Social factors for JTR murders

[Cuervo]

Hi to all,
I recently read this: "Jack the Ripper came along when Britain was at the leading edge of cultural diversity and change".

Appart from this (supposing an agreement) What social and cultural factors do you think may have played an effect on the emergence of a killer such JTR?

[Errata]

Hi to all,
I recently read this: "Jack the Ripper came along when Britain was at the leading edge of cultural diversity and change".

Appart from this (supposing an agreement) What social and cultural factors do you think may have played an effect on the emergence of a killer such JTR?

Well, define what you mean by "a killer such as JTR". I mean, he was a serial killer not terribly unlike other serial killers. He has neither the distinction of being the first nor the worst, nor was anything about him particularly unique. He has the benefit of being considered one of the great all time unsolved mysteries, but I don't think that's what you mean.

[Adam Went]

Well the thing is that these changes had been happening for decades, right throughout the Victorian era and beyond it, so it's not as though 1888 or the 1880's was isolated in this and therefore it contains some special significance.

There's no doubt that the time and place of JTR's murders make it more interesting and appealing to many people NOW, but as far as JTR himself was concerned, I don't think it would have played a significant role in the murders themselves at the time.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Phil H]

A few social factors I would perceive as relevant:

a) urbanisation as a result of the industrial revolution - 2 or three generations earlier most of the population would have been rural;

b) mass immigration - especially from Eastern Europe and Russia;

c) the creation of slum areas (such as Whitechapel Spitalfields;

d) high unemployment, poverty and destitution;

e) lack of social support or sympathy for sickness etc;

f) the creation of high levels of prostitution as a result of poverty, unemployment and destitution;

g) alcoholism on a large scale as an escape;

f) alienation of the individual - in small rural communities, aberrants would soon be noticed and "dealt with" - the educationally challenged for instance might be given appropriate jobs -with animals. There would have been little or no unemployment and people would have felt valued. and part of the community.

I see JtR, these days - as likely to be someone with limited ability to speak English, low levels of literacy, an alien (i.e.e a foreigner) in a strange land, who has mental problms and a huge chip on his shoulder - perhaps leading to a separation from his family in one of many ways - no sympathy, feeling harrassed or opressed. He would have felt a grudge against the affluence he saw in some compared to his own poverty, lack of employment (or of stimulating satisfying employment) and surplus time on his hands. He may have been sexually contaminated and blamed others (not least prostitutes) for this as for anything/everything else.

Added later:

One might also say that in 1888, Britain had experienced around 100 years of change (since the agrarian revolution of the 1780s, the empire had expanded and London had become a huge melting pot of races and cultures. Thus cultural identity may have been an issue - how to keep pure (racially, religiously etc) as a "Jew" or a moslem or an Indian or whatever? Vast wealth rubbed shoulders with deepest poverty, there was depravity (child sex, prostitution, gay venues etc) but also religious zealotry (in reaction to some of the depravity and poverty but also self-generated). This must have been a hugely volatile environment, especially for a stranger (say from a small Polish village?).

Phil

[kensei]

Just some musings as I was reading this thread- can I make a comparison between JTR and Charles Manson? Both were very much products of the times in which they operated, times which were so extreme they were bound to produce extreme aberations. Late 1960s southern California- hippie culture, sex drugs and rock and roll, free love, do anything you want, young people looking for gurus to help them expand their minds. Insert someone into that mix who had anger running through his veins, someone charismatic who wanted to become a celebrity but who found himself rejected by the celebrity culture of L.A., and you get cult leader Charles Manson who used his followers as weapons to strike out at those he saw as having wronged him. Late 1880s east London- oppressive poverty, squalor, disease, crime, rampant alcoholism, people with no place else to go struggling on a daily basis just to go on existing in that atmosphere. A sector where Victorian norms about sex were tossed out the window because so many desperate women had turned to prostitution as the only means of support they could find, and where so many downtrodden, depressed, and angry men were willing to spend a few pence of their hard-won wages on hiring such services because, dammit, they deserved a cheap thrill now and then. Insert someone into that mix who had serious anger issues with women, possibly stemming from childhood issues, and you get Jack the Ripper.

Both came from poverty. One never rose above it and hunted within the only world he knew, while the other found himself with access to the world of the rich and famous and made his murderous mark there. One used other people to kill for him in spectacular ways, while the other was a loner who very few witnesses ever even saw. But interstingly enough, both used bloody overkill on their victims, both may have used graffitti on walls to spread their message, and both had profound impacts on the cultural minds of their respective times.

[Errata]

Would it be fair to say from the last two posts that the surprise is not so much that a serial killer rose out of such an environment, but that only one rose out of that environment?

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi to all,
I recently read this: "Jack the Ripper came along when Britain was at the leading edge of cultural diversity and change".

