Friday, August 28, 2009 

Monsters everywhere.

I presume then, now that Jacyee Lee Dugard has escaped from 18 years of captivity, along with the two children fathered by her alleged kidnapper, that the nation's finest media organisations will inform us that this was the sort of thing that could only happen in closed, post-authoritarian societies where questions go unasked, secrets remain secrets and tents, outbuildings and sheds are permanently closed, while others will suggest that the police should be arming themselves and start searching sheds across the nation, should any others like Dugard be hidden from view.

Or considering that most of those who indulged in such fantasies after the discovery of what Josef Fritzl had been subjecting his daughter to in Austria are rather fond of and think America to be vastly superior to both this country and Europe, maybe they'll just tone down the rhetoric slightly.

P.S. A rather meatier piece concerning today's Sun front page is over on The Sun - Tabloid Lies.

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Tuesday, March 17, 2009 

I stared into the cold, dead eyes of unpopular journalism...

As well as being exploitative and revolting, the coverage of the Fritzl trial has also delivered some simply shockingly bad journalism. The Guardian, despite its crowing about the only British broadsheet in the courtroom, has at least tried to remove all sensationalism and cod personal insights from its reports, even if the sub-editor behind the headline was not as subtle. The same, unsurprisingly, cannot be said for the Sun, or the other papers that led with the impossibly precise figure of 4,000 rapes, but Brian Flynn's piece in places has to be read to be believed:

I STARED into the cold, blue eyes of incest fiend Josef Fritzl yesterday — and saw not a flicker of remorse or shame.

Fritzl had lowered the blue file binder he used to hide his face from photographers when he entered court.

The power-crazed monster, who regards females as objects to dominate and abuse, was finally confronted by two women who will decide his fate

Yet, with a sick discipline learned from the Nazi heroes of his youth, he simply gazed ahead, expressionless, for more than two hours.

...

As the public section of the trial ended yesterday, Fritzl reached for his blue folder and held it against his face once more.

It was as if he believed that no one was going to see into his soul.

But he was too late for those of us in court who had already fixed upon his eyes.

I was in no doubt I had seen the most evil man on earth.


Even Craig Brown might have baulked at satirising a humourless, puffed-up journo in such a fashion, thinking that no one would believe one could write such utter meaningless twaddle dressed up as an actual news report. Fritzl will remain the most evil man on earth until the Sun finds the next one, who should be along a couple of days from now.

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Monday, March 16, 2009 

Fritzl and media saturation.

There really is nothing quite like some good old fashioned humbug. The same media which rejoiced in the Josef Fritzl story, covering every sordid detail of the 24-year long abuse of his daughter even as it proclaimed itself shocked and horrified at what he had done, while chomping at the bit to ascribe to Austria as a whole the blame for the man, is now covering his trial in the same fashion. This should be one of those occasions where the media just leaves well alone, lets justice take its course and leaves the shattered family in peace, but of course someone somewhere would cover it, so therefore all of them have to. The Guardian is even crowing about being the only "broadsheet to have a correspondent in court throughout the trial", as if that's something to proud about. The person who abused therefore has his audience, through which the abuse can be continued and extended, even if for the last time.

This is nothing more than voyeurism of the worst kind, purveying the peversions to a salivating audience whilst pretending to simply be providing a public service. Then again, when you have the likes of Peter Hitchens saying with a straight face that women who are raped when drunk have to bear some of the responsibility, it's not entirely surprising that the Fritzl story has been proved to be so amazingly popular.

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Thursday, November 27, 2008 

The Sheffield incest case, Baby P and Josef Fritzl.

It would be nice to imagine that the fairly restrained coverage so far over the case of the father who abused and raped his two daughters for the best part of three decades is out of embarrassment at the tidal wave of judgemental coverage earlier in the year over Josef Fritzl. Our finest media denizens, after all, informed us that such a level of abuse going unnoticed was the kind of thing that could only happen in a closed, post-authoritarian society where questions go unasked, secrets remain secrets and cellars are permanently closed. Lorraine Kelly, getting into the spirit of such things, suggested that the Austrian police "should start arming themselves with pickaxes, torches and strong stomachs and start searching those cellars". The Daily Mail is even referring to the father as the "British Fritzl", as though his reign of terror, which lasted longer than Fritzl's, was somehow inspired or just our version of Austria's national shame.

