The Meanings of Violence

Elizabeth A Stanko, Elizabeth A Stanko

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134418213
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Kriminologie

The media often makes sense of violence in terms of 'randomness' and 'evil'. But the reality, as the contributors to The Meanings of Violence demonstrate, is far more complex. Drawing on the diverse subject matter of the ESRC's Violence Research Programme - from interviews with killers to discussions with children in residential facilities - this volume locates the meaning of violence within social contexts, identities and social divisions. It aims to break open our way of speaking about violence and demonstrate the value in exploring the multiple, contradictory and complex meanings of violence in society. The wide range of topics include:
*Prostitute and client violence *Violence amongst young people at school and on the streets *Violence in bars and nightclubs *Violence in prison *Racist and homophobic violence
This book will be fascinating reading for students of criminology and academics working in the field of violent crime.

Part I
Conceptualising the meanings of violence

1 Headlines from history
Violence in the press, 1850–1914

John Archer and Jo Jones¹

Every historical era has experienced some form of crime-generated social anxiety, and it would be both foolish and unwise for contemporary commentators to view present-day crimes of violence as either novel, unique or representative of ‘the decline of society’. For every child-on-child murder, paedophile outrage or serial killer that shocks present-day society, historians can point to incidents and figures from the past. Some are notorious, like Jack the Ripper; others are almost forgotten, like ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, the details of whose brutal murder lie forgotten in the columns of Victorian newspapers but whose name has lived on and even been abbreviated into the euphemistic phrase ‘sweet FA’.²

However, the manner in which we are made aware of crimes of violence is, to a large extent, of recent heritage. The Victorian press served an ever-widening readership and therefore adopted a popular language, tone and layout in which sensation and fact intertwined to generate and arouse interest, fear and concern in equal measure. The main difference between now and then is the current use of pictorial images to portray the victim, the scene of the crime and the perpetrator. Victorian newspapers, by contrast, only occasionally resorted to crude pictorial etchings of a trial and the defendant, preferring instead to describe in highly explicit detail the killing, the victim’s wounds and the character and behaviour of the killer. In so doing they set the agenda for the representation and reportage of crimes of violence that is still largely with us. Violent incidents that contained a human interest story were highlighted or amplified because they suggested wider social threats such as the danger posed by strangers to unaccompanied women, or described the helpless child victim. Such news items continue to make particularly sensational and emotionally charged copy. Crimes of violence came to be defined as social problems and indicative of a wider social malaise. History has therefore an important role to play in establishing how violence is portrayed, represented and interpreted both now and 150 years ago.

The press, since the mid-1850s, has been the most important medium for creating the public’s awareness and perception of violent crime. Murders, assaults and other crimes against the person have literally made headline news, and as such these news stories and their associated headlines have provided historians with a rich seam of evidence. This chapter intends to investigate the possible significance, meanings and representations of violence through the newspaper headline. Questions concerning the perceived level of crime and the general threat and fear of violent crime, which were implicitly or explicitly addressed within the wording and language of the headline, are also discussed. It will be argued that during the second half of the nineteenth century the presentation if not the language of headlines about violence evolved and became recognisably modern.

Many of the headlines and news stories that appear in this chapter have been taken from the Liverpool and Manchester press between 1850 and 1914. Regional newspapers have proved an invaluable source of nineteenth-century interpersonal violence for our study. Our project has examined reports relating to violent incidents, from common assault to murder, which appeared in what the press at the time referred to as ‘police intelligence’ or ‘local news’ columns. The timespan of the period covered by our research, over sixty years, enabled us to note changes in the layout and presentation of news within the regional weekly and daily papers.³

The growth of crime reporting

News of the kind that we read on a daily basis is a nineteenth-century creation (Brown 1985: 1). More particularly, the arrival of the modern newspaper can be dated fairly precisely as coming in the 1850s. Many contributory factors, both legal and technical, came together during that decade to allow both the national and provincial press to expand exponentially. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers were still relatively expensive, having to bear the weight of the stamp duty – branded as a ‘tax on knowledge’ – and a tax on the paper used for newsprint. Before the 1850s, with a few notable exceptions such as The Times, newspapers were often weekly and contained news that could be many days, even weeks, old. They also failed to highlight to any great extent crime news within a specialised column. Anyone who has had to research county newspapers from the 1830s, for example, will know of the problems of searching the tightly packed stories within the column headed ‘Local News’ for items relating to crime. Such stories would appear in no particular order and could be juxtaposed with innocuous items concerning local charitable donations. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, many provincial papers began to carry, as one of their main news items, a police intelligence or police court column. In addition, individual news stories of recent crimes, both local and national, were regularly featured.

