Two commentary pieces have bothered me today. The first is by Alice Miles in The Times, the second by Deborah Orr in the Independent. Actually, both pieces are notable for their compassion and intelligence. They are well argued and persuasive. In both the general thrust is that the illegality of prostitution forces vulnerable women into dangerous situations, and that if legalised it’s extremely unlikely that the prostitutes in Ipswich would have been killed.
To briefly recap for anyone who’s not been following the news recently, three prostitutes are confirmed dead, and we are waiting on the formality of two more bodies to be identified. That was Jack the Ripper’s tally.
What both Orr and Miles choose to avoid properly discussing is the fact that the girls were all addicted to hard drugs. Actually, Orr does mention it in reference to the death of 25-year-old Gemma Adams, but only in passing: ‘She "fell in with a bad crowd" and became addicted to heroin. She lost her job in an insurance company because of her chaotic drug use. She ended up on the streets. Bad choices, all.’
But the drugs are significant, as Sean O’Neill tells us in an article for The Times entitled ‘They risked all for drugs – even after their friends disappeared’. This is also picked up on by Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph. He uses their addiction to drugs as a pretext for arguing that drugs are the problem here, that prostitution should remain proscribed and that drugs prevention should be more stringently enforced.
Yet still something is missing, and the uncomfortable something is this: if prostitutes were in high security bordellos and clean of drugs they’d still be at risk. Prostitutes don’t get killed because prostitution is illegal. They get killed because serial killers target them. For people with that most complex of psychopathologies often tend to, firstly, be intelligent enough to evade detection, and, secondly, have fixations that lead them to target particular groups.
There are serial killers, such as ‘black widows’, who kill a succession of husbands, lovers, or other family members. There are serial killers, who as nurses or other medical professionals, become self-appointed ‘angels of death’ murdering babies, elderly, or the desperately ill. And, relevant to this case, there are those who prey on women and children. Prostitutes, drifters and hitchhikers are their victims of choice. Take Jack the Ripper and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, to name but two.
The appalling fact is that serial killers seem to exist in all developed societies. They pick their target groups and, in a free society where people go about their own business, whatever it may be, they are virtually unpreventable. I’m not sure that the Ipswich story provides us with any evidence for making political arguments about the status of prostitution in Britain.