Becky Watts murder

Anyway... back to the feminist discussion of the issues.....

This piece by Sarah Ditum in the New Statesman is really good, using this case to talk about porn and how it's affects are being felt.

Why should women be associated as a murderer just because they happen to be in a dysfunctional relationship with a man who murders?

My problem with the headline in my OP link is that both are seen to be killers.

She is not a killer, Matthews is.

A killer she is not.

Barbarian mum- I suppose it's a chicken and egg type thing. Perhaps people are draw to violent porn because of those dormant seeds.

Also like a lot of things we only tend to hear about these things once something like this has happened. Abit like drug abuse/ use. How regularly do we hear about people who like porn (maybe not really violent stuff) but have no issues with relationships or views of women.

I don't believe I said he wasn't abusive. I said we didn't know how abusive or controlling the relationship was (and I completely agree that common sense indicates it was abusive and controlling to some degree).

And yes, my reference to folie a deux was speculation. But then, suggesting Hoare was controlled to the point she should escape some or all responsibility is also a speculation.

There are always other factors but without the porn (and yes sometimes the gaming) to normalise a world view where women are there to be used, abused and disgarded, I do wonder how often these 'dark seeds' of abuse would lie dormant. I find it pretty hard to believe that anyone could regularly enjoy porn of women being raped, tortured and degraded without it affecting their real life view of women, sexual appitites and relationships.

My point is really that to do these horrific things to people I think there has to be something else going on other than liking violent porn( as an example, substitute video games, books, rap music). If these killers didn't watch violent porn then something else would take its place and become just as damaging. You have to be of a certain mind set ( I can't think of a better way to describe it)to do these things. If you've got that mind set then I think any number of things will set you off.

I've played video games for over 20 years, Most of those games have been extremely violent. I've never killed someone, never even really been in a fight. What's stopped me from becoming a killer? A lot of things I'm sure but amongst them are my fairly stable up bringing, the fact that I've had no real significant trauma. I wonder how many sadistic killers can say the same thing.

Of course the other factor is he strangled a 16 yr old girl and chopped up her body.

But yeah, he wasn't abusive or anything .

Whilst not pinning all sexual and violent crime (from harrassment upwards) against women on porn, I think it is a huge contributing factor.

"We can't actually say how abusive and controlling the relationship was..." We can actually. We can listen to what he was saying and look at his behaviour. He was kidnapping Becky because he believed she "needed to be taught a lesson". He had an "unhealthy obsession" with teenage girls. He started his relationship with Hoare when she was a teenager and he was much older.

You could believe that all those things are unrelated and really he was a great guy and totally misunderstood or you could piece together a jigsaw of what he was like.

It's a continuum with porn. It is known that that men who use porn (especially violent porn) lose empathy with women. Yes that isn't going to manifest itself in every case to turn them into murderers. But it is never going to be a good thing.

Similar to playing violent video games.

So at one end of the spectrum you have men with sexist views, looking at women as sexual objects rather than full human beings. At the other end you have men becoming sexually violent and murdering.

Joanna Yeats's murderer: another man, in Bristol using violent porn who kills a woman. Just for the record.

Undoubtedly there is a correlation Elendon but then there could be a correlation with eating bread or drinking tea as well. Those things don't make people kill people.

IMO it's dangerous to pin all of this epidemic on a single thing. People have been killing each other forever, long before the Internet became so wide spread.

Besides that a 22 year old having sex with a 14 year old is considered rape.

No, it isn't, it is considered unlawful sexual intercourse.

We can't actually say how abusive and controlling the relationship was, because not much evidence was led about it. And we can't say that abuse and control were the only or even the main reasons why Hoare participated. It could have been fear, and then again, it could have been that the two of them shared certain proclivities-a folie a deux like the Wests. And it could have been an unholy combination of all sorts of things.

Think about it from a public policy point of view. For very serious offences of sex and violence, is it really desirable to allow people to argue their way out of legal culpability by alleging abuse in any but very extreme circumstances? Surely we all think that people have a responsibility to refrain from those kinds of acts, however difficult that must be, and we reflect this in the law and in sentencing policy?

I'm sure it doesn't help but you can't lay all the blame at porns door IMO. Look at the figures in that article, estimated in 2012 that 50000 to 60000 individuals downloaded child abuse images. Why aren't all those individuals going out and abusing, mutilating and murder people? Plenty of people watch all kinds of porn and function "normally".

Whether people are blaming books, games, movies or porn for these horrific acts, I always think that while it doesn't help, if you are that way inclined already anything can set you off.

From a feminist pov the stand out issue for me is how a use of violent porn was followed by a horrific crime.

^^This more than anything.

"It's an absolutely horrible case and I do agree that the women involved in these cases - Myra Hindley being the premier example - are judged very harshly, more harshly than male partners would be."

What? Myra always had a lot of apologists and even campaigns to get her released in a way that Brady has never had.
Sure, plenty of people judged her harshly (righly so), but not worse than Brady.
It might happen, but I don't think in the example you chose.

Yes even the mail went with the pornography as being an issue.

I think you need to have more sympathy for Becky and her family, than with the perpetrators in this one.