A 40-year-old man calling himself the Crossbow Cannibal is charged with the murder of three women prostitutes. Parts of the body of one of them were found in drains near his flat in Bradford, Yorkshire, and others in the river Aire which flows through Shipley near by. The three women disappeared from Bradford at various times during the last year.
The police suspect that a mature PhD student of criminology is responsible for the murder of several other missing women, but they haven’t amassed enough evidence to charge him with them. The victim whose body parts were discovered was killed by a shot from a crossbow and it would be reasonable to assume that a maniac who calls himself the Crossbow Cannibal in court has tasted the flesh of his victims.
The case, still being investigated by the police, has brought back echoes of the Yorkshire Ripper, one Peter Sutcliffe, who was caught and convicted 20 years ago for the serial murder of several prostitutes.
On the computer of the suspect the police found copious material about Jack the Ripper, the 19th century murderer who stalked the East End of London, killed the sex workers and street walkers of the time and was never caught or convicted. The motives of these serial killers are left to conjecture. That they are, though perhaps technically able to pass any test a psychiatrist may set them, insane, is evident.
I have, in my short and happy life, encountered and got to know one individual who is an alleged serial killer. That’s probably one too many. The individual in question, now in jail for life in a mountainous country, convicted of murder, never struck me as any kind of maniac. On meeting and getting to know him as well as one could, Hannah Arendt’s phrase in describing the mentality which brought on the holocaust — “the banality of evil” — came to mind.
“My” serial killer, if indeed he did do what people have said and written that he did, did it for the purposes of taking a passport or for getting hold of amounts of money that today’s hedge fund operator might offer as a tip to his taxi driver. In trying to understand his motivation while at the same time avoiding asking him for it straight, I came to the conclusion that he valued his own life and time but thought very little of the life and time of “the other”. If he saw a wallet and there was, unfortunately, a human being attached to or in possession of the said wallet, he would contrive to separate the object from its owner and the simplest way of doing it would be to render him or her unable to possess the wallet — dead! It’s an existential way of apprehending the world, in the sense that original existentialism contended that the death of God and faith meant that evil and good had become confounded. There was no template left to distinguish one from the other; there was a void in which murder was not imperative but allowed.
The motivation of Peter Sutcliffe and Jack the Ripper, whoever he was, is not, one may conclude, devoid of a judgment of value. They got nothing from the prostitutes they murdered. It was in their derangement a moral imperative, an unfathomable confusion of sexuality, power, derived morality, inadequacy and shame. They slaughtered the innocents, women who had turned to selling their bodies to feed a drug habit, feed themselves and their children or feed the greed of a pimp who exploited their dependency.
The freshly installed Prime Minister of Britain, David Cameron, in the wake of the Crossbow Cannibal’s pre-trial, told the nation he would be looking at the laws governing prostitution with a view to making it safer for women who were forced into the sex trade. If he does initiate a debate it will no doubt consider the repeated question of taking the sex trade off the streets and institutionalising it in brothels supervised by the state.
Any discussion of ending the trade is futile. The oldest profession lives because demand and supply in any foreseeable social construct will remain immutably high and match each other.
The victims of the serial prostitute murderers were, before they were murdered, victims of the social dysfunction of almost all historical societies that turns sex into a vicious trade.
While protesting that I have in that same short and happy life never resorted to the services in any sense of a sex worker, I hesitate to condemn the men, some of them my friends and acquaintances, who do or have done. I am aware that a strand of feminist opinion holds the customers who buy sex responsible and morally and legally culpable for the existence of the trade.
If one takes a strictly Marxist view of the sex trade and sees supply and demand meeting each other in a free market, neither the supplier nor the consumer is the culprit in the equation. The real villain is the middleman who profits: the pimp.
It is the pimp who keeps the girls on the streets, induces their dependency on drugs or even on the notion that they are supplying the love, support and stability as boyfriends that the sex worker in all her alienation from normal social intercourse craves.
In my boyhood in Pune, one of the worst things a man could be called in Marathi was a bhado, a pimp. The bhadva, the dalal, the agent of evil, the exploiter is a recognised villain. In the ghettoes of Western cities, the image of the pimp is one who rides around in expensive cars, wears expensive clothes, lives in luxury and exercises a merciless cruelty over the women he exploits. And from there, in a bizarre semantic leap, the noun has become a verb. “Pimp” with its connotations of dandy style, has been transformed into the verb “to pimp” meaning to elaborate extravagantly and hence the TV series about decorated cars entitled Pimp My Ride.
The linguistic leap indicates a moral lapse. Pimping becomes its style rather than its exploitative essence. Meanings shift. Pimping is the decorative art, the serial murderer can continue to victimise the victim.