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Chapter 14
‌

Destroying women: sexual murder and feminism

Anette Ballinger

Meet Anette Ballinger

Anette Ballinger is a lecturer in Criminology at Keele University. She is the author of the award-winning book
Dead Woman Walking: Executed Women in England & Wales 1900–1955
(Ashgate: 2000) (Hart Socio-Legal Prize 2001), and has written several book chapters and journal articles on the subject of gender and punishment in modern history. More recently her research interests have also included contemporary issues – particularly in relation to state responses to violence against women. She is currently working on a book entitled
Capitalising on Punishment: Gender, Truth and State Power
, to be published by Ashgate.

Introduction

An account of sexual murder which does not address gender is not merely incomplete, but systematically misleading.

(Cameron and Frazer 1987: 1)

Femicide ... is not some inexplicable phenomenon or the domain only of the mysterious deviant. On the contrary, femicide is an extreme expression of patriarchal ‘force’. It, like that other form of sexual violence, rape ..., is a social expression of sexual politics, an institutionalized and ritual enactment of male domination, and a form of terror that functions to maintain the power of the patriarchal order.

(Caputi 1992: 204–5)

One of the most fundamental and enduring achievements of second-wave feminism has been its success in creating new discourses and hence a new language within which violence against women in both the public and private sphere can be understood. Thus, contemporary taken-for-granted terms such

as sexual harassment and domestic violence did not enter discourse until the 1970s, when second-wave feminists named such experiences, thereby ensuring that from then onwards, they would no longer be ‘unspeakable’, but instead become firmly placed on the public agenda.

However, as Liz Kelly has noted, ‘the unnamed should not be mistaken for the non-existent’ (1988: 141). Hence, while the term ‘sexual violence’ did not exist until feminists named it as such in the 1970s, and the distinct category, ‘sexual murder’, did not come into being until the mid to late nineteenth century, when the newly established ‘experts’ from professions such as psychiatry, psychology and medicine identified it, the existence of these forms of
behaviour
has been evident throughout history. The creation of new discourses such as sexual violence and sexual murder thus brought with them the possibility of identifying ‘a tradition’, within which abusers and killers of the past, present and future could, and can, be discussed, analysed and understood in ways which were not possible prior to the mid nineteenth century (Cameron and Frazer 1987: 22).

Liz Kelly’s book
Surviving Sexual Violence
played an important role in the creation of these new discourses, by identifying and naming specific forms of sexual violence which had hitherto been endured in silence by a substantial section of the female population, despite being part of their everyday lived experiences. For example, Kelly was at the forefront of establishing key terms such as ‘survivor’ to denote ‘the extent to which women are able to reconstruct their lives so that the experience of sexual violence does not have an overwhelming and continuing negative impact on their life’ (1988: 163). She also developed the term ‘ ‘‘continuum’’ to describe both the extent and range of sexual violence’ recorded in her research (1988: 74). In this way, Kelly played a key role in creating a new language within which sexual violence against women could be discussed. Moreover, she emphasised that her use of the term ‘continuum’ should not ‘be interpreted as a statement about the relative seriousness of different forms of sexual violence . . . [because] the degree of impact cannot be simplistically inferred from the form of sexual violence women experience or its place within a continuum . . .
with the important exception of sexual violence which results in death
’ (1988: 76, my emphasis). It is this most extreme form of sexual violence – sexual murder – which is the focus of this
chapter. More specifically, through two case studies, that of Peter Sutcliffe, who was found guilty of murdering 13 women in 1981, and Steve Wright, who was convicted of killing five women in 2007, a number of key themes relevant to sexual murder will be explored through a pioneering body of feminist literature published during the same period as Kelly’s
Surviving Sexual Violence
.