Historically this is a fact but it doesn't explain the emergence of Jack the Ripper or the phenomenon of the Whitechapel murders. It's just a description of England of the day, just as saying it was the England of Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes, Queen Victoria, and gas lamps.

Appart from this (supposing an agreement) What social and cultural factors do you think may have played an effect on the emergence of a killer such JTR?

What does explain the Whitechapel Murders is that there was evidently a serial killer at work. The sociocultural reality does not explain this, just as it doesn't explain the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1812, the Yorkshire Ripper of the 1970s to early 1980s, or, in the United States, the Green River Killer or the BTK Killer.

Best regards

Chris

[Errata]

What does explain the Whitechapel Murders is that there was evidently a serial killer at work. The sociocultural reality does not explain this, just as it doesn't explain the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1812, the Yorkshire Ripper of the 1970s to early 1980s, or, in the United States, the Green River Killer or the BTK Killer.

Best regards

Chris

Maybe social and cultural changes or norms don't explain serial killers, but they might explain the serial killer phenomenon. It is in times of great change that we get the really famous ones. The sort of twisted folk-hero legendary serial killers.

I mean Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, none of these guys were really spectacular examples of their kind. Not like Chikatilo or some such. But these are the ones with a kind of weird anti-hero legend attached to them. Everybody knows them. We know Jeffrey Dahmer because he really was sort of spectacular. Ed Gein spectacular, and yet not many know Ed Gein. I can think of four or five people more remarkable than Jack the Ripper, about 20 more remarkable than Manson. But they are not part of the popular culture.

So why these guys? That I think has to do with the times. The industrial revolution and overcrowding isn't going to make a serial killer, but it will probably make him famous.

[Jonathan H]

All of the 'canonical' murders were commited in the 'Evil Quarter Mile' identified abd nicknamed by contemporaneous social reformers; the abyss within the abyss.

Is that just a co-incidence?

[Scorpio]

Hi all,
social factors that i would consider relevant include multi culturalism, where communities with little knowledge of, or sense of responsibilty to, each another. This is exacerbated by industrial slum conditions, which includes a raft of social problems. Lastly is the growth of the media, which certainly fed the myth and possibly the behaviour of the killer himself.

[Cuervo]

Hi to all,

What about an infraculture that may be more open to sexual behaviour, sexual depravation and deviant behaviour? I´m not talking about differences of class, but about a culture which doesn´t show the same sense of alarm we can give nowdays to children and women abuse, prostitution, etc.

[Errata]

Hi to all,

What about an infraculture that may be more open to sexual behaviour, sexual depravation and deviant behaviour? I´m not talking about differences of class, but about a culture which doesn´t show the same sense of alarm we can give nowdays to children and women abuse, prostitution, etc.

You mean like every society from ancient Roman times to about 1946?

[Cuervo]

Hi Errata,
I understand what you mean, but not all societies and historical times are the same in their way of having an infraculture and dealing with it.

[suspiria_2]

one of the few things that make this case different is the light shined upon Jack's activities and the social milieu within which they occurred. we probably had rat droppings and other mystery items in our meat prior to Upton Sinclair's pointing them out, but only after the public read his book did outrage grow so bad that there were organized steps taken to prevent contamination.

we've had all of the above-mentioned things at some time or another before - mass migration/immigration, poverty, slums, prostitution, even serial killers and 'mad fiends'. the only difference that i can see is that, for whatever reason (someone above mentioned the social-reform movement and one would guess the media of the time played into that heavily) these killings were viewed differently than other, similar types of crime before.

i would also hazard a guess that actual, scientifically based investigative techniques being in the early stages had a great deal to do with it. the police in this case had a plan of attack (but not much in the way of ammunition) and tried to catch the killer in an organized fashion. many of the cases i have read about from earlier periods than this seem to have been solved by either sheer luck or confessing co-conspirators.

of those of you who have read more widely, was there any other crime before this where the public was made aware that they had an 'unsub' among them? one imagines that police had some kind of classification like this for criminals long before it came to public attention.

[Errata]

Hi Errata,
I understand what you mean, but not all societies and historical times are the same in their way of having an infraculture and dealing with it.

See, I see it the other way around. The infraculture has historically reacted the same, while the governments and larger societies of the time change laws and punishment. Almost universally prostitution, extramarital affairs, and sexual excess (read misbehavior not otherwise specified) had been accepted as something of a necessary evil. Men have different needs, boys will be boys, street level society had hundreds of ways of rationalizing the behavior of men who broke the rules. The social punishment has almost always been heaped onto the women. Mary Magdalene was going to be stoned, but her clients were left alone. Guinevere was going to be burned at the stake while Lancelot rode home. It's a common theme. In Jack the Ripper's London, prostitutes were blamed for the declining morals of society. Arrests, abuse, even institutionalization and beatings were common to try and clean up the streets, but no one tried to address the clients of these women as part of the problem. They were almost pitied as victims of these amoral women.