I want to put out a disclaimer that this is not in any way aimed at Ms Everard or her family. It is an awful, horrible, tragic thing that happened to her, and I can't imagine how awful it must be for her family. My heart goes out to them, and the perpetrator, be this suspect or anyone else even, must be brought to justice to the fullest extent of the law. I intend no disrespect to them whatsoever, and this is aimed neither at them, nor at Ms Everard herself. What I take issue with is the inappropriate reaction.
Dear Readers,
Those of you living in the UK will have heard of the case of Sarah Everard. I have read only a few bits of information about this case, but as far as I know, she's a young who went missing and whose remains were recently discovered.
Someone has been arrested, and it's even been commented on by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and I heard that someone (allegedly Mark Drakeford from the Welsh Assembly and a woman from the Green Party) in the House of Lords absurdly suggested an all-male curfew (go to sleep and have another dream why don't you) and the verbally incontinent and frothy, of course, saw fit to come up with the "men bad" rhetoric, in their infinite lack of wisdom. (Obviously a slap in the face, not just to ordinary decent men, but to those who are male victims of female abusers, big time. Also impractical if the killer or abuser is a friend, family member or partner since, you're living with them. Duh.) So far so Yorkshire Ripper case.
The thing is, we've been here before.
(For any MRAs reading this, don't blame feminism for this, this is a very old trope that pre-dates feminism by centuries, so it'd be unfair to solely blame feminists or feminism for this. Also, any feminists reading this, don't blame 'patriarchy' for this either, other feminists are guilty of endorsing this trope. More it has some anti-male "men are the expendable gender" tropes in it.)
If you haven't seen the pictures before, Ms Everard is young, pretty and from a white middle class background. Another couple of victims who fit this description were 11 year old Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, two girls who went in 2002 out on an errand and were lured into the home of a janitor at their school, who later killed them and dumped them a few miles away.
Sarah Payne was another example, an 8 year old girl who was abducted by a local man in the UK, and was raped and murdered back in 2000. The murder was a local man who was later imprisoned for life in 2001.
A year later, 13 year old Milly Dowler went missing in 2002, and six months later her remains were found dumped in a woods, the murderer was a serial sex offender later imprisoned for life (incidentally, the disgusting hacking of her family's answering machine by the press was enough to block communication between her family and the police or the killer, and the revelation brought out a scandal that ended the newspaper 'News of the World' in 2011 but that's another story).
In South Africa, another example was Rebecca Reeva Steenkamp in 2013, shot to death by her, at best, unstable and trigger-happy (and at worst, violent and abusive) boyfriend Oscar Pistorius, who presented a rather pathetic figure at the trial.
These murders were deeply tragic. These were innocent people completely undeserving of a fate that really, nobody deserves. There's no denying that, nor the pain and suffering delivered to their families, and the murderers deserve to rot in jail for the rest of their natural lives.
What is also striking is how others who aren't middle class, pretty, white women don't get nearly the same treatment. If you're male, or non-white, or poor, the press doesn't give a shit.
Did people react the same way to Danielle Jones? She was a woman who was disappeared in 2001, and yet the press interest was lower because she was from a lower social class and estranged from her parents. Nothing close to the same coverage as the other examples.
Or Damilola Taylor, a black boy whose killing shocked the UK, but didn't get the near hysteria as Wells and Chapman, (which also featured the ugly spectacle of people standing next to their graves to take pictures of them crying, without saying a word to their families). (1)
Or little Liam Fee? A young boy who was caged, forced to live with snakes and rats, force-fed vomit and dog-turds and later beaten to death by his female guardians. (2) None of the same outrage in response.
Prostitutes, black (or general non-white people) also get short shrift, (the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 are treated less as a tragedy and more as a curious 'whodunnit?' by amateur sleuths) and this isn't even something I've made up. It's called "missing white woman syndrome" and it's actually been documented since the 1890s. (3) Basically, it's the "poor, pure white maiden destroyed by the terrible male brute", a positively Neo-Victorian point of view that's more patriarchal than feminist, another off-shoot of the damsel in distress trope.
Kim Pasqualiani, President for the National Center for Missing Adults in the U.S has also documented this phenomena as to how the media seem to be curiously picky as to who gets to be a worthy victim, and who doesn't, and how the media prefers the "damsel in distress" trope. (4)
Journalist Tom Pasqualiani also noted much the same in 2016, Quoted as follows: "Media outlets are ruthlessly selective, and they tend to prefer women who are white, pretty, and above all, innocent." Certainly the case of white working class heroin addict Tiffany Whitton in the U.S in 2013 didn't get nearly the same level of outrage. (5)
Or another male example. Jolene Doherty, a Scottish girl previously going viral for violently assaulting a male acquaintance on camera in 2013, later murdering Connor Cowper at a party, and bragging about being a "man-hater" in prison after the murder. (Yeah, please all wokester trash, continue to tell us male survivors how "it only hurts men's feelings it doesn't do anything to them".) (6)
Even the acid attack in Zanzibar on Kirstie Trupp and Katie Gee, two North London (working class Jewish) girls (7), again, virtually nothing in the way of the hysterical outrage as with their middle class counterparts from Christian cultural backgrounds.
Naomi Oni was another example (8) of an acid attack in East London in 2012, a black woman assaulted and disfigured by another woman, little to no outrage compared to white female middle class women.
