Lessons to be learned: how to prevent serial killers

Hunting Evil: Inside the Ipswich Serial Murders is published today.  This is the first book that I have written outside of the academy and I’m so pleased that I had Paul Harrison as my co-author and Sphere as our publisher. 

I found writing for a more general audience far more challenging than writing for other academics, and in particular I was grateful for Paul’s help in explaining to me how to write narrative.  But no matter the challenges I was determined to broaden the audience for my academic work about serial offenders, for the Ipswich case seemed to us to demand as wide an audience as possible so that we could explain what drove the awful murders of the five young women that took place between October-December 2006.

Put simply, Hunting Evil isn’t simply a re-telling of the case as one might expect to find within the “true crime” genre, but is much more about the factors which created the vulnerability of Tania, Gemma, Anneli, Annette and Paula, and what we should all do to overcome that vulnerability.  So, we explain that prostitutes are one of the five regular targets of British serial killers because of moralising about the fact that they sell sexual services; there is inadequate policing when they are attacked; their use of drugs; their poverty and a more general failure to discuss prostitution in our public policy.

It is these factors which create the vulnerability that serial killers exploit, and so unfortunately unless we do something to overcome these factors there will be other serial killers who will attack and kill other young women who sell sexual services.

Part of the reason for writing Hunting Evil was to get readers to understand that we could do something to overcome the vulnerability of those who work in the sex industry – there have been 40 unsolved murders of prostitutes in the last ten years – by encouraging the police to target punters rather than prostitutes (as they do in Sweden), or consider “managed” or “tolerance zones” for prostitution (as they do in three states in Australia and in New Zealand).  We also argue that we could consider what to do about the availability of heroin – which is what drives young women and some young men into prostitution, in the same way that gin did in the times of Jack the Ripper, and perhaps follow the Swiss example of making heroin available on prescription.

Above all we wrote the book because we wanted to explain that the number of serial killers active in this country is on the increase and we want true crime readers to think seriously about why it is that the elderly, gay men, prostitutes, young children running away from or being thrown out of their homes and babies and infants are overwhelmingly the five targets of serial killers in this country.  If we can start to see serial killing from the perspective of who it is that is victimised by serial killers, rather than endlessly debating the psychological motivation of the serial killer, then Paul and I believe that fewer of our fellow human beings would fall victim to the Steve Wrights of the world.

Even so I already get the impression that with Wright behind bars (the bogeyman has been locked away) most people are simply prepared to forget the awful events of 2006, and worst of all the amnesty for prostitutes in Ipswich has ended.  Only last week the first woman in the town since the murders took place was convicted and fined for soliciting, and everything seems to be in danger of returning to “business as usual”.  That would be more than a pity, and we hope that Hunting Evil will at the very least keep people interested in the case and question what we could do to prevent others from being murdered.  It might even prompt some action.

Posted 25/03/2008 12:41:34 by Professor David Wilson with 0 comments.