(cited in Walter 2010: 61)

As noted above, humans have agency, hence my aim is not to present a causal effect between porn and sexual violence. However, as also noted, agency takes place within a wider sociocultural context, hence, the specific choices humans make are not random or meaningless, but spring from a culture within which they make
sense
. If that culture predominantly portrays sex as synonymous with the subordination of women, a sexual dynamic is created ‘in which the putting-down of women, and ultimately, the brutalisation of women, is what sex is taken to be’ (cited in Power 2009: 47). Within this context:

Sexual murder is not a piece of abnormal sexual behaviour determined by innate drives, but a cultural category with a social significance. Sex killers are not responding unthinkingly or involuntarily, to stimulus, they are adopting a role which exists in the culture, as recognizable and intelligible to us . . .

(Cameron and Frazer 1992: 379)

In turn, taking these wider cultural factors and power relations into account helps to explain why there has been no change to ‘the risk associated with prostitution’, whose women continue to ‘make up the largest single group of unsolved murders in Britain’ with a third of prostitute killers never caught (O’Kane 2002). More broadly, they might also help to explain the continuing existence of male fratriarchy, as illustrated for example – (among a plethora of examples one could have chosen) – by an agony uncle writing for
Zoo
magazine, who considered it acceptable to advise a jilted male reader to ‘cut your ex’s face, and then no one will want her’ (
The Guardian
2010). Such examples serve to remind us that:

The rise of a hypersexual culture is not proof that we have reached full equality, rather, it has reflected and exaggerated the deeper imbalances of power in our society.

(Walter 2010: 8)

Thus, not only has Kelly’s 1988 observation that sexual equality may be accompanied by ‘an increased public sexualisation of women’ been confirmed beyond expectations, her prediction that women’s wider ‘equality will increase sexual violence . . . as men attempt to reassert their dominance’ has also been confirmed – for example by Smith, who in 2007 wrote about the sex industry:

What this huge industry offers isn’t just sex but an opportunity to exercise power over women, which is why it flourishes both in traditional cultures and ones like our own where some men feel a corrosive level of discontent about the growing equality of the sexes.

(
The Guardian
13 April 2007)

In turn, this raises wider questions, not only about how the state polices the sex industry, but also about how it protects sex workers.
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At the time of writing, yet another sexual murderer, Stephen Griffiths, has been charged with killing three women who sold sex on the streets of Bradford. They thus belonged to a group who continue to make up one of the most vulnerable sections of the population, for ‘while only one in four sex workers are on the streets, they make up three-quarters of the victims’ (I
ndependent on Sunday
30 May 2010). These statistics reinforce Britton’s point that sex killers do not single out prostitutes as victims for complex psychological reasons – ‘
they kill because prostitutes are easy to kill
’ (
The Guardian
16 September 2002, my emphasis). Yet, while sex workers are increasingly understood as victims who need support to enable them to leave prostitution, for example through ‘exit strategies’, the 2009 Policing and Crime Act can nevertheless be understood as having increased their vulnerability by forcing street workers into poorly lit, less populated areas (
The Independent
30 May 2010). Wilson writes with respect to the Ipswich murders:

What these... murders reveal is that those who want to kill and kill again can only do this when the social structure in which they operate allows them to do so by placing value on one group or groups to the detriment of others.