Peter Sutcliffe's mirror on misogyny

 

Peter Sutcliffe is dead and nobody should be upset that he is gone from this world. We will never know exactly how many women he killed or attacked. We will never know exactly how many lives he ruined. 

Thankfully, today's coverage is centred largely on the victims and the people left behind to pick up the pieces after women they loved were taken cruelly away from them. 

Naga Munchetty did an excellent interview on BBC Breakfast this morning with Richard McCann, the son of Wilma McCann, believed to be Sutcliffe's first victim. She was compassionate, she let Richard speak through his grief and complex feelings about his mother's death and the man who was responsible, she reassured him that he has nothing to be ashamed of. 

The appalling events between 1975 ad 1980 could have ended much sooner - Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times before he was finally brought to justice, and the Wearside Jack hoax tapes were a devastating distraction, wasting police time, allowing Sutcliffe to kill more women. Misogyny infested the West Yorkshire police force at the time, fuelling incompetence. This horrific account of a press conference is sickening:

Today's coverage of Sutcliffe's pathetic demise has not been perfect. The footage that did not need to be broadcast was that of a jovial interview with one of the killer's former colleagues. We saw the unedifying spectacle of a man laughing as he said they all knew Sutcliffe was the Yorkshire Ripper and that he even answered to this name. And still he laughed, reducing dead women to workplace banter.

It is vile misogyny, just as it is vile misogyny to diminish some of the victims as "just prostitutes" rather than individual women with their own stories, often of hard lives, of limited choices. It is vile misogyny to dismiss any of the victims as somehow asking for it, to create a hierarchy of dead women from sainted virgins to scorned sluts. 

But this is what happens when sex workers are among the dead, as if their lives matter less than those of other women. This narrative reared its ugly head for years in discourse surrounding the Yorkshire Ripper just as surely as it did a century earlier when Sutcliffe's grotesque namesake, Jack the Ripper, was terrorising women in London. 

Our dead bodies are not there for workplace banter, for our corpses to be picked over by hideous vultures seeking to push misogynistic narratives from our carrion, for making people feel better about their attitudes to women, for helping people convince themselves that the safety of some women is more important than that of others. 

Instead, let us take this moment to remember the names of the victims we know and to reflect that we may never know the names that would surely complete this tragic list:

Wilma McCann

Emily Jackson

Irene Richardson

Tina Atkinson

Jayne MacDonald

Jean Jordan

Yvonne Pearson

Helen Rytka

Vera Millward

Josephine Whitaker

Barbara Leach

Marguerite Walls

Jacqueline Hill

And these are the women who survived attacks by Sutcliffe, more women whose lives will be forever affected by his violent hatred of women:

Anna Rogulskyj

Olive Smelt

Tracy Browne

Marcella Claxton

Marilyn Moore

Upadhya Bandara

Maureen Lea

Theresa Sykes

Say their names. Say all their names.

Photography: Tasha Kamrowski/Pexels