Criminology students' obsession with monsters

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Uncomfortable though it is to acknowledge, anyone who has taught criminology will know that the first thing any student wants to talk about is serial killers, preferably at the darkest, most disturbing end of the ‘abnormality’ continuum. What makes them tick? What makes them different? Who is likely to become one and how did it happen? Naturally, the more information you can give students about what various serial killers actually did to their victims, the more engaged they become. Deviance is dead but its ghost continues to haunt us all. Sumner’s seminal obituary to the concept of deviance (1994/2012) exposed it as nothing more than a tool of social control, locating difference within selective pathological narratives serving vested interests but did he underestimate its capacity to feed off the ever-present attractions of the macabre?

For some teachers, it is all too tempting, given the pressures to retain students, to serve up what they expect to discover; you assume that it softens them up – gets them on your side - for the debates you really want to introduce them to. I have been led down that road myself when I first started teaching criminology at night school twenty years ago. Donald 'Pee Wee' Gaskins, whose autobiography was written by a journalist whilst awaiting the electric chair, never fails.

He was the prosaic physically diminutive lorry driver on the Coastal highways of the American South who picked up young girls hitch-hiking and who, within minutes of getting into his cab, would decide who would live and who wouldn’t. The references to ‘walking with God’ and ‘being free’ – only those who actually carry out their fantasies are, he maintained –are indicative and chilling, then add that potent fascination with the perverted mind that can trace its roots back in folklore and religious traditions. Feeding on the horror genre of witches, vampires, werewolves and ghosts, H.P. Lovecraft said of it in 1927: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" ("Supernatural Horror in Literature"). (1) Like those who witnessed the witches trials and subsequent burnings, today’s students relish being confronted by the macabre in all its gory detail.

The trouble with this softening up process is that once you depart from the tit bits with which you have baited your hook, the student never swims with the same enthusiasm in what follows thereafter. The serial killer is what criminology is really about; the other stuff is merely what they need to know for the purposes of getting the piece of paper at the end of the course.

In her essay "Elements of Aversion" (2012), Elizabeth Barrette identifies the need for horror in modern society. There was, she wrote, ".... something missing: the excitement of living on the edge, the tension between hunter and hunted. So we told each other stories through the long, dark nights...when the fires burned low, we did our best to scare the daylights out of each other. The rush of adrenaline feels good. Our hearts pound, our breath quickens, and we can imagine ourselves on the edge". (2)

Against this macabre hinterland of raw, adrenalin fuelled narrative, the emotionally arid terrain of white collar crime, as it has been euphemistically labelled, stands little chance of wetting the appetite except among those who recognise the theatrical sidings into which they have been led. Serving up the serial killer is no more than one of the highly addictive but politically impotent Disney rides that provide the emotional nourishment that capitalism has proved so capable of delivering with such rich rewards for those who devise them. Film directors vie with each other to lift the lid a little more on Pandora’s Box whilst pocketing their billions and promising evermore white knuckle rides to come.

Yet Barrette found in the horror genre something rather promising: "sometimes a story intends to shock and disgust, but the best horror intends to rattle our cages and shake us out of our complacency. It makes us think, forces us to confront ideas we might rather ignore, and challenges preconceptions of all kinds. Horror reminds us that the world is not always as safe as it seems which exercises our mental muscles and reminds us to keep a little healthy caution close at hand".

In terms of what apparently nondescript individuals like Dennis Nilson, who drugged and murdered at least 12 young men in his flat, are capable of and the kind of terrors we ourselves may be subject to, Barrette may be right. A former junior policeman and working as an executive officer in the civil service at the time of his arrest, described as quiet and conscientious, the sheer ordinariness of the serial killer (or the radicalised terrorist, for that matter) is a powerful wake-up call on the interpersonal plane and serves to magnify the horror unexpectedly.

Few female students accept lifts from lorry drivers once they become familiar with Donald Pee Wee Gaskins. However, interpersonal horror was never going to shake the complacency with which most absorb the anonymous horrors of ethnic cleansing, world poverty, enforced economic migration, the callous disregard for the ecosystem of the planet, the willingness of international corporate actors to sacrifice people’s lives for profit, modern day slavery through bonded labour and any other number of obscenities being played out on the macro-political plane in the heartland of the military-industrial complex or among the institutions of capitalist repression. The fate of victims, especially those belonging to ethnic groups we’ve been conditioned to think of as victims, registers far less shock unless they can be connected with the actions of some palpable monster.

