Reframing How We Talk About Sex Work
It’s far too easy to dismiss anti-sex work sentiments as a product of the 1970s.
Serial killer documentaries are oddly marketable. Netflix has of course capitalised on our grave fascination, as in December ‘The Ripper’ premiered on the platform. The four-part docuseries details the murders of 13 women from 1975 to 1980 at the hands of Peter Sutcliffe, better known by his alias, The Yorkshire Ripper.
Netflix’s aim was to expose the respective failures of the police investigation and the sexist attitudes of the media throughout the Ripper enquiry. Sutcliffe, who was depicted by the press in a more favourable light than some of his victims, wasn’t even one of the police’s top suspects. Ironically, the series revealed misogyny is still rampant in both of these bodies today.
Directors Jesse Vile and Ellena Wood attempted to portray the sexist culture surrounding the crimes as a product of the 1970s, something far from the general view of violence against women today. But feminism is a movement where actions do speak louder than words. The dialogue of the men interviewed throughout the series proved that current public opinion of sex working women bares more similarities to the 1970s than we’d care to admit.
Society’s sex work consensus needs to modernise. Our 1970s mentality fuels victim blaming, overlooks the origins of sex industry, and encourages further violence against sex workers.
In the first episode, Yorkshire Post journalist Alan Whitehouse chauvinistically distinguished Sutcliffe’s fifth murder victim, 16-year-old Jayne McDonald, from his previous fatalities. Up until McDonald, Sutcliffe’s victims had all allegedly been linked to the sex industry. To Whitehouse, McDonald was a “perfectly innocent girl”, whereas sex workers are a “certain kind of woman leading a certain kind of lifestyle”.
Former Police Superintendent Keith Hellawell described Sutcliffe’s pattern of murders in an equally intolerant way.
“It started with suspected prostitutes. Then he killed a couple of innocent, if you can call it that, girls”, he said.
The binary between those working within the sex industry and those outside of it upholds the victim blaming narrative behind violence against sex working women.
Separating sex workers from all other women depicts them as subhuman. It implies they’re more deserving of their deaths than so-called ‘ordinary’ women because they engage with an inherently brutal line of work. Sex workers don’t fit into the innocent, virginal archetype society has of women so they aren’t treated as such.
In January, a young woman in New Zealand was murdered while working on the street. The Madonna/whore dichotomy, which implies that women who have sex with numerous partners are to blame for their downfall, was as present here as it was in the 1970s. Media reports questioned her value to society as a sex working woman. Frustratingly, this pattern of press coverage legitimises violence against women while simultaneously shifting the blame for any attacks sex workers experience onto sex workers themselves.
Clearly, 1970s logic has infiltrated the 2020 mindset. Whitehouse is merely a symbol for how society blames the battered sex worker far before it questions the man who battered her.
‘The Ripper’ went on to explain how public opinion of the killings only changed once a woman outside of the sex industry had been murdered. Considering the attitudes of Whitehouse and Hellawell, it’s likely this would still be the case if Sutcliffe killed today. There’s been almost 200 sex worker homicides since 1990 in the UK alone. With little public outcry for these women, this likelihood is really a certainty.
Alongside victim blaming is an ignorance for the roots of sex work. The series pushed the message that Sutcliffe’s sex working victims deserved their fate. It’s suggested that they chose to enter a dangerous industry, so they were liable for any maltreatment they faced.
For many, sex work isn’t a choice. The impacts of capitalism and neoliberalism have been cited as some of the most pervasive reasons for entry into the industry. For instance, a 60 percent increase in street prostitution has been linked to cuts to social welfare benefits. Though contradictory to the danger of brutality, sex work is the last chance of survival for these women.
Sutcliffe’s victims should be remembered in a particularly sympathetic light. Unemployment was rife at the time of his crimes. Evidently, economic hardship is reflected in the rise of the sex work population. It’s unjust to blame these women for their deaths. Instead, we should be challenging the economic system which involuntarily pushes women towards exploitative lines of work. This feeling should also apply to 2020, which marks the first time the UK has entered a recession in 11 years, with the north of England (where Sutcliffe murdered his victims) being hit especially hard.
Though ‘The Ripper’ presented sex work as morally evil, capitalism is far more deserving of this title.
Concerningly, the series also encourages further violence against sex workers. When discussing Sutcliffe’s first murder victim Wilma McCann, Whitehouse mentioned there was little public sympathy for her. To him, violent crime against sex workers was – and still is – an expectation. Unfortunately there’s a grain of truth to his claims. After all, sex workers have a hugely disproportionate murder rate compared to women in other occupations.
So long as we treat violence against sex workers as part of the job, so long it will continue. With expectation comes a reluctance to enforce punitive action. The belief that sex workers are asking to be murdered leads to insufficient police inquiries into their deaths, as ‘The Ripper’ showed us. In all, this acts as a perverse incentive for violent misogynists to attack the most vulnerable women.
Crucially, capitalist systems are unlikely to change. What can be altered is the general view of sex work. We must stop implying that sex workers are deserving of violence, and we must stop seeing this violence as inevitable. Respecting sex workers on a social level will influence how the industry is seen on a legal level. While ‘The Ripper’ may have set out to expose police incompetence and media bias, it instead concluded that these problems still very much exist.
Written by Sarah Bennett
A Sheffield-based final year Journalism undergraduate, who specialises in feminism, politics, and music. Her past work includes an investigation into the impact of capitalism on sex work and why women in rap are being let down by the music industry.