Early nineteenth-century readers who wanted to learn more about a particularly notorious crime would have normally bought a penny broadside, which would have concentrated solely on the event. Such broadsides, which sold in vast numbers, particularly on the days of executions, offered the reader a potted history of the crime, the trial and the almost formulaic redemption of the accused in the condemned cell (Chassaigne 1999). Also popular, especially in London, were the Newgate Calendars, which gave descriptions of the crime, the criminal and the trial in far more detail (Pelham 1886). In spite of their moralising tone, both calendars and broadsides constituted reasonably accurate and popular crime reportage.

The coming of what is termed ‘new journalism’ in the 1850s changed the face of crime reporting for ever. The following figures, taken from Jones (1996: 23), show just how fast and large this expansion of newspaper titles was both in London and throughout the provinces. Between 1800 and 1830, 126 papers were established; from 1830 to 1855, the number of titles rose to 415 before mushrooming still further to 492 in the seven years between 1855 and 1861. During this mid-century expansion, 123 towns in England gained a local newspaper for the first time.

The repeal of the advertisement duty in 1853, followed by the abolition of stamp duty two years later and the paper duty in 1861, helped to increase the number of newspaper titles, the size of the newspapers and their frequency of publication. In addition, where expense had been one of the key issues in dictating layout in early nineteenth-century newspapers, small typefaces and dense columns had, as a result, been deployed in order to pack in as much news as possible. All this became less important after 1860, although columns remained traditionally packed for a while longer. However, as the century drew to a close layouts changed, more white space appeared, and news items in some cases became smaller while headlines became larger. The expansion of the press was also aided by other developments, not least the continued expansion of the railway network, cheaper imported newsprint, the penny post, printing machine developments and telegraphy. All these factors combined to make the period from the 1870s to 1914 the ‘golden age’ (Brown 1985: 32) for major provincial newspapers such as The Yorkshire Post and The Manchester Guardian. These regional papers could receive and print telegraphed news from London along with their local provincial news before the arrival of the London trains in the morning.

In addition, there was another development wholly unconnected with newspapers but which came to have a symbiotic relationship with the press, namely the advent of the popular ‘sensation’ novel in the 1860s. Unlike the earlier popular literary genre of the Gothic novel, in which things supernatural often intervened in the plot, the ‘sensation’ novels were thrillers or mysteries in which human failings, by way of criminal or sexual misbehaviour, played a significant part in the storyline and plot. Thus the popular appetite, mainly middle- and lower middle-class, came to be thrilled by the sensation of exciting details concerning murder and, to modern eyes, heavily disguised passion. Crime, and crimes of violence in particular, came to offer the reading public both fictional narratives that thrilled and titillated and courtroom dramas that brought equal entertainment value. In fact, the reports of some news stories took on the hallmarks of fiction, deploying narrative, melodrama and plot in which the forces of good and evil were played out to a reading public who may have had little direct experience of interpersonal violence. In this way, a newspaper journalist could attract the interest of the reader. Thus language, content, narrative form and the initial eye-catcher of the story – the headline – which used such keywords as ‘tragedy’ or ‘mystery’, came to be important.

The use of headlines: historical and contemporary parallels and contrasts

The headline had and still has many important functions, being among other things a tone setter, story precis and signpost. In these functions it has become an enduring feature of crime reportage, so much so that in the case of murders the headline can become the label or title by which the incident is referred to thereafter by both the police and other newspapers (Soothill 1991: 39). Nineteenth-century murders, more often than not, were identified by their location, such as the ‘The Whitechapel Murders’ or ‘the East End Murders’, which we now know as the ‘Jack the Ripper Murders’. In the beginning, headlines, especially those appearing within the police court or police intelligence columns, were often short, single words even, and were, by modern standards, mundane and prosaic. Such common headlines as ‘ASSAULT’, ‘THE USE OF THE KNIFE’ and ‘ASSAULTS ON POLICE’ served the simple function of alerting readers to violent crime having taken place in their town. Another common headline, ‘THE KNIFE AGAIN’, goes a step further by implying that stabbing, for which Liverpool was especially renowned, was becoming a problem. Many headlines in the early years of the period under review were of this simple and stark kind. However, with the passing of time there evolved genres of headlines that related to different types of interpersonal violence. Many of these were, as will be seen, fuller, more sensational and even moralising and judgemental in tone. The headline could, in short, concisely convey, promote and emphasise value systems that the newspaper regarded as respectable, worthwhile and healthy.

