A few small observations on media and other coverage of the Ipswich unpleasantness which so dominates the airwaves and press.
a) the attitudes of a Reclaim The Night march back in the Eighties are now entrenched in editorial positions. The working girls are almost becoming street heroines, the punters are the scum of the earth, and while there may be a shortage of punters at present, there's no shortage of journalists wanting good interview.
b) I'm pretty sure last week I heard Eddie Mair on R4 ask a senior police officer "The pimps are asking for an amnesty - are you prepared to offer this ?" - the first time I've heard the BBC acting as intermediary in this way.
c) a number of bloggers and journalists seem unclear on the law. Prostitution has never been illegal in the UK, but soliciting in the street is, as is 'controlling prostitutes for gain' e.g. pimping/poncing, and as is 'keeping a brothel' where more than one prostitute works.
d) some writers who rarely if ever write about the many, many victims of murder are for some reason writing about these victims. Street heroines again.
e) if anyone can point me to the remarkable column I glanced at yesterday, which said the murders were the fault of a society which "either puts women on a pedestal or considers them whores", I'd be grateful.
f) I'm going to take a punt on the killer and do some outrageous stereotyping, based on my deep knowledge of a couple of Ruth Rendells and an episode of Morse. Once upon a time in a place like Ipswich you'd have looked for the strange, withdrawn farm lad - still at home aged 33, good with animals, bad with people.
Most of the native farm boys have been made redundant, replaced by young single Catholic lads a long way from home.
g) I lived in Bradford during the Ripper years and knew one of his prostitute victims (not professionally). It should be unnecessary, but I suppose I'd better say that I disapprove of all murders, no matter who the victim.
Easy Mistake To Make...
9 hours ago
17 comments:
Is this the article you're after?
'Crimes like these grow out of a festering anger that is aggravated by a distorted view of women as either paragons or whores. There are fundamentalist cultures that see women as evil seductresses who deny men the virtues that will take them to Heaven. It is not surprising that even within our own society there are men who harbour the same confused perspective.'
"The working girls are almost becoming street heroines.."
Perhaps a deliberate ploy by the police, to focus on the victims & the grief of their families, to 'humanise' them for not just the killer but also potential witnesses?
"...the first time I've heard the BBC acting as intermediary in this way."
Probably not the last, though......
"...the murders were the fault of a society which "either puts women on a pedestal or considers them whores"..."
Sure. Because killers are unknown in any other society...
Predictioon 2: in so far as the unknown suspect has come out of nowhere to Premiership-standard predation, it will be found that he has served a long apprenticshsip in predation in his homeland, and was already well-known to the authorities there, but we're too polite to check that sort in Nu Britons.
Dumbjon
Laban,
An Ipswich Cuckoo?
Felixstowe's unco handy...
I think DJ & Martin are onto something there.
I'm going to go out on a limg and say
a) it's more than one person. A man and a woman.
b) there's a reliogous angle.
I suppose a Betfair book would be in poor taste.
Its a good idea anticitizenone, whoever it is clearly has a knack of gaining peoples trust.
Paul
I've watched a lot of movies so I've believe that the most likely suspect is a businessman with a seemingly happy family who is probably a born again christian.
ross - you forgot to mention white. I know from TV that all serial killers are white, its probably the first thing they teach at Hendon.
"ross - you forgot to mention white."
You're right, how could I have forgotton all the newspaper articles at the time of the Washington Snipers insisting that the culprits were almost certainly white male NRA members?
and one thing NOBODY in the media is asking - is how in gods name did Ipswich, a small town of 140,000 in the middle of Suffolk countryside become a place where you could score heroin and crack? Why is there a red light district there?
this isnt some major city we're talking about after all.
is policing in Ipswich so crap that they've let a crack epidemic grow out of control?
One can't but help wonder if readily available heroin isn't a small price to pay for the elimination from a society of certain undesirable elements.
Think this killer is a chap who was henpecked at home, still lives with his mum, has a small knob and works in a callcentre(probably wrong on all points)
It seems probable that the killer will be found soon.
It will be interesting to see, if the killer is a Moslem, whether the BBC or Gwardian can bring themselves to report that fact. And upfront, not as a deeply buried addendum.
G.o.J.T.
Heroin is all over the place - in the small market town nearest to ours there are cases every week (mostly youths stealing 'to fund the habit') and a few overdoses a year. There are addicts in our village (the children of locals - outsiders have to pay the massive mortgage). What's really scary is that it's also hit 'the travelling community' - not all the families but some.
How does one go about telling a drugged gypsy from a normal one?
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