Far from rattling the cage, horror placed the key to the door in our own hands and we gladly locked it for fear of what lies outside. Horror, with its escapist litany of folk devils reworked in a contemporary sinuous cornucopia of dystopian anti-heroes ensures that the object of our disgust is sublimated through fictional madmen with designs on world domination, villains with superhuman powers or serial killers prowling the streets looking for their next victim, never dehumanising capitalist world order as it lays waste to us all. The appeal of interpersonal horror is a relatively tame (and taming) game, and students who think otherwise might be very surprised to discover that this is exactly the view of one of the most notorious folk devils of the twentieth century – Ian Brady (below).

The ‘Moors murderers’ Ian Brady and the latter-day ‘witch’ Myra Hindley, tortured and murdered five young children in the 1960s; the 16-minute tape recording made of Lesley Anne Downey screaming and pleading for help made the case all the more horrific. (https://news.sky.com/story/the-moors-murders-the-victims-of-ian-brady-and-myra-hindley-10879310). Described by the trial judge as ‘’two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity’’ and Brady in particular as ‘’wicked beyond belief’’, this was a case that entered into the annals of heinous criminal folklore alongside Jack the Ripper. Referring to his crimes as "recreational killings" from which he derived an "existential experience", who wouldn’t recoil in horror at the thought that murder could reduce to entertainment?

Yet, at a tribunal in 2013 constituted to decide Brady’s mental state many years later, Brady described himself as a ‘petty criminal’ and asked of the mass media: "Why are they still talking about Jack the Ripper after a century?’’ He answered: ‘’Because of the dramatic background, the fog, cobbled streets’’. His crimes had, he said, entered the public conscience in the same way; they bore the same cachet of the macabre, crimes against a backdrop of "Wuthering Heights and the Hounds of the Baskervilles" as he put it. He had been demonised and romanticised over the past half-century by a public obsessed with him. Writing elsewhere, Brady suggested: ‘‘Unfortunately, many people sleepwalk through life without conscious awareness of their own system, if they have one at all, and are therefore susceptible to external notions of right and wrong imposed by others, particularly members of the often eminently unqualified upper class and their support system, mass media.’’ Explaining the public’s ‘endless fascination’ with serial killers, he wrote: ‘’.....they have a vague conception of murder as being somehow mystical, highly dramatic, or even a nebulously romantic experience, replete with unimaginable connotations of eroticism. And guilt for it must be paid for in full’’.

Speaking at his mental health tribunal, Brady asserted "Most people don't recognise the fact that Britain is a psychopathic country. It's been invading countries for the last 300 years.’’ He went to compare himself to “global serial killers and thieves like Blair or Bush”. In his case, he said, each victim’s death had personal value attached to it - a "criminal" would have "given a value to the person he is about to kill’’. The notion of giving a value to a victim is a troubling one, especially when that value is identified as ‘recreational’. However disgusting the thought, it is far, far more disgusting that the death hundreds of thousands (millions?) of civilians in the two Iraq invasions could be described merely as ‘collateral damage’, the accountant’s calculation of value when drawing up a balance sheet showing ‘depreciation’ of assets. Euphemised in this way, mass popular opinion was never going to recoil in shock and revulsion as they would when reading about Brady’s crimes. It is a point that anyone wanting criminology to be about serial killers should heed and we shouldn’t conclude that this is an issue that arises only in the context of war.

To the budding student of criminology, I say look carefully at Brady’s words; they challenge our preconceptions about the kind of horror we focus on compared to that we could be focussing on if only we could overcome our skewed preoccupation with the wretched theatrical violence that capitalist society lays before us every day as entertainment.

For socialism, theatre is part of the world of appearances that is cluttered with preoccupying and entertaining fears, loyalties and obsessions that absorb the awareness of individuals and divide them into groups, to which they then feel they belong, contingent upon well-entrenched sexual, religious, political, economic, racial and culturally divisive narratives. Ironically, even our so-called unique postmodern individuality is played out in an arena of neurotic media-generated attention to personal appearance and the whole panoply of material objects that we are told define the ‘good life’ – Ipods, Ipads, mobile phones, games, cars, toys, clothes, food and diet. Our conversations are dominated by soaps, ‘NEWS’, heinous crimes and crime waves, international terrorism, hoodies, chavs, benefit cheats, sexual performance, Brexit, all mapped out for us by a mass media brimming with anybody’s and everybody’s particular interest or fetish. Society is theatre and our understanding of society internalises false assumptions that control our potential to act: we live in a ‘free society’, there is a ‘free press’, we have ‘democratic institutions’, we are a ‘caring society’, ‘I can do and say what I want’, ‘I am a unique individual’. The assumptions seem so self-evidently true that it becomes difficult even to recognise that they are assumptions at all.

