Media, Violence, Sex, and Police

Berrington, E., Honkatukia, P. (2002). An Evil Monster and a Poor Thing: Female

Violence in Media. Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 3(1): 50-72.

Berrington and Honkatukia examine patriarchal constructs of British news media using case of Rosemary West as an example and comparing by way of contrast to the Finnish reporting on Sanna Sillanpaa, another female "killer." The ways in which media representations of these two women differed suggest that the cultural societies in which they lived espoused different views regarding women and violence.

This article is interesting because it supports what the study by Naylor (2002) shows, which is that media representations are gender-skewed in the British news. Women who commit violent acts are described in monstrous terms as though they were the epitome of evil, whereas in other countries there is more sympathy or sensitivity expressed in the media and therefore felt by the public. As far as Rosemary West is concerned, she is remembered in England as a monster because the murders that were committed are viewed as particularly unnatural when a woman is involved, according to media representations in England, so this article posits.

The researchers assert that the reason for the gender bias is that England has a patriarchal culture which views women in a particular light and any movement or activity by them outside of that light instantly casts them in a dubious gray light. They are seen as less natural, as something wicked, whereas men are simply accepted as they are. What the researchers claim is that these representations say more about the culture that delivers them than the individuals they are reporting on. The Finnish example, for instance, shows how a different culture displays more gender sensitivity and responsibility in its treatment of female violence.

I would recommend this article to anyone interested in how media representations foster bias in cultures and/or how cultures foster media bias. It is particularly relevant for gender studies and students interested in the sociology of violence and media.

Emmers-Sommer, T., Pauley, P., Hanzal, A., Triplett, L. (2006). Love, Suspense, Sex,

and Violence: Men's and Women's Film Predilections, Exposure to Sexually Violent Media, and their Relationship to Rape Myth Acceptance. Sex Roles, 55: 311-320.

Emmers-Sommer et al. analyze the relationship between sex and violence in media and gender preferences and find that men prefer films with more sex and violence than women do. Women, on the contrary, prefer love stories more than more do. Men, however, are more accepting of the rape myth than women are. Emmers-Sommer et al. see a correlation between men's preferences and rape myth acceptance and women's preferences and than lack of rape myth acceptance.

In a lot of ways, the study arrives at conclusions that would seem obvious on the surface. However, the researchers offer "theoretical explanations for the findings" which are interesting in their own right (p. 311). The researchers discuss the notion that men's attitudes toward women can be negatively affected by violent and/or sexually explicit films and/or sexually violent films. They argue that expose to such media can affect the way that men value women if the exposure coincides with other social factors. One finding that Emmers-Sommer et al. note is that women's attitudes towards rape myth acceptance fluctuated if the film they were viewing was a true story. For men, whether it was true or not did not alter their opinions one way or the other.

In a sense, this study suggests that men or more insensitive to rape than are women, that they tend to favor films which are violent and/or sexual (though not in a romantic sense), whereas women tend toward more sensitive films (romantic love stories). This study appears to support stereotypical findings regarding gender preferences, so for that reason it might be dismissed as conservative. The researchers do provide an extensive literature review to show what other researchers have found in the past, so what they illustrate here is not surprising.

Overall the study does not really offer anything new other than the concept that violently sexual films reinforce negative stereotypical ideas regarding rape myth acceptance in men, and that women's exposure to such films when based on a true story can be negatively influenced as well. The study, in my opinion, might have benefitted from a more in-depth analysis of rape myth acceptance as it was assumed for the most part by the researchers that the reader would have a common understanding of the subject.

Jarvis, B. (2007). Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture. Crime, Media,

Culture, 3(3): 326-344.

Jarvis makes the claim that serial killing is "big business" (p. 327) best witnessed in the display of serial killing in consumer culture's entertainment industry. Jarvis tracks the sale of "murderabilia" and the depiction of serial killings in popular films and television (Saw, American Psycho, CSI, Law & Order, Nightmare on Elm Street) to show how a culture of death permeates modern culture.

