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Tuesday 7 October 2008

A prurience about women and murder

The ‘Foxy Knoxy’ case has stirred a deep prurience about women and murder

Why the case of 'Foxy Knoxy has gripped the British psyche'

There was an echo of this, too, in the treatment meted out to an attractive young British woman, Joanne Lees, whose boyfriend, Peter Falconio, was murdered while the two of them were backpacking across Australia. When it emerged that Ms Lees had, at some point, enjoyed an extracurricular sexual relationship during her affair with Mr Falconio, the hounds of hell were let loose on the woman; there were even dark murmurings that she may have been in some way complicit in the killing of her boyfriend. As if to imply that if she were capable of cheating on her boyfriend, then, hell knows, she might well be capable of anything. It was a bizarre and cruel pursuit of a woman who had committed no crime whatsoever. She was even given a grilling about it all on the Today programme.

And I suppose there’s another echo of it in the way in which the media began to swing its guns around on to Kate McCann, fuelled by reports in the Portuguese papers of ‘swinging parties’ and the like. Again, the readiness to believe that she might have been capable of harming her own daughter was suggested by allegations of a sybaritic lifestyle.

None of this should be taken to imply any conclusion about Amanda Knox’s involvement in the murder of Meredith Kercher; frankly, I haven’t a clue either way, and nor â” it would seem â” has anyone else. As far as we can tell she has lied to the police, which would seem to indicate, to me at least, that she has something to hide. It may well be that the police have, by now, got her bang to rights. But it is less the lying that has attracted the interest of the British press than the insinuation that she was an extremely sexually active young lady and that her sexual activities were not entirely confined to a safe, monogamous relationship with one man. A predatory sexual instinct is something we are perfectly at ease with when it refers to men; when it is a term applied to a woman then we seem to find it all a little hard to swallow and, on occasions, our imaginations get the better of us. In other words, we will shrug our shoulders at supposedly transgressive sexual behaviour from men, but not from women. And yet there is no great evidence to suggest that women are any better behaved than men these days.

Nothing ignites our interest in a story quite so much as a woman who ceases to be a victim or recipient of male sexual advances, but who is instead revealed as an accomplice or instigator. It turns our expectations around and once we have labelled her thus we find it easy to believe that she might be capable of absolutely anything. A certain amount of hypocrisy, then, is still required for us to enjoy a good murder story, just as it was in Orwell’s day.

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

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