Even when it's a high-profile woman the difference is clear. UK royal, philanthropist and aristocrat Princess Diana, a woman of huge international reputation was killed in a car crash in 1997 in Paris. She was regarded with hysteria by people who'd become obsessed with her in the soap opera of Royal family life, never met her, and responded with a giant outpouring of grief that wasn't seen in the same way after the murder of actual working class soap (Eastenders) actress Gemma McCluskie in 2012. (9)
We even see examples of this when rich, white, middle class women are the perpetrators of crimes (including heinous, evil ones). Examples are Jodi Arias who murdered her boyfriend Travis Alexander in 2008 (10), American Amanda Knox who murdered British female exchange student Meredith Kercher in 2007 (11), and Casey Anthony (12) who murdered her own daughter and dumped her remains in a nearby woods in 2008.
Even the tragic suicide of Caroline Flack in 2020 forgets that she was in court for violently assaulting her boyfriend (who had been through a hideous ordeal of alleged assault, public scrutiny, and the death of his girlfriend) was covered in this way. In regards to the press coverage, the circumstances that lead to the court case needed to be scrutinised and if she was innocent, allowed to clear her name in court. Assault in the way described is a serious accusation, and her boyfriend could well have been killed if it indeed happened the way described. And yet the later press story seemed to be ambiguous about whether she was a victim rather than accused of an assault.
Personally, I see homeless people in town - immigrant men and women - where I live almost every day. I do what I can for them, but there's only so much you can do, especially since I suspect they're getting trafficked, and though I've alerted the authorities on them, I can't approach them directly to help. However, I can guarantee that if they disappeared, the press wouldn't give a shit.
(The only counters to this example are the murders of James Bulger in 1993 and the case of Alex Skeel in 2018, but I think this is because the culprits were caught on CCTV with their victim before the murder took place, and that was a shock to most people, and the brutality that Jordan Horner had enacted on Alex Skeel was undeniable and there for all to see, and even then the latter didn't receive much outward revulsion.)
This isn't a conspiracy theory, having its own documentation (look it up, seriously) and has also been a trope featured in shows such as 'Broadchurch', 'Family Guy', 'Scary Movie', 'L.A. Confidential' and so on.
Also, isn't it curious that the main protagonist and survivor of many (if not most) slasher flicks is a beautiful, blonde white teenager from a middle class background who doesn't drink, smoke, take drugs or have premarital sex? (If you're noticing the unfortunate implications of this, you're not alone.)
In other words, what happened to Sarah Everard, Sarah Payne, Holly Wells, Jessica Chapman et al, is undeniably tragic. But is it any less tragic than the deaths of Damilola Taylor, Liam Fee, Tiffany Whitton or Connor Cowper? Are they no less human or valuable to society? Didn't they have hopes, dreams, feelings, friends and families as much as their white, affluent female counterparts?
I may focus on male victims - as is my personal experience - but in this article I'm doing things a little differently. I'm actually advocating for all these other demographics of victims of murder too. The press and its lapdogs, and those who constantly devour its content and jump on the bandwagon have constantly engaged in both racist, misandrist, and snobbish hypocrisy.
Don't fall for the hypocrisy. See every victim of murder as a human being and worthy of compassion, and every murderer and abuser as needing to be brought to justice in a court of law.
If Sarah Everard or any of her counterparts I've highlighted fitted into any of the other tropes, people wouldn't have cared. Anyone who expresses outrage and responds in a stupid knee-jerk reaction is a hypocrite, possibly a racist or misandrist or snob or combination thereof who never gave a damn for the humanity of the victim, and never will.
In 2017, the morally useless Nick Jack Pappas crassly compared #MeToo male victims to "All Lives Matter", the trope used to shout down "Black Lives Matter", an important and crucial message (and much more important and relevant than the organisation under the same name). However, I'd like to take the message and use it in a different context.
"All Lives Matter" when it comes to murder victims, and that also means that when it comes to murder victims, "Black Lives Matter" as much as white affluent women. Male lives matter just as much as female lives, lower social class women's lives matter as much as middle and upper class women's lives.
See one another as human, and see this double-dealing snake-in-the-grass unequal manipulation for the prejudice, selfishness, arrogance and hate that it truly is. And show up the useless donkeys who engage in this selective behaviour for their double-standards.
Because at the end of the day, we're all human.
Sincerely,
The Invisible Man.
This article is dedicated to the memories of Damilola Taylor, Sarah Everard, Liam Fee, Holly Wells, Tiffany Whitton, Connor Cowper, Milly Dowler, Travis Alexander, Sarah Payne, Danielle Jones, and Meredith Kercher.
(0) Jewkes, Yvonne, (2004). Media and Crime. London: Sage Publications. pp. 52-53 ISBN 0-7619-4765-5.
(2) https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/liam-fee-murder-sickening-catalogue-8359146
(3) Earle, S.; Komaromy, C. & Bartholomew, C. (2008) Death and Dying: A Reading. SAGE Publications Ltd., 276 pages
(4) Krajicek, David. "Damsels in Distress". TruTV.com. p. 3. Archived from the original on July 28 2011.
(5) Junod, Tom (April 29, 2016). "Missing: The Curious Anomaly of Tiffany Whitton's Disappearance". Esquire
(6) https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/17526816.conner-cowper-murder-killer-jolene-doherty-brags-callous-crime-amid-man-hater-claims/
(7) https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/two-men-charged-over-zanzibar-acid-attack-on-jewish-girls-1.58197
(8) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-26689194
(9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemma_McCluskie Jones, Cass (10 March 2012). "Gemma McCluskie's brother charged with her murder" The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077
(10) Jodi Aria Trial: Jury Gets Graphic Details of Travis Alexander's Slaying".
(11) Follain, J. (2012). Death in Perugia. pp 61-62, 25 and 71. ISBN 978-0-340-99309-5
(12) Edwards, Amy L.; Lundy, Sarah (December 19, 2008). "Remains identified as missing toddler Caylee Anthony" Orlando Sentinel
No comments:
Post a Comment