Jarvis' overall point is that consumerism is a violent, materialistic ideology and thus it is not surprising that it should be consumed by an obsession with violence. Art acts as a mirror, and audiences have always loved to see themselves represented on the stage. The depiction of grisly violence reflects our consumerist culture's thirst for violence as well as its acceptance of and pleasure taken in horror and blood. He discusses works which show protagonists becoming mired in a world of torture and killing (as in The Extremes) and that this reflects modern culture's infatuation with murder stories, which erupted in the 1990s beginning with the widespread story of Jeffrey Dahmer's house of horror. Moreover, Bret Easton Ellis's title character in American Psycho "embodies a merger between ultra-violence and compulsive consumerism" (p. 330). Bateman is a serial yuppy and a serial killer are is the "gothic projection of consumer pathology" (p. 330). Jarvis's claim is that consumerism is an appetite that demands the death of something else in order to be momentarily filled and that such an appetite is inherently related to the murderous impulse of the serial killer. The ultimate consumer tagline "obey your thirst" speaks to animal-like passion to which the consumer is being urged to submit. The same submission to an urge is reflected in the pathos of the serial killer.

Jarvis touches on the serial obsessions of serial killers, which in American Psycho is linked to serial consumption. He also discusses the supernatural element of serial killing and the link between horror and the spiritual realm. George Romero's "living dead" for instance embody the soullessness of modern materialism.

Kinnell, H. (2013). Violence and Sex Work in Britain. Oxon: Routledge. (Chapter 1).

Kinnell provides a case study of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who was convicted of murdering several women from 1975 to 1980 in England. Some of the women he attacked were sex workers (prostitutes) others were not. Kinnell makes the case that the Sutcliffe affair has colored the way the UK thinks of violence and sex workers. The purpose of her case study in this book is to draw attention to the actual details and facts of the case in order to show how Sutcliffe was a unique example and far out of the ordinary in terms of violence and sex workers, and that this being the case it should not be held up as a typical example of what happens to prostitutes or the dangers or how to deal with prostitution in general.

The book is very informative and this chapter is especially illuminating, as Kinnell has spent time learning the lives of sex workers first hand, interviewing them, and lobbying for changes in laws in order to better protect them from persecution/prosecution and harm. This chapter is meant to set the stage for a thorough examination of the sex worker culture and how police and politicians fail to properly understand the women engaged in this work.

The case study shows how the police in the UK were quick to jump to the conclusion that the killers of the women "hates prostitution" even though up till that point only two of the women killed had any links to sex work and these links were thin at best (p. 5). This is a good point that Kinnell emphasizes, which is that the British police were predisposed to think that a serial killer of women, two of whose victims happen to have ties to sex work, must clearly hate that profession.

The police thought it best to protect sex works by criminalizing sex work, thinking that would somehow make the profession go away -- but as Kinnell shows this only made their situation that much more dangerous. One of the victims of Sutcliffe was a regular, experienced sex worker who had already been charged for soliciting and was due in court. Fearing a second arrest, she went to work the streets, as opposed to the safe places she normally met her clients. It was on these streets that she became a victim of Sutcliffe.

Thus, this chapter shows how the police and the lawmakers often work at odds of the community they allegedly serve and protect. By not understanding the nature of sex work and the women who take to this profession, but rather by approaching the profession with a cultural bias, police and lawmakers make it so that women not only have to fear attackers but also the police and the law. Kinnell suggests that police and lawmakers do a better job of protecting that which they will never be able to eradicate and instead of forcing women to operate on the margins of society where they are less safe, allowing them to work in jurisdictions which are patrolled and kept safe by a police presence.

I would recommend this chapter and this book to anyone interested in the actual facts of sex workers in the UK as Kinnell is well-informed and passionate about the subject. It is obvious that she cares for these people and knows them intimately.

Mason, P. (2003). Criminal Visions. Cullompton, Devon: Willan. (Chapter 8).

