Another Jack the Ripper exhibition

Finn Mackay
Co-Founder: Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution
www.fcap.btik.com


There is a new Jack the Ripper exhibition at the Museum In the Docklands. This is the classier Jack the Ripper exhibition, and not to be confused with the tackier Jack the Ripper exhibition at The London Dungeon. That’s them that have the posters on the underground saying: “visit your local butcher”; tasteful.

The Museum In the Docklands however, is a very nice museum. They are obviously trying to get more people through their nice doors and they, probably rightly, think that a bit of sexualised violence against women will do the job....



Being not interested in Jack the Ripper at all, but very interested in the history of prostitution, I decided to go along and check it out. I’ve known about the exhibition for some time now. I actually went to meet with the Education Officer at the Museum a few months ago, in my capacity as Co-Founder of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution. We talked about what form the show was going to take and the possibility of putting on linked events, which could address the issue of prostitution today. The Museum also consulted with organisations such as Toynbee Hall’s ‘Safe Exit’ programme, which supports women involved in prostitution. In all, they seemed very keen to ensure the exhibition was as sensitive as is possible. Well, as much as it can be of course, given that its in the name of a serial murderer who preyed on vulnerable, marginalized women involved in the world’s oldest oppression, and who has been treated as some sort of national hero ever since…

I visited on a Sunday and it was still fairly busy, staff told me that it had sold out the day before. Entry was being staggered to ensure it didn’t get too full. I’ve been to a few exhibitions at the Museum In the Docklands and I don’t remember them being so busy. Clearly London’s most famous son is a money-spinner, incidentally I’d always thought that was Dick Whittington, but I guess boys and their cats are not as exciting as killers. Bit of a failing if you ask me. The exhibition is advertised as not being suitable for children under 12. Pretty depressing to think that children not much older than that are actually being exploited in prostitution on our own streets every night. Indeed the global average age of entry into prostitution is only 13 to 14 years old. So, thinking these happy thoughts I made my way through the heavy double doors and into the exhibition, wondering just how bad it was going to be. On entering, the lighting gets much dimmer, for a more spooky effect I suppose. The interpretive panels are all quite plain, with the names of the murder victims written in red and the dates they were discovered. There are newspapers from the day, actual police reports of the crime scenes all filled out in lovely, swirly script and genuine copies of hoax letters sent to the Met, amongst many other artefacts and original documents. However, as I went round the displays I did think that this was perhaps less about Jack the Ripper and more an exercise in “The History of the East End (by stealth)”. There is in fact, a lot of very enlightening information on the history of the East End. The way people lived, the poverty and the attitudes of ‘civilised’ society to these slums and the people struggling to survive in them; attitudes that were anything but civilised. All of this was very interesting and I would say came across as the main focus of the exhibition.

As for Jack the Ripper himself, it was pretty much as I expected. Lots of attention to what we have made of him and the legend he has become over the centuries. Ironically, this exhibition in his name, of course further adds to his legend. Our fascination with constructing the murderer as some sort of mysterious, romantic anti-hero is another focus of the show. This fascination is unfortunately, perfectly exposed in the words of Bonnie Greer, interviewed especially for this event and making up one of the short interpretive films that are interspersed throughout. I’d always liked Bonnie Greer, but I’ve gone right off her now. She seems to sincerely believe, or has anyway persuaded herself for this showcase, that Jack the Ripper represents the savage in us all. That his crimes illustrate the desires and intentions that lie behind our veneer of civility and that if we scratch the surface we all want to “get away with it” as he did. She’ll be arguing that pornography protects free speech next. Perhaps she already does. After seeing this interview with her, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Considering the great number of often ignored freedom fighters, real heroes and heroines in the world, it is a great shame that a brutal murderer of women is being presented as the embodiment of ‘real’ human nature and our desire to put two fingers up to authority. Yes indeed, Jack fought the law and Jack won. But this doesn’t make him a hero. It perhaps says more about the lack of interest in finding a killer who only targeted “fallen women” from the “unfortunate classes” and also, the difficulties of investigating crimes in a ghetto, which had almost been boarded up and left to get on with it, by the rest of society.

Is it only because he was never found and brought to justice that this serial murderer has become such a legend? Would we say that Steve Wright is a hero? Peter Sutcliffe or Robert Pickton? When we do know who they are society brands them monstors, but in the case of Jack the Ripper his cloak shaped void has been filled by a lot of ridiculous romanticised notions and topped off with a hat and cane. Who is he? He is everyman, he could be anyone. He is invisible like most punters are. The truth that should come screaming out of this exhibition is that men have been abusing and killing women in prostitution for centuries, that these women have always been vulnerable and that stigma has always attached to them rather than the men who choose to exploit them.