Granted, Fritzl's was just one of three cases emerging from Austria which involved the locking up and abuse of children, although one of those was something of a stretch as it involved a mentally ill mother imprisoning her sons, rather than the more sickening caging of young women for years on end, as occurred in the Natascha Kampusch case. Even so, the coverage was predicated on the idea that this was the sort of thing that didn't and couldn't occur in own backyard, and also showcased our own understandable obsession, some would suggest even fetish for extracting every drop of retribution out of those countries which turned fascist, especially ones which have not quite faced up to their past in the way that Germany itself has, with the Nazi angle being played up as an explanation for why Fritzl became the man he did. Admittedly, he himself used it as an excuse, and that is often enough for the more lazy among us to conclude that must have been it, especially if the person themselves says so.

This though always reflected a rather deceitful decision to overlook our own "monsters", which every society, regardless of its culture, government or society creates. The ultimate example was Fred and Rose West, where a married couple connived to molest and murder young women, and which we already seem to have almost forgotten. Such crimes, and such individuals are of course extraordinarily rare, but when it came to Fritzl and Kampusch the media tended to overlook that the uncovering of such crimes close together was coincidental rather than indicative of a moral malaise in Austrian society. After all, it made for great copy, and that in our current media climate seems to be far more important than taking a step back and examining such things calmly. We connect and correlate rather than detach and research.

While the coverage yet could step up if further revelations of incompetence or failings emerge in the Sheffield incest case, for want of a better way of describing the crimes committed by the father, as all those involved are quite rightly being protected from the media intrusion which they would come under were they to be named, it doesn't seem likely to reach the critical mass which the Baby P story has undoubtedly reached. This is itself ought to be confusing: without a shadow of a doubt this is a case far more shocking, disgusting and frightening than that involving Baby P. The abuse he suffered went on only for a relatively short period of time by comparison, as did the social services involvement with him. Here we are talking about almost 30 years of continuous abuse, contact with the public services and up to 19 pregnancies, all of which went by without anyone doing enough investigation into who was impregnating two sisters on such a regular basis. Even on the lowest level, the abuse of the two sisters was more insidious than that even inflicted on Elisabeth Fritzl by her father: she was after all imprisoned in the family basement. No such physical manacles prevented the two women in this case from escaping; theirs, to quote Blake, were of the mind forged variety. The terror of their father, and what would happen to them, perhaps even to him, imprisoned them far more ably than the construction which Fritzl developed to constrain his daughter.

One of the reasons why it might well be overlooked is that, after all, the Baby P campaign is still in full swing. The Sun is keeping up the pressure, splashing on it again today. You can only tend to keep one outrage going at a time, in the front of people's minds, about which something must be done. Moreover, because of the nature of the case, there are no faces to which the pain can be attached. It was only once Baby P's face was revealed that the witch-hunt proper swung into action. The best we have at the moment is the almost same digitally altered faces, hiding identities and rendering them inhuman as a result. Also true is that this is not the second case in the same area, as it is with Baby P in Haringey. Then there is, equally obviously, that Baby P, was well, a baby. Unable to defend himself, with his own mother either complicit or involved in his abuse, it rings the alarm bells of almost any society that the youngest and weakest can be so cruelly treated and failed by those who are meant to be there to protect him. Young mothers themselves and especially women seem to have been instrumental in the campaign, especially disgusted that someone like themselves could apparently have been so heartless towards her own offspring, or so detached as to allow such things to happen to him. Some of it can surely be placed down to the maternal instinct, to empathise with the child failed by her own mother. That the empathy does not extend to the social workers involved raises its own questions, who are derided as foolish or stupid for believing lies, with the abuse being so apparently obvious.

Those are the more prosaic reasons. Perhaps the ones closer to truth for why it will fail to have the same impact as Baby P, and I might well be proved completely wrong in this, is that while his death and mistreatment has led all the usual suspects to jump to their pre-ordained conclusions, the abuse of the two daughters in this case has no easy scapegoats to castigate. We're not just dealing with one or two doctors or two or three social workers who must be instantly sacked for all our sakes, but with officials and public servants going all the way back to the 1970s. We haven't got the evil mother who left her husband and shacked up with a simple Nazi, who browsed porn on the internet and played poker while her child suffered, but instead the more familiar abusive father. Likewise also, while even though Baby P was born into what was a dysfunctional if nuclear family, the matter of parentage didn't really matter, as single parents and the apparent loose morals of the mother, or of those like her were condemned even if they were irrelevant. In the Sheffield incest case we appear to have an extended nuclear family, which certain politicians and newspapers inform us is the only real way to bring up children, and that anything else helps contribute towards the broken society. Although benefits may have been involved, with the Mail alluding to the father collecting the child benefit from his incestuous offspring, in Baby P's case the welfare state had quite obviously contributed towards his predicament. Here instead the father seems to have been a local businessman, involved in construction, which helped him to move from place to place, evading suspicion.

