The Words We Use Are More Important Than Ever
The sentencing remarks in the Sarah Everard case raise questions about how we think of victims.
The horrific Sarah Everard case reached a conclusion the other day when Wayne Couzens was sentenced to a whole-life term for her murder. Of course questions continue to be asked about what is to be done to address violence against women and why institutional failings within the Metropolitan Police are being swept under the carpet.1
In the meantime there has been some debate over how Everard was described by Lord Justice Fulford in his sentencing remarks. The judge stated that:
“Sarah Everard was a wholly blameless victim…”
For Catherine Bennett, writing in The Observer, this exacerbated the distress:
“Everard was, Lord Justice Fulford said, “a wholly blameless victim”. Ah. The other sort – the woman who contributes to her own death at the hands of a pitiless stranger – evidently lives on in the mind of the senior judiciary.”
This criticism of the judge was itself then queried by legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg who wrote:
“What Bennett has clearly forgotten is that Sarah Everard was blamed extensively online for contributing to her own death. Malicious trolls claimed, entirely falsely, that she knew her killer and had agreed to engage in dangerous sexual activity with him.”
I don’t think Bennett has ‘clearly forgotten’ anything. If a victim did, for example, know their killer; even consented to dangerous sexual activity, does that mean that she is no longer blameless? Of course not and this is why the use of wording related to blame is so inappropriate in the context of a female murder victim.
Rozenberg previously wrote about Lord Justice Fulford in The Guardian where he summarily predicted that misconduct charges (where the judge was alleged to have supported a campaign group that wanted the law changed to permit sex between adults and children) would be dismissed before the investigation was even concluded. Those charges were indeed subsequently dismissed but the failure in mainstream legal commentary to provide a robust critique of the judiciary is what allows problematic views to remain.
According to Rozenberg (whose wife wrote the book The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male) the judge “deserves respect” for his attempt to “set the record straight” about Everard not knowing her killer. He suggests that this might have been better spelled out but my understanding is that the defence never suggested that this was the case, such rumours were never reported in the media and were only repeated by a small number of online trolls. The idea of ‘blamelessness’ did not need elaboration, it needed to not be there.
That is the point that Bennett is making in her piece. By using the word “blameless” Fulford is not deliberately seeking to cause distress but when people took to the streets following Sarah Everard’s death, this type of discourse was exactly what they were trying to eliminate.
We have a special episode of the podcast this week that includes the audio from an interview that I gave recently to https://www.law101.info/. I discussed my career, advice for law students and how I would change the law myself.
Episode link: http://uklawweekly.com/interview-with-law101-info/
Make a difference today,
Marcus
Today another serving officer, David Carrick, has been charged with rape.
At last, a fan of jurisprudence. This was favourite part of studying for law degree.