A killer is active in America.
He is prolific. Numbingly so. He roams across state lines, strikes in small towns and big cities. Sometimes he’s unemployed, other times he wears the uniform of a tradesman or the white collar of a city banker. His methods vary—mostly he shoots his victims: his access to guns is laughably easy. Often he strangles or stabs them. His crimes cut a swathe across society; his victims are of every race and class. Many of them are mothers; they leave behind children who are deeply traumatised. They are, almost entirely, women.
The yearly death toll of his violence exceeds the losses in any war in recent history. Five murders every day.
Five women. Every day. Thirty-five a week, one hundred and forty a month. Eighteen hundred a year. Every year.
If this killer leapt out snarling at women from behind bushes, crept up behind them in dark alleyways, we’d hear more about him. If he struck women who’d had a drink too many, who wore clothes that revealed their commodified bodies, if he killed the girls who were out too late, whenever they’ve trusted strangers. Whenever they’ve done something that means, according to the judgement of the media, that they deserve to die. If they were found naked and provocatively posed. more notice would be taken.
Curfews would be introduced, and dress codes, and drink restrictions. The killer’s terrifying handiwork would become entertainment fodder. Go viral, like Making a Murderer or Serial. Spawn a thousand think pieces and internet sleuths. Those deaths might register, even if only as a matter of titillation.
He kills in the home, and before he kills the woman he tells her that he loves her.Except…that’s not how this killer operates. He kills not in the murky spaces of public life, not in dens of vice. He kills in the home, and before he kills the woman he tells her that he loves her. Sometimes he marries her. Often she tries to get away from him, and that’s when he strikes.
The women in question are the five women who are murdered every day in America by a partner or former partner. These are real, dead women, but they’re largely ignored.
Often she’s done everything right. Stayed with him for years, because she refuses to give up on her marriage. Or because she knows what he’s capable of. They are often women who put their own needs behind the needs of the man who claims to love them. There are few figures more romanticised in the popular imagination than the angry, damaged, abusive man. Often they see not the man he is, the man who hurts them, but the good man he could be, the man they love. They believe he can change. Often they have learned to manage his behaviour, shield the children from the worst of it. They hope that those children can have a father. They assess, correctly, that they’re safer staying where they are than they are leaving.
But then they die anyway. And then the judgement comes, when people ask why they didn’t leave.
The judgement assumes that these women must have done something to deserve it, or else that they somehow enjoyed being abused. And from the outside it often doesn’t look great. The woman may use drugs or alcohol to cope with their daily reality. They may behave in ways that appear erratic, inexplicable. They may even have brain injuries as a result of the violence inflicted on them.
So in a way, they got what they deserved. And the world carries on.
To the rest of the world the killer himself is perceived as charming, likeable. A real family man. That makes sense. This killer is a man who has internalised the world’s idea of what a man should be. That is, powerful, and justified in using violence to cement his power. France’s Napoleonic Code of 1810, which was spread across the world by colonialism, stated that if a man killed his unfaithful wife, then he had not committed a crime. The reverse was not true. This was only repealed in 1975.
This man isn’t an aberration, he is normative. Which means, in a sense, he’s normal.
The normalisation of the violent man coexists with another archetype: the cultural obsession with the Beautiful Dead Girl™. The women, needless to say, are young, white, slender and beautiful. They’ve probably been found physically naked. Certainly they’re spiritually naked—the only way that they can be free from sin is to be free from context. They can’t have lives: lovers, sex lives, a history of being human—or else we’d be able to find something in their background that means that it was their fault that they died. As Flora Carr observes in her essay on the subject, ‘The method of murder varies, but often it’s sexually motivated, and usually there’ll be some grim, drawn-out scene where the pathologist takes isolated photographs of the victim’s body (frequently naked or barely clothed).’The plight of the Beautiful Dead Girl™ is largely symbolic. She’s chattel, the sign that decency has been infringed upon. Every part of her body can speak—the legs, flaunted by a short skirt. The breasts that reveal that she’s asking for it. The long hair that’s just begging to be grabbed and pulled. Every part of her body can speak—apart from her mouth, when she uses it to say ‘no’. Writing for bitchmedia, Jennifer Chesak observes, The “dead girl trope” perpetuates the myth that girls must be pure to be valued, and confirms that death is the price paid for rebellion. The violence against her is eroticised, and therefore the actions of the violent man are seen as inevitable, even justified.