Ultimately, it might come down to the fact that it isn't so easy in this instance to blame a "leftie mafia", as Trevor Kavanagh called them. The years of rape began in 1981, two years after Thatcher's victory and sixteen before the Conservatives eventually lost. Even if you want to try to blame Sheffield itself, as Haringey has been, it's not so easy to do so years after the fact, although the red flag did fly briefly from the council building during that time. They also lived in Lincolnshire, which is fairly equally split between Labour and Conservative MPs, while the council is at the moment Conservative. You can't so convincingly, as Melanie Phillips attempted, argue that those really with blood on theirs hands were the "progressive intelligentsia who have simply written orderly, married, normative family life out of the script". Orderly, married, apparently normative family life in this instance covered up the abuse. Accordingly, you can't really say that the "ultimate responsibility lies with them [Labour] and the Guardianistas they have created in every section of public life."

Whilst then we have an apparent mirror image of the Fritzl case, we have none of the soul-searching and introspection that country underwent following the discovery. We are perhaps exhausted from the witch-hunt over Baby P, where the underclass reared its ugly head, benefits were seen to be partially responsible and where the political correctness and naivety of social workers could be blamed for the failure to protect him. The Sheffield incest case ought to be an example of how such abuse and failings can happen almost anywhere, in the most apparently normal of families when viewed from the outside. It ought to suggest that all of our assumptions, whether left-wing or right-wing, can often be proved completely inadequate when it comes to the crunch; that we shouldn't imagine that these sort of things can only be possible in dark, uncaring places such as Austria, or only in the benighted council houses of Tottenham. All of this really ought to be just that, apparent. Instead we're so interested in finding someone or something to blame that we skip past the point where we examine why these things happen where they do and how to learn from them. There will always be cases like that involving Baby P, just as there will be those like Josef Fritzl. We create our own monsters, and only by realising that our society and culture as a whole influences them, not just sections of it which we wish to demonise, will we ever be able to move on from the blame game.

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Thursday, May 08, 2008 

Each society has - and creates - its own monsters.

The Josef Fritzl story has now been running for almost two weeks, and the tabloids show no sign of scaling back their coverage. That in itself is astonishing - it's almost unheard of for a story that doesn't in some way involve either Britons or Americans to keep the notoriously nationalistic press in such raptures for such a period of time. The last time such a story did capture the lurid and ghoulish imagination in such a way was when Natascha Kampusch escaped, conveniently for every tabloid writer in the land in the same country as Fritzl committed his perversions.

The story itself, all those involved, and the response to it both by the press and indeed those now under arrest could not be more suited to the modern media age. With Natascha Kampusch, the media assumed that she would be frightened, afraid and easily malleable, able to get all the juicy but suitably horrific details without much effort. As it turned out, despite her incarceration for 8 years, she proved to be a fiercely independent, intelligent young woman who refused to sell her story and asked the media to leave her alone. This time round everything has been different, possibly because the "monster" in this case declined to kill himself once his secret had been exposed. Both the Austrian police and Fritzl's lawyer have been more than helpful to the media, giving updates on how Elisabeth and her children are progressing, revealing that the younger ones don't so much speak as grunt, while Fritzl himself has been pouring his heart out, apparently informed of how the media have decided that he isn't an especially nice person and determined to prove that he loved his daughter and their children as only an incestuous father who locked them in the cellar can. There has been absolutely no room for subtlety, for any of the more unpleasant details which could be overlooked to be discarded, to let the complete unpleasantness of the case to be watered down and then the coverage scaled back. After all, if it didn't sell papers they wouldn't be saturated with it, would they?

If such diligence went into reporting the mechanics of the European Union, we might not be so ignorantly informed of it, and I hold myself in the category. It hasn't simply been enough though for the tabloids to publish the stomach-turning, blow-by-blow account of what Fritzl did to his daughter however; instead it's been open season on Austria as a whole. To an extent, this has been because the country itself has obviously been shocked to the core by one of its own citizens constructing a prison in his basement for his daughter without anyone becoming suspicious for 24 years, even while she apparently dumped her unwanted children on the doorstep without anyone ever catching a glimpse of her, but Austria's understandable introspection has been a boon to the armchair psychologists here. For most, it simply comes back to the Nazis, a view encouraged both by Fritzl himself, who in his latest dispatch has blamed his inclination for discipline and order on growing up during the Anschluss and second world war. Kampusch, in an interview with Newsnight, also suggested that the control and subjugation of women during the Nazi era might also have been a contributory factor. Again, this is partially to do with our own continuing obsession with WW2 and the Nazis as much as it is with Austria's own not as resounding renunciation and guilt for the crimes committed over 60 years ago. However much the years of Nazi rule still haunt Europe, to still be blaming them now for incredibly rare but brutally visceral crimes is a refusal to look not just as modern society, but also into the minds of both those responsible and the victims' themselves.