Mason discusses the attractiveness of murderabilia in consumer culture and its appeal over the Internet, as long as the images of murder and violence "are relayed from a distance" (p. 166). However, the obsession with murderabilia hits close to home in a number of portrayals of serial killing in media. The killers themselves demonstrate a fondness for murderabilia, drawing on popular culture or some specialized nuance or skill, which the protagonist alone possesses, thus identifying with the hero or serving as a wicked double or foil.

Mason's survey of films ranges from The Bone Collector to Fallen to Ghost in the Machine. Some touch on the supernatural association with murder (such as Fallen or Ghost in the Machine), others on the specialized knowledge (such as Bone Collector). In any case, the act of serial murder is one of highly specialized and conditional requirements. Part of its appeal is its exotic expertness: it takes a special kind of individual (either possessed or of some sort of genius) to pull of the types of crimes in these media depictions. Thus, a cult-like following builds up around these types, and more and more media representations depict this build-up and its inherent obsession with murderabilia.

The study is interesting because it connects the obsession with murderabilia of media serial killers with audiences' obsession with serial killer films and murderabilia, which in turn feeds the media obsession and so on. It is a cycle that repeats itself, in which films copy one another, and the genre begets its own cult-like following.

Naylor, B. (2002). Reporting Violence in the British Print Media: Gendered Stories.

The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 40(2): 180-194.

Naylor's study focuses on the way that news media portrayals of violence do not at all reflect the reality of the situation of violence in Britain but are rather shaped for purposes other than that of conveying true reflections of actual circumstances. For the study, Naylor examined half a year's worth of UK newspapers and the way that they each discussed gender in relation to violence. Naylor concludes that violent acts by men and women are reported in much different ways with different narrative styles and motivational focuses.

Naylor's study is interesting because it shows the way popular news media outlets view the gender question with regard to violence: acts of violence committed by men are described in terms in which the motive is rationally explained or told as stemming from some sort of logical cause. However, with acts of violence committed by women, the narrative explanation is usually described in terms of how "emotional" the woman was being or with a sense that the woman was acting irrationally or even out of sheer "wickedness" (p. 180).

This study is helpful in bringing to attention the ways that media do shape gender perceptions and the bias that different media outlets can have in the way that they tell stories and relate news-worthy incidents.

I would recommend this study because it does offer both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of a subject that would appeal to any sociology or gender studies student. Its insights are formative in the sense that they draw attention to a slice of life that is often taken for granted -- which is the neutrality of news media reporting. What Naylor shows is that such neutrality, at least when it comes to gender and violence, is non-existent in British media.

Sanders, T. (2004). Controllable laughter: managing sex work through humor.

Sociology: a Journal of the British Sociological Association, 38(2): 273-291.

Sanders examines the role of humor in the sex industry and shows how it is used by women in sex work to bond with their jobs, connect with others, get through their work, and protect themselves from emotional trauma. Sanders provides and analyzes empirical evidence gathered from a survey of British prostitutes and assesses the female workers' ability to consciously be humorous as a way of "distancing" themselves (p. 273) from the work.

According to Sanders, humor is used as a business strategy in the sense that it helps sex workers to "manage client interaction" (p. 273). It is also a way to distinguish oneself from others: humor has a categorizing effect and can be both inclusive and exclusive.

This article is helpful in that it illuminates through empirical evidence the idea that humor is both a crutch and a device in "extreme" professions such as prostitution and sex work. Humor has both a humanizing effect and a personalizing effect. It also, conversely, can make "intimacy" impersonal by keeping it "light" and casting it in a humorous situation.

Sanders, T. (2008). Male sexual scripts: intimacy, sexuality and pleasure in the purchase of commercial sex. Sociology: a Journal of the British Sociological Association, 42(3): 400-417.

Sanders provides a qualitative analysis of men who patronize escorts and masseuses using empirical evidence. It focuses on normative and non-normative senses of sexual relationships and how there is a blurred line between the two when the notion of "commerce" is involved. What Sanders discovers is that a script emerges between the male patron and the female sex worker, in which a romantic, normative theme is developed albeit in a fantasy-type situation, because of the non-normative nature of the commercial aspect of the relationship.