The world doesn’t teach women to recognize the violence of everyday misogyny. Instead, we learn how to avoid becoming a Beautiful Dead Girl™. These rules are enforced even by people who know that they’re unfair. “It shouldn’t be this way,” mothers, fathers say, “but the world isn’t fair, and the most important thing to me is that you’re safe. So don’t wear that, don’t drink that, don’t go there.”
When I started at an all-girls secondary school (in the UK, aged 11) a police officer came in to talk to my class about how to stay safe on public transport. He was a man in his 50s. He got one of the smallest girls in the class to stand up and help him in a ‘demonstration’ in which he simulated stroking her hair and legs to ask what we should do. He told us that to avoid molestation we should always sit in the aisle seat on the bus or train so that no one could ever trap us against the window. Every time I sit in the window seat and lean my forehead against the glass and watch the world go by and think about the landscape or the podcast I’m listening to or what I’m planning to have for dinner—whenever I think about anything beside my own personal safety—I feel a little thrill of defiance. Whenever I imagine Detective Sergeant Whitworth, the senior police officer in KEEPER, I think about that cop. I think about how wrong he was. I think about the fact that he was doing his best. All the advice I got about staying safe as a young woman was really about staying pure. It wasn’t advice on how to not get hurt, but advice to not be the kind of girl who deserved to be hurt.
At that same school, a male teacher in his fifties made a point of inspecting the length of our skirts, sometimes measuring them with a ruler. We learned how to adhere to external standards, and how to ignore what we ourselves were comfortable with.
We were taught sex education. We learned the bits about sperm and eggs and labelled Fallopian tubes, but we also had sessions which were supposed to address the ‘emotional’ side. We were told that boys would want to touch us, and we had to think very carefully about what the terms and conditions of that touching were going to be. Because once we’d signed that dotted line, once we had allowed ourselves to be touched, there was no going back. I wish that someone had said that we might want to do the touching. I wish that someone had suggested that we might have desires of our own, that we didn’t exist merely to be the object of desire for some worthless teenage boy.
How the hell would those same teachers cope with giving advice on how to navigate an understanding of sex that is fundamentally shaped by porn? It has become commonplace to talk about ‘torture porn’ (which covers, incidentally, most mainstream pornography). Violence against women is deeply eroticised. Sex and death have become so intertwined in the legal system that ‘rough sex’ is considered a good defence when a man kills a woman. It plays into a deeper, darker idea. The idea that if a woman has sex—is sexual—then she deserves to die.
I was talking to a bisexual friend about the possibility of having great, transcendental sex, sex that feels genuinely life-affirming and erotic. ‘I’ve only had that with women,’ she said. ‘Men always want to strangle you.’ Strangling, incidentally, is one of the single biggest predictors of whether an abusive relationship will become lethal. Rape, it is important remember, was originally conceived as a crime perpetrated by one man (the rapist) against another man (the father or husband of the raped woman). It was a crime against property, not against the sovereignty of a woman’s body, which was never sovereign at all. A man could no more rape his own wife than he could rob his own house.
Let’s look at the facts for a second. 80% of women know their rapist. Half of murdered women are murdered by a partner or former partner. We teach women to see the best in people, particularly men, to feed that little spark of goodness no matter how small it is and no matter how much we ourselves are burned. We teach women to see men not in terms of their actual behaviour, but their potential. If we cared about women’s safety we would teach them to prioritise their own instincts over a man’s ego. That they don’t owe anyone a smile. That painful sex is not a price worth paying. We would not teach them to be nice.
But nice girls are compliant, and we like compliant girls, girls who won’t argue with the teacher measuring their skirt. So we tell them instead to sit in the aisle seat on the bus.
These days, knowing what I know about the reality of violence against women, I don’t walk home from a night out with my keys clutched between my knuckles. Fearing strangers makes no sense to me. I don’t. I won’t. The image of the lurking figure in the dark is so divorced from reality that it’s impossible not to see him as a kind of metaphor—a vigilante. He operates in the same way as the bogeyman—a tool deployed by parents to get their children to behave. I refuse to behave. The thing I need to do to keep myself safe is to choose a partner who respects my humanity. To understand that ‘no’ is a complete sentence.
We seem to crave stories of violence, particularly violence against women. Yet nonetheless we turn our faces from the reality of that violence, at the real death toll. Because no matter what kind of delicious thrill we might get from our true crime, no matter how fascinating the machinations of a random killer seem, they cannot be more chilling than the reality that, for women, the most dangerous place in the world is not a bar or a dark alleyway or a deserted forest. It’s their own home.
