AIBU to be annoyed by this?

[falcon]

We recently had an attack on a woman here in Glasgow, she was viciously assaulted and it's getting the appropriate publicity.

However what annoys me is that in every report they refer to the woman as a prostitute.

Does it really matter if she's a prostitute or a 'respectable' finance manager?

Is she of less importance because of her job?I think not, so why must they constantly make mention of it when they could just say 29 year old woman instead?

I understand it's of course relevant to the police and their enquries, but perhaps not so relevant to the general public.

It seems to me that it's almost a way of saying, it didn't happen to one of us, we nice normal respectable people.

Ext - that men who kill prostitutes hate women in general, but vent their hatred on prostitutes because of their availability.

If the murder had happened as a bank robbery gone wrong, the report would likely say "Cashier murdered in bank robbery". If the crime/event can be linked to the work of the murdered then it it seen as relevant, rightly or wrongly. "Accountant in fraud case" etc etc. Therefore if the murder was linked to her being a prostitute then it is relevant. I agree, if a prositute was run over by a bus in an event unrelated to her job then it would be odd to read "Prostitute run over by bus" if the story or event bore no relation to her job at all.

If the headline was "Cashier murdered in bank robbery" would the OP be annoyed?
If not why not? As someone else said, it could say more about one's own prejudices as such to focus on the prositute element. Sort of reverse snobbery IYSWIM. Possibly.

I don't care if the report says woman, prositute, cashier - if it's a sad story of their death then I feel very sorry for that person and their family. I personally don't care what the report says they do for a living, just sorry for them that it happened.

that is imo a sixth-form view of human psychology.

I do agree to some extent there ext - it's also about who owns the papers and what is in their best interests'

think -murdoch- nightmare on kinnock street

sorry, second sentence should read "If the crime/event can be linked to the work of the person" not murdered.

yep noonks, and also agree with mimi about drugs. poor women, really.

Really? Why?

off to bed ex - think we are basically on the same wavelength?!

cos it sounds like you've seen an episode of cracker and memorised a few lines of the script, mable. your point, might i remind you, is that the woman's miserable job is not relevant to her demise, and then you've proposed that all men who kill prostitutes hate all women but find prostitutes easy to come by. no doubt this is true of some, but it's ludicrous to suggest that it's a well-known fact about all men who kill prostitutes.

course, noonki, always were. don't leave me with mable, we'll fight.

The suffolk killer was violent to his ex wives though. He was a thorough misogynist. But this does not mean that he didn't have a special hatred for prostitutes.l He never talked about his motives so we'll never know.

I don't watch crime series at all, Ext, for your information, but I do read a wide variety of newspapers and other journals in which this theory has been widely discussed. I will leave you to do the googling. Nowhere did I say it was a fact (if such a thing exists in psychology).
Neither of us can speak about all killers, but the cases I know of women other than prostitutes WERE killed or attacked by the killer so to label someone a "prostitute killer" can be dangerously misleading.

I would think it's far more dimensional that just hating women in general.

It could be about having control over another human (male or female) luring them with the prospect of money as the substitute for real power. It could be about feelings of inadequacy with prositutes being an easy route to an acceptance of sorts. It could be that the person targets prositutes as he sees them as being below him when he suspects he is the lowest in many people's eyes.

None of these are to do with hating women necessarily.

sorry, no... you said 'common knowledge' not 'a common theory'. that most definitely implies fact.

Lol Ext, am also off to bed - have hardly spoken to dh all night!

Well I stand corrected! And no, common knowledge does not imply fact.

why on earth would that make you lol?

knowl·edge (nlj)
n.

1. The state or fact of knowing.

yes, it does.

Lol was at your post to noonki at 22.57.

Can I please go to bed now?

keep reading, mable.

Obviously not.

No, going to disagree again. One programme I do watch occasionally is QI, and while I have serious doubts as to the veracity of some of the stuff they say, what is blindingly obvious is that there is a lot of knowledge that could be described as 'common', i.e. widely known about, that is very far from being fact.

ofgs. it was YOU who said it was common knowledge 'that men who kill prostitutes hate women in general, but vent their hatred on prostitutes because of their availability.'

YOU presented it as fact. why on earth would you say something was 'common knowledge' if what you were saying was that it was 'widely known but very far from being fact'? you're not making any sense at all.

Er, perhaps you're both right?!

I get what Marble is trying to say (the statement is not completely unfounded I wouldn't think) however I get Ext's annoyance at the blanket approach that the statement is presented as a fact as such.

Maybe it is common knowledge that sometimes "men who kill prostitutes hate women in general, but vent their hatred on prostitutes because of their availability".

But there are many other complex reasons why men kill prositutes.

Plus the phrase "common knowledge" lends weight to an argument, is easy to use but difficult to account for.

well i've already acknowledged that it may be correct that a man hates all women but chooses prostitutes as easy prey, but i don't see how mable can possibly present this as 'common knowledge'.

plus, this is from an earlier post of mable's. again, not much theory, just a bafflingly confident statement of fact.

"By mablemurple on Fri 01-Aug-08 22:20:41
But the killer is not killing prostitutes because he hates prostitutes, he hates women, it's just that it's EASIER to kill prostitutes! So to report that it's just prostitutes that are being killed IS irrelevant."

I see your point Ext. It is an incredibly sweeping statement which would have benefitted from "in my opinion" to precede it. Otherwise the statement is speaking for whom? All?

Trouble is Mable, common knowledge is very very hard to define, because the subject matter of what entails "common knowledge" varies from person to person - which makes it, er, common only in each person's individual opinion!