The press cuttings reproduced in the exhibition illustrate this, showing us that views towards women in prostitution have not changed much. The articles are obsessed with the gory details of how the women were killed, are clear to point out that they were involved in prostitution and prompt the reader to make all the judgements that go with that. It reminded me that society seems so much more interested in prostituted women when they are dead. But only if they are killed in a spectacularly gory way that is, and if there are a lot of killings at once, otherwise nobody is that bothered. Because of course, women are killed and assaulted every day and this never hits the headlines, quite simply: it’s so common it isn’t news. Here in our country, two women every week are murdered by a violent male partner, for example. There are around 80,000 rapes every year. For women in prostitution the levels of male violence are even higher. They go missing all the time, are raped, killed and brutalised all the time. Canadian studies estimate that women involved in prostitution face a murder rate 40 times higher than the average. I wonder what women in prostitution in the East End now, think of Jack The Ripper. Their voices are of course, a glaring omission from the exhibition. Does the fact that his legend is still pulling in the punters today serve as a reminder that we find serial murders of women in prostitution a source of intrigue and entertainment, possibly a bit sexy? What does it say about our society that we have accepted the buying and selling of women as inevitable and cannot bring ourselves to question this status quo, yet we buy books, queue up and spend money to find out more about a man who brutally murdered prostituted women?

Personally, I don’t find the disembowelling of women entertaining. I’d rather I hadn’t looked at the cigarette card style, sepia photos of the victims that are displayed at the end of the exhibition. Each one is lined up along a starkly lit, white circular wall that forms a sort of round, mini-gallery. There is a warning on the outside, that some may find the crime scene photos disturbing. They certainly are images I could have done without putting into my head, and now they are an addition to all the other horrors that men inflict on women that I know far too much about. As I walked round the photos, with the name of each woman underneath, like some sort of ghoulish roll call, it felt like a memorial; an unfitting memorial. It made me think that perhaps we do need somewhere to remember our dead, to remember all our sisters fallen in a struggle that has been going on for far too long. But this place is not in a museum exhibition dedicated to one of their killers.

When I left I felt rather sullied, and found myself wondering what I’d been part of. I couldn’t wait to get outside into the fresh air and sunlight so I chose not to take up the offer, advertised on my ticket, of a “Jack the Ripper meal” at the Museum’s attached café. Perhaps I missed out by not stopping to taste their take on “what Jack would have dined on..”. But then, gory details of woman killing doesn’t do much for my appetite.

The last words in the Jack the Ripper exhibition, somewhat ironically, read: “The endless obsession with Jack the Ripper glamourises serial murderers and trivialises violence against women.” Indeed. Perhaps one day the violence against women that is prostitution will only be a feature in museums, and we will all look back in shame at what we condoned. I hope that everyone who visits this exhibition will ask themselves what they can do to make that day a reality.

"These things happen in families"

Anon

I have just read this item on Yahoo news. In response to Baroness Warsi saying forced marriages were an abhorrent act, home office minister Lord West of Spithead replied: "The difficulty is that these things happen in families.

We have taken a lot of advice and talked to many people. There is a feeling that the crime would go even further underground because people generally do not want to put their families through this.” He said that "because it was made a crime", the cases of domestic violence dropped from 814,000 in 1997 to 407,000 in 2006/7.

Does Lord West also think that domestic violence should be ignored because “these things happen in families”? Maybe he thinks the same consideration applies to the 102 women every year who are murdered by their partners. Is he truly saying that a crime isn’t a crime because it happens in a family context? The human rights of the victims of forced marriages are being abused by the very people who ought to be relied upon to protect those human rights – their families. That’s a double abuse. An abuse of human rights and an abuse of trust. Criminalising forced marriage is an inadequate answer of course.

Let’s draw a parallel with rape. Rape is a criminal offence but look at the appallingly low conviction rates and the degrading treatment of women who are brave enough to come forward to report it. What we need is a system that deals not only with the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity, but a system that deals with piecing the lives of victims back together and giving them emotional and practical support to become self-standing. Empowering young women and training Social Services to respond to their requests for help must go hand in hand in the government’s policy with the criminalisation of the families that put their children through this. There is no correlation as Lord West claims between decline in reported domestic violence crime and its creation as a criminal offence. ABH is a criminal offence, but the CPS routinely don’t take forward cases more than 6 months old of partners abusing their spouses. ABH against a partner is not necessarily classified by the police as a domestic violence crime, nor is rape.
Lord West should respond to this and explain his remarks.