Of course, even doing that results mainly only in cod-psychological answers, and Fritzl's own bringing up of his mother will do nothing to alter the emerging stock Oedipal and Freudian explanations for his crime. It is at least more worthy than blaming Austrian society as a whole, as some of the press have taken to doing. According to them, as Brendan O'Neill writes, Austria is a look-away society; its inhabitants wary of too much familiarity, and they don't care about what's happening next door. Even if this were true, this is astounding hypocrisy from the likes of the Mail and the Sun, who when not feigning shock at the apparent indifference and lack of questioning by Fritzl's neighbours rail against the nanny state, social workers, local councils and anyone who denigrates from the view that an Englishman's home is his castle. O'Neill concludes with:

The truth is that the Fritzl horror reveals precisely nothing about the Austrian people - but the rabid reaction to the Fritzl horror reveals a great deal about the sense of loss, confusion, desperation and chauvinism amongst opinion-formers here at home.

The only part I would demure from is that while it may not tell us anything about the Austrian people as a whole, it will obviously tell us something about Austrian society. Those who go on to commit notorious crimes are shaped not just by their upbringing and their family but also by their country at large - and let's face it, we're hardly slouches in that regard. We can go all the way back to Jack the Ripper, whose crimes in effect created the media obsession with murder and killers, but our more modern "monsters", if viewed through the same prism as Austria is currently being judged by, hardly show us up as being any less guilty. From Myra Hindley and Ian Brady to Peter Sutcliffe, Dennis Nielsen, Colin Ireland and perhaps most pertinently, Fred and Rose West, in most of the cases warning signs were ignored, or those nearby didn't suspect anything, even if they thought their neighbours were a bit strange or different. The closest we've perhaps come to Austria's current mood and navel-gazing was the James Bulger case, which like Fritzl's was an almost uniquely terrible and perplexing crime which has not been repeated. If anything, that crime led to the "prison works" mantra and our continuing obsession with locking ever more individuals up, despite all the evidence to the contrary and the fact that Bulger's killers were released after what were only relatively short sentences.

Furthermore, all nations have their own inherited monsters, whose cases and crimes continue to shock generation after generation: America has Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, not to mention the more recent, even more troubling school shooting killers such as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and last year, Seung-Hui Cho; Japan has Futoshi Matsunaga and Tsutomu Miyazaki; Belgium has Marc Dutroux; France Michel Fourniret and Russia Andrei Chikatilo. We ourselves have the ignoble distinction of having Harold Shipman, possibly the serial killer with the highest number of victims which we know about. There was little questioning of society as a whole when his crimes were exposed; rather, it was the health service that was called into question. As Stuart Jeffries has written, perhaps our lack of mulling over such crimes tells us more about ourselves than it does the Austrians. Even after Diana, which some saw as the moment when the cliched stiff-upper lip was shed, our capability for self-criticism has not developed in such a way. Sure we're renowned for our self-deprecation, and we can why-oh-why about how our public services are rubbish, but when it comes to us ourselves we're far more defensive. Back when Steve Wright was committing his crimes in Ipswich, a town which could be described similarly to how Amstetten has been if you were so inclined, the slightest amount of questioning about how those women came to be on the street was answered by the likes of Richard Littlejohn who declared we were not all guilty and that the death of the five prostitutes was no great loss. Elsewhere, the liberals were (inevitably) those who got the blame. At the time the Sun complained about how some of the coverage was more sensitively referring to the women as "sex workers"; once the trial was out of the way and political capital was to be made, one of those women's mothers was used to demand the restoration of capital punishment and removal of the human rights act, two of the policies that might just signify our move towards a more civilised society.

Partly this is because our current fears have moved on from killers such as Wright, and even paedophiles such as Ian Huntley to that other bogeyman: the binge drinking, ferret-faced yob, ready to kick anyone to death for so much as looking at them in the wrong way. Similarly though, we care little about why the yob is why he is; all the debate is on what should be done to them after the event or what the punishment should be when they first step out of line, with epithets such as Broken Britain being thrown in when they know it isn't true but is a catchy soundbite. Hence why Fritzl is so attractive to the tabloids: an incredibly easy story to cover without having to get into such unpleasantries as thinking about ourselves and where we're going when we can do the same about the foreigners who are yet to get beyond their Nazi heritage. Even the recent Shannon Matthews case, rather than wondering about how estate had got how it had, or whether it really was as bad as they were making out instead concentrated on how awful they were rather than anything towards a solution. Thinking takes time; relying on prejudices takes moments.

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