Bunting For Wimmin With Sharon Shoesmith And Karen Matthews
KAREN Matthews. Booo! Sharon Shoesmith. Hissss!
Do you know why you don’t like them, why it is you bang on the van as it leaves court, sign a petition to call for Shoesmith to be sacked and want both women to be flayed alive?
Madeleine Bunting knows why:
Sharon Shoesmith, the disgraced former Haringey director of children’s services, went to Pret a Manger last week and then out for a pizza with friends. Who knows, and who cares? But it still warranted a substantial picture and story in the tabloids, to whom this woman has become a hate figure. This is how the 21st century does voodoo: instead of sticking pins in wax dolls, newspaper reporters crawl all over the victim’s life - relatives, in-laws, homes, and even their trips to a sandwich shop.
Several hundred miles away and a million miles in life chances, another woman’s life has been mercilessly exposed to public vilification: Karen Matthews. She was “pure evil”, a slob who had never done a day’s work in her life. Matthews behaved appallingly to her daughter and she will rightly go to prison for it, but her life story was one of such desperate inadequacy that it demanded pity alongside our judgment, not demented mob hysteria.
These two have almost nothing in common - one the professional high flyer, the other an unemployed, unemployable mother of numerous children by different fathers. But they are both women, and the way their stories have been covered in many parts of the media in recent weeks is tantamount to deranged. What goes completely overlooked is the context that the vast majority of domestic violence is perpetrated by men on their wives and children; instead, the moral outrage is whipped up to fever pitch and a few women are singled out to be subjected to its onslaught.
Gary Glitter is now known as Geraldine Tinsel…
Posted: 15th, December 2008 | In: Media Comments (3) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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December 16th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
C&C
There has been a lot of research looking at this; the days are long gone since I opted for a sudy on the sociology of deviance because it had the least books on the topic. It’s certainly arguable that women are punished much more severely than men for similar crimes of violence; Myra Hindley is a case in point.
My problem with Bunting’s article is that it is so lunatic that it tends to discredit the important things which should be being discussed.
One of the things we should be discussing is why the editor of Spiked, Brendan O’Neill, is prepared to hijack an article on the excesses of the media on child abuse to flog his own agenda on the use by what he calls traditionalist parents of implements to inflict punishment on their children.
His claim that such parents demonstrate love and concern as they use their rulers, belts and whips on their children is a lot scarier than Bunting’s lack of scholarship…
December 16th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Hmmmm….
The only niggle I have is that some years ago I read a book by the QC Helena Kennedy about how women are treated differently in the penal system. (I was doing some work in a prison at the time)
Very interesting reading and also scary. Women are definitely treated more harshly amid the general fantasy in the courts and the media seems that all of us are akin to the selfless Virgin Mary; we have to be beatific and curb the excesses of our menfolk who simply can’t help it.
Ageing judges and media barons are very similar in outlook!
December 15th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Anorka, you are too nice for your own good.
Madeleine Bunting’s next sentence reads:
‘The only appropriate analogy is the witchcraft craze of the late 17th century’
There has been a great deal of historical research into the witch crazes which waxed and waned over the space of 3 centuries or so; none of it is recognisable in Ms Bunting’s rant. Indeed, the remark is so raving bonkers that anything else she has to say can be safely dismissed on the grounds that by the time she’s made her way through treatment the sun will have gone nova.
Which is a pity because the way in which our culture has become obsessed with child abuse really does need to be considered; articles like these simply ensure that the obsession rolls on…