On 15 December 1999, newspapers in the UK reported former Home Secretary Michael Howard’s view of the murder of James Bulger, a two-year-old toddler who had been taken from Bootle Strand shopping centre by two 10-year-old boys and then walked and dragged two and a half miles to the side of a railway line in Liverpool, where he was battered to death with bricks. It was, he said, ‘a uniquely and unparalleled evil and barbarous act’ (The Guardian). Turning to the newspaper headlines of 1993, when the murder was committed, the language and size of type would appear to bear him out. The Daily Mirror (22 February 1993), for example, ran a headline above a photo of a carpet of flowers placed near the spot where Bulger’s body was found: ‘JAMES BULGER: born 16 March 1990, killed 12 February 1993’. Below the photo ran the emotionally charged quote in bold type: ‘Goodnight little one. Nobody can ever hurt you again’. A day later, in what it termed a ‘News Special’, the Daily Mirror ran across the top of two inside pages, which were encased within a barbed wire border, a videoprinter-style heading ‘BRITAIN UNDER SIEGE ++ BRITAIN UNDER SIEGE ++ …’. The murder, it reported, signified a wider crisis afflicting British society in which poor parenting and video ‘nasties’ were contributing to the rise of a generation of children devoid of moral sense.

While the degree of coverage for this crime may have been unique in the 1990s, the actual killing of a young child by two older boys was not. Ironically, just such a case occurred in Liverpool in 1855, when 7-year-old James Fleeson was killed by two 10-year-old boys, who bricked him unconscious then threw him into the Leeds–Liverpool canal. Among the headlines that the incident attracted were ‘THE EXTRAORDINARY CASE OF A BOY KILLED BY A BOY’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 21 July 1855) and the more emotive ‘A LITTLE BOY MURDERED BY TWO OF HIS PLAYMATES’ (Liverpool Mercury, 24 July 1855). The former, while getting an important fact wrong in that there were two culprits, emphasises the unusual nature of the crime. In the latter, the choice of ‘little’ and ‘playmates’ render the story more shocking and can arguably be read in two ways. Such language can suggest a certain poignancy, while a more critical reading can lend it sinister overtones in which playmates have played at murder. However, the subsequent tone of both articles lacked the shocked outrage of the reportage on the Bulger case; in fact, one of the articles refers to the killing as ‘a sad case’. The nineteenth-century press does not appear to have projected wider fears about the threats posed by dangerous children; nor was the murder portrayed as a society in crisis in the manner that James Bulger’s killing was interpreted. One of the deepest contrasts between the two killings lay in the fact that James Bulger’s disappearance was seen by us all on the CCTV tape in which he is caught, hand in hand, walking away with two older children. That haunting image both reinforced and fed the newspapers’ headlines and coverage.

More recently, some elements of the English tabloid press have orchestrated widespread panic concerning paedophiles in the wake of the murder of 8-year-old Sarah Payne in rural West Sussex in the summer of 2000 (The Guardian, 4 July 2000). Social anxieties concerning paedophiles reached such a pitch that lone adult males and families were driven from their homes during a naming and shaming campaign against alleged child sex offenders (The Guardian, 11 August 2000). In 1876, a Blackburn barber, William Fish, sexually assaulted, murdered and dismembered a young girl. This crime, headlined as either ‘THE BLACKBURN MURDER’ or ‘THE BLACKBURN TRAGEDY’ in the regional press, like the more recent case excited universal condemnation. It was regarded as ‘one of the most diabolical outrages of modern times’, and the Liverpool Mercury reported (15 August 1876) that special trains were laid on to transport people from all parts of Lancashire to the trial in Liverpool, where ‘persons in all walks of life’ clamoured for tickets for admission to the court. Yet this case failed to generate wider fears about the safety of children. This was in part due to the fact that the crime was considered so unusual and that the culprit, Fish, who had been captured quickly, was himself regarded as distinctly singular in terms of his upbringing and his physical appearance. He had, it was reported, fallen 40 feet from an aqueduct as a child, leaving a permanent indentation in his skull. He was perceived to be different, if not monstrous, and his very appearance almost explained the monstrosity of the crime, a fact confirmed by the subheading of a report on his and another’s execution, ‘PHRENOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF FISH AND THOMPSON’. The description that followed not only helped the reader to visualise Fish, it also confirmed h...