Misogyny and male violence against women is endemic but the truth must remain hidden

By Jennifer Drew

It was a particularly horrible week in respect of UK men’s sexual and physical violence against women. On Friday, 22nd February, 2008 Steve Wright was convicted of murdering five young women, the same day Mark Dixie was convicted of murdering Sally-Anne Bowman. On Monday, 25th February, 2008 Levi Bellfield was convicted of murdering Marsha McDonnell and Amelia Delagrange. Bellfield was also convicted of attempting to murder Kate Sheedy. All three men have been sentenced to life imprisonment.

So what is the connection between these male murderers. The answer is all three men hate women and all three men targeted women simply because of their biological sex. There is a term for this and it is not misogyny – it is femicide. Femicide means women who are murdered by men exclusively because they are women.

All three cases were high profile and received mass media attention. Steve Wright’s claim to infamy was because he targeted prostituted women and murdered five young women within a very short time frame. Mark Dixie’s claim to infamy is that he chose a young, white aspiring model to rape and murder. Levi Bellfield chose to target young blonde haired women and he selected these young women whilst they were travelling home after dark on buses. All the ingredients of salacious sexual violence and murder which is always guaranteed to ensure newspaper sales will increase dramatically for a few days before reverting to normal sales.

Much has been written in the press and media of the prostituted women’s lives but there is a now a new twist. The media has created a new myth, namely drug and/or alcohol abuse caused these young women to enter prostitution and subsequently be murdered by Wright. No need to question male sexual demand which is fuelling prostitution or the fact most prostituted women do not enter prostitution because of drug addiction. Rather prostituted women use drugs and/or alcohol in an attempt to dissociate from the trauma and intense pain of having to endure innumerable men raping and abusing their bodies. Male demand must never be discussed or analysed because it is supposedly ‘natural for men to need a constant supply of fresh women in order to obtain their “rightful” sexual satisfaction.’ But upon Wright’s sentence of life imprisonment, details of his life history are emerging. Wright had been buying women’s bodies for his sexual gratification for more than 25 years and Wright even claimed he resorted to using ‘prostituted women’ because his sex life with his female partner was non-existent. One newspaper, The Daily Mail claimed Wright’s family ‘believe his motive for murdering women could be revenge on his mother Patricia, who abandoned him when he was a child.’ The murders of five prostituted women has once again caused the media to focus on why women ‘choose’ (sic) to enter prostitution – as though it is a free and autonomous choice. Little has been written about the numerous male Johns who are the ones ensuring prostitution continues to exist.

Mark Dixie was convicted of murdering Sally-Anne Bowman and his defence was he ‘stumbled upon the unconscious body of Ms. Bowman and in a moment of uncontrollable (male) sexual arousal raped her. But the media did not refer to his confession as rape, instead he simply ‘had sex with a female who was either dead at the time or unconscious.’ Apparently it is ‘sex’ because Ms. Bowman omitted to tell Dixie she did not consent to him penetrating her body with his penis. Like Wright, immediately after Dixie was convicted, details of his hatred of women emerged. Dixie has a history of sexual offences committed against women and he is known to the police since he has five convictions for sex offences against women.

Bellfield’s history of sexual violence against women was also disclosed by the media immediately after he was convicted of murder. Bellfield too, is a serial sex offender with a history of multiple rapes and sexual abuses committed against women. Bellfield was known to target under-age girls in order to rape and sexually abuse them. Bellfield’s ex-partner Becky Williamson spoke publicly about Bellfield routinely beating and raping her, but his sexual and physical violence against her only ceased when he was arrested for the murder of Ms. Delagrange. Another aspect all three men have in common, apart from hatred of women, is that they all engaged in acts of violence against their female partners.

Wright and Dixie were initially reported by the media as being ‘deviants and monsters.’ But photographs of these men do not show them with horns or frothing at the mouth, instead they appear to be normal indistinguishable men. Very quickly the media began to apportion blame but of course these men alone must not be held responsible for their actions. Oh no, women have to be partially held responsible for causing these men to commit femicide.