As documented in a series of articles here on CrimeTalk, by Frank Pearce and Steve Tombs,, summarised briefly in Bhopal: criminal immoral or the cost of business as usual? a gas leak incident on the night of 2–3 December 1984 at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India was considered as of 2010 to be the world's worst industrial disaster. (See also the e-book by Pearce & Tombs Bhopal: Flowers at the altar of profit and power available from CrimeTalk Books here ). Over 500,000 people were exposed to methyl isocyanate gas and the highly toxic substance made its way into and around the shanty towns located near the plant. Estimates vary on the death toll but the government of Madhya Pradesh confirmed a total of 3,787 deaths related to the gas release with 558,125 injuries, including 38,478 temporary partial injuries and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries. Another 8,000 or more have since died from gas-related diseases.

It is reported that an on-site engineer had repeatedly warned that the plant was dangerous but his warnings had fallen on deaf, cost-aware ears. Yet this suffering across successive generations caused by criminal negligence and driven by the profit motive was never criminalised in the US. The legacy of destruction of communities where girls affected by the escape of poisonous gas became stigmatised as un-marriageable for fear of genetically compromised offspring meant nothing to a giant US company whose plant was parked in somebody else’s backyard, a backyard doubtless perceived by them to be used to death and privation anyway. One more disaster ‘over there’– so what? – and Bhopal revealed only too well that if value was to be placed on the devastation and mangling of whole communities, it had to be painstakingly extracted from cynical corporate interests and then without any US court ever entertaining civil or criminal liability.

One mother, Krishna Bai, recalled how her sons were blinded by the gas and later died. Left with sight, heart and breathing problems, she got 35,000 rupees ($566; £360) as compensation. Unless other capitalist economic interests are affected – as in the BP oil leak in the South Atlantic – big business is always ready and most adept at burying their greedy disregard for human life in the chicanery of the legal long grass by re-inventing the company under another name, denying the Indian court system jurisdiction and even haggling over the numbers of people who died. Those affected have spent decades of crusading to get justice for themselves and their loved ones, a familiar story when you are killed or maimed by the multinational corporation. More than three decades after the Bhopal gas tragedy, survivors are still fighting for adequate compensation and proper medical treatment for ailments caused by the toxic leak.

For socialists, we all risk being manipulated subliminally, a kind of collective hypnotic trance induced by those who have hijacked the levers of economic power and turned society into their personal playground – those who can and do control conscious awareness in society through the education system and the mass media. Marxists call this ‘ideological domination’ and for that reason regard asking those who read the tabloid press, listen to the news and spend their lives shopping in ‘Next’ what they think as akin to asking the parrot what he means by ‘pretty boy’. Everything in the world of appearances contrives to serve the interests of the dominant economic class: the workers, who create the wealth, living out their lives believing that only in death will they find peace and happiness (Christianity), that blood is thicker than water (family comes before everything), that having your own home and owning a few shares in British Gas means you are sharing in the prosperity of your society and have a real say in what goes on (stakeholders in a property-owning democracy), that failure in the education system is down to individual ability and effort, and that those who are at the top of society deserve to be there (meritocracy), that those at the bottom pose the greatest threat to our safety and well-being (chavs, etc), that politics has got nothing to do with them (‘they’re all the same, aren’t they?’ ‘we’re all in this together?’), that the freeloaders in society are those who claim welfare benefits not those decent and respectable lawyers who created a labyrinthine legal system that they alone on their £400 an hour can understand, that Wonga, etc are really very nice people helping you to survive whilst you’re waiting for that phone call on your zero-hours contract and that those who challenge any of this are dangerous ‘extremists’ or else utopian dreamers not in touch with ‘reality’.

It is challenging but necessary to say that to write the obituary of deviance, we must write the obituary of capitalism itself together with its Nietzschean ‘mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms’. (4) Marx could not have foreseen the subtle and complex ways in which the entrepreneurially creative, elastic and adaptable capitalist superstructure could lead us into the politically supine, highly profitable and culturally bedazzling cul-de-sacs where criminology is – even for those who manage to write good essays about corporate crime – ‘really’ about serial killers and murder most foul, or else about why the working class is so bloody deviant. Serious students of criminology should start by finding out more about what one such killer thought about his own crimes and then, perhaps, they might take a different view? This is, however, easier said than done when A-Level students [16-18 year-olds for our overseas readers] still face the preposterous, mendacious academic snobbery permeating secondary education that ranks the curriculum along a continuum from ‘hard’ (objective, testable knowledge) (Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics) to ‘soft’ (subjective, woolly-minded knowledge) (Art, Media Studies, Sociology).

Conveniently forgetting its Freudian metaphysical origins - as A Level Psychology does - and add ‘forensic’ for good measure and that subject can graze happily in the scientific pasture which many students and their families regard as delivering reputable, ‘proper’ knowledge. Needless to say, top performing students are carefully corralled into science-based subjects from where they become the ‘success’ stories come results day. Wander around schools and you’ll find Psychology students happily profiling the criminal personality of the serial killer, adding a measure of ‘scientific’ gravitas to the underlying salacious interest in the horrors committed by our folk devils. Compared to ‘Bollocksology’ - as some teachers are apt to dub Sociology - Psychology is delivering reliable knowledge even if their university equivalents have yet to construct an index of ‘normality’ and ‘deviance’ that could bear scrutiny either as a theoretical model or as operational guidance for empirical research.

