Forget serial killers — here's why victims are the new stars of crime
I t starts with a girl, usually. A young one, probably white, invariably beautiful. Silent, obviously, because she's dead — murdered by some psychopath. But fear not: here comes the handsome, world-weary detective with a bottle of Scotch in his bottom drawer, ready to catch that killer.
We've all seen this film, and the limited series. We've probably read the book too. But in recent years, as we've become more conscious of the scale of male violence against women, it's all started to feel a bit, well, uncomfortable. In such a climate, is there even a place for murder any more? Are psychopaths officially cancelled?
A new wave of films, books and television is doing crime differently, with women, once pushed to the sidelines, coming to the fore. There is more interest in the psychology of the survivor. It seems victims are the new killers.
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29 minutes ago
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Hail the brave, defiant women who rightly shame their attackers
'Let them see what they've done.' On the flight back to Washington after her husband's assassination, that was Jackie Kennedy's reason for refusing to clean herself up and change out of that famous pink suit. It was spattered with blood, powdered bone and brain tissue, her stockings were soaked and her face was smeared with gore but she insisted on stepping off the plane bearing her battle scars for the world's cameras to record. The ensemble itself, the bloodied stockings folded into a white towel, is preserved in a climate-controlled vault outside Washington. Almost nobody has seen it since that day and, on the Kennedy family's strict instructions, the vault will not be opened for decades to come. Why didn't she change out of those bloodstained garments on the way back? It's a three-hour flight from Dallas to Washington and yet she sat there all the way in that suit, with the blood stiffening on her clothes, its metallic smell thickening the air, rather than wash and change to make herself presentable. She was clearly a woman who took great pride in her glamour — it must have gone against every instinct to appear in public in such a degraded state. Hours earlier she'd been first lady, a fashion icon, radiant in her custom-made outfit; now she was a widow, dishevelled, stained and dirty, a sight to horrify and repel rather than charm and attract. There must have been some, back in the day, who considered her display hysterical and unseemly, unbecoming to someone of her status. Not much has changed in the 60-odd years since. Women in the public eye are still expected to present themselves in a manner never required of men, and attractive women are under an added obligation to be decorative, as if to do otherwise were a defiance of their purpose. Sinéad O'Connor shaved her head to thwart industry executives who she feared prized her good looks above her music. Youth and beauty, for all the strides we've made, are still considered a woman's most valuable capital; old and ugly are the insults most often flung at contrary or controversial females to put them in their proper place. An Irish Times letter writer last week described how her 81-year-old mother confronted a man on Sandycove beach for breaching a ban on dogs in the bathing area, as he had two large hounds roaming free. His response was to put a heavy chain lead around the elderly woman's neck and tell her she was the only dog on the beach. The most striking image of the past week, for me, was the picture of Alanna Quinn Idris on her way to court to confront one of the thugs who blinded her in an unprovoked attack four years ago. She is an exceptionally beautiful young woman and, with the wind lifting her curls into a black halo, she looked like an ancient warrior goddess, striding into the criminal courts in Dublin in pursuit of justice. But her beauty was not being deployed for the male gaze or admiration; instead, she was deliberately subverting convention by displaying, to horrify, and even repel us, the evidence of her injuries. And it is shocking to see: her dead eye, a white orb in her lovely face, challenging, defiant and uncompromising. The author Salman Rushdie also lost an eye, in a stabbing attack provoked by the Satanic Verses fatwa during a speaking event in New York in 2022. He wrote a memoir, Knife, in which he reflected deeply on the incident and laid bare the chilling detail of the injury. His eye, he said, was left dangling on his cheek 'like a soft-boiled egg', and the lids are now stitched closed. But in public, he covers his wound with a darkened spectacle lens or an eye patch. 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