The most common excuses/justifications for men’s sexual violence against women is that a man’s female partner was frigid and yes, this excuse/justification was used by Wright. Wright was supposedly driven to buy prostituted women because his female partner would not satisfy his sexual needs. Another common justification/excuse for men’s sexual violence against women is that the mother was responsible because she either abandoned the man when he was a boy or she was a ‘bad mother.’ These excuses/justifications are used to neatly deflect accountability away from the men who choose to commit violence against women and instead society holds women partially or totally responsible for men’s sexual and physical violence against women.

In the case of Bellfield it was not the media which first claimed these myths but a police officer. Det. Insp. Sutton made a public statement wherein he was reported as saying ‘Bellfield a psychology PhD waiting to happen, was very close to his mother. His father died when he was young. He (Bellfield) has a massive ego to feed, he thinks he is God’s gift to everyone.’ Not everyone, Det. Insp. Sutton, Bellfield’s ‘massive ego’ was in relation to women NOT MEN. Det. Insp. Sutton’s words serve as either justification for Bellfield since he is mad, or Bellfield’s mother is to blame since no male role model was around in order to show Bellfield how to become a ‘man.’ No need to raise the fact Bellfield’s relationships with women were ones typical of a violent man who rigidly adheres to the masculine script which defines ‘real manhood’ as one wherein men are expected to dominate and control women generally. Sexual relationships are ones wherein a man owns the woman and her sexuality is always for his sexual pleasure. If she deviates from this role he is entitled to rape and sexually abuse her. As evidenced by Bellfield’s ex-partner Becky Wilkinson’s disclosures.

Evidence of how men lie not only to themselves but others concerning their contempt and dismissal of women as dehumanised beings is contained with a BBC website report of Johns who regularly buy women’s bodies in order to rape and sexually abuse them.

Yet again women are being blamed for men’s sexual violence against women and already in less than a week the media is once again attempting to focus attention away from men’s sexual violence against women. Because it is men who are the real victims of women’s lies and duplicitousness. Irrespective that less than 5% of men charged with raping and committing sexual violence against women are convicted, the BBC news website has featured an article on the numbers of men falsely accused of raping women. No need to highlight the fact only around 3% of rape claims against men are false and this percentage is in line with other cases of false reporting such as fraudulent insurance claims, great attention is being paid to the very small number of men falsely charged. Male sexual violence against women in the UK is endemic and the truth is we live in a rape culture. Misogyny is rampant and continues to be denied; women are now routinely depicted by the media as men’s sexualised objects or toys. Pornography has now become mainstream and one only has to enter any random high street newsagent and immediately be met with graphic images of naked women bodies splayed and in poses which systematically dehumanise women as holes to be penetrated by men. Women are routinely depicted as dehumanised sexualised commodities who can be bought and male sexual violence/coercion against women is depicted as an important aspect of the normal male heterosexual script.

Another case which has received only minor media attention is the one wherein a number of arrogant teenage boys filmed themselves group raping a young woman as she lay unconscious in her own home. This video was put on Youtube’s website and was viewed by over 600 individuals. Not until local London newspaper, The South London Press raised this issue with Youtube was the video withdrawn. Yet another example of how male sexual violence against women goes unnoticed unless it is a particularly high profile case.

Sadly, already the media has once again returned to selective amnesia, because these three cases of men deliberately murdering women because they are women, plus the added sensationalism of sex, murder and violence are not common. The more mundane everyday cases of men raping, murdering and using physical violence against women and children will continue to pass unnoticed because it is not newsworthy. Only when at least three or more prostituted women are murdered in a short time frame, or if a particular case is considered to be ‘newsworthy’ will the everyday male violence against women be reported.

Instead the media is perpetuating the myth only deviant male monsters commit rape and sexualised murder against women.

Patrizia Romito, a feminist Professor of Social and Community Psychology at the University of Trieste, Italy, has just published a book entitled ‘A Deafening Silence: Hidden Violence Against Women and Children.’ Ms. Romito delineates the various ways male sexual and physical violence against women and children continues to be hidden. The various mechanisms used to hide men’s accountability and how women continue to be blamed for men’s sexual and physical violence against women. The book is published by Policypress and the ISBN number is 978-1-86134-961-3.

The links are:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/7258115.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7254628.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7257623.stm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=517401
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/ukcrime.gender
http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/25/ukcrime
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7227830.stm
http://icsouthlondon.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0200southlondonheadlines/tm_headline=mum-s-gang-rape-shown-on-internet%26method=full%260bjectid=2050755%26siteid=50100-name_page.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7265307.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/27/ukcrime

JENNIFER DREW
27th February, 2008