The hard-soft distinction is not, however, just an effect of academic hubris. It reflects the political desire to deliver a data-driven, managed curriculum that can be bureaucratically designed, delivered and measured with teachers stripped of professional autonomy and reduced to grade-chasing operatives. It is hardly surprising that this has left the ‘fraud’ Sociology occupying a disparaged yet still nonetheless potentially intellectually challenging space in the curriculum. Whereas the typical second year A-Level Psychology student will be expected to have detailed factual knowledge of 15 empirical studies providing them with a safely structured terrain in which to operate, the Sociology student traverses a complex theoretical canvas that offers no such security. For example, sociology students may be required to consider whether ‘social class’ remains an objectively defensible ‘reality’ in a post-modern world.

Appealing to the NS-SEC (National Statistics Socio-economic) scale, where the State tells us who is what and why, ducks the ontological issues raised - yet the average A-Level Psychology student who is researching ‘working class’ crime proceeds as though those issues do not exist. The sociological opportunity to operate in a terrain that has fewer pre-set boundaries and where students can potentially think creatively around concepts is certainly much more challenging as well as extremely unnerving for students who prefer safety, yet it remains deeply distrusted and therefore rubbished because it is less easily check-listed into an assessment formula.

The knock-on effect is that neither students nor teachers are expected to think creatively; instead, teachers must learn how managers expect them and their classes to behave within the closely defined parameters of the latest paradigm of effective teaching and learning. For example, when observed by senior managers, teachers must ensure that behaviour in the classroom suggests ‘effective learning’. How often did Sarah contribute to the discussion? (If not at all, it’s assumed that she’s not learning). If the teacher dares to engage in an in-depth dialogue with one student, that is counted as a failure to support the others. Questioning must be frequent and clearly promote a hierarchy of lesson objectives devised in advance; this is called ‘scaffolding’, suggesting that the teacher already has in mind what the end result will look like so it’s just a case of demonstrating that students are getting there.

Scaffolding certainly helps when you want to build a block of high-rise flats but when you are engaged in the messy process we call teaching and learning, the concept soon breaks down into something rather grim where the teacher physically arranges students around the classroom in relation to their place on the scaffold (Jane can describe but not interpret; Peter can interpret but not analyse; Mohammed can analyse but not evaluate). Effective questioning is then judged by how appropriate your questions are to those sitting around the room. If the teacher dares to speak at length, no matter how enlightening, no matter how imaginative, s/he risks being condemned as ineffective. Muzzled by managerial dictate, it’s no wonder so many teachers want out, are getting out or have long gone. It takes a very brave teacher to treat teaching and learning as an open, creative process; needless to say, younger colleagues are understandably paranoid but certainly welcomed with open arms by academies looking for exactly that kind of neurosis.

Like many of us who began teaching before the full impact of marketisation had taken root, I can no longer stand to be in a classroom under such circumstances. Nor is it easy to be optimistic these days - O tempora, O mores! – but when optimism dies, the light goes out on the world.

Footnotes:

A long essay by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was written between November 1925 and May 1927 and revised during 1933–1934. It was first published in 1927 in the one-issue magazine The Recluse. More recently, it was included in the collection Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.
"Elements of Aversion". Archived from the original on 28 February 2013. Retrieved 2 November 2012; see also https://www.scribd.com/document/183813327/Horror-Factor-Elements-of-Aversion-What-Makes-Horror-Horrifying-txt
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10140850/Ian-Brady-Public-still-obsessed-with-my-Jack-the-Ripper-crimes.html; see also https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/16/ian-brady-words-petty-criminal-compared-tony-blair/‘ All Brady quotes are from these articles.
"On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense", an essay by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1873.

References:

Elizabeth Barrete (1997) "Elements of aversion: What makes horror horrifying?" Creatio ex Nihilo, April/May.

Frank Pearce and Steve Tombs (2012) Bhopal: Flowers at the star of profit and power (CrimeTalk e-books, available here)

Colin Sumner (1994/2012) The Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary (CrimeTalk Books, paperback and e-book available here}. Also in Spanish here.

Trevor James taught sociology for over twenty years in UK colleges of Further and Higher Education and secondary schools and became a welfare rights advocate. He studied criminology at Cambridge University, taking the MPhil. at its Institute of Criminology. Sadly, he died in 2023 and will be very much missed for his perceptive comments on UK society and politics.