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Our World continues to be Poisoned by Testosterone
 
How could it happen again?

Levi Bellfield is the third man to be found guilty in the past week of the brutal murder of women. Why are there so many such cases - and just how much of a misogynist does a man have to be before anyone stops him?

Kira Cochrane
The Guardian
Wednesday February 27 2008

You can say many things about the double murderer Levi Bellfield, but you could never suggest that this was a man who kept his rampant, violent misogyny a secret. Convicted on Monday of the killings of Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange, and of the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy (whom he ran over repeatedly, leaving her with a "crushed and fractured" liver, punctured lungs, broken ribs and collarbone, and her lower back "ripped open"), Bellfield is now a suspect in the 2002 disappearance of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, as well as 20 other unsolved crimes against women, including five rapes.

Over the years, many in Bellfield's circle had become well versed in his hatred of women. He had told acquaintances that girls who dyed their hair blonde were "impure", "sluts", who "deserved to be messed around with". His ex-partner, Johanna Collings, mother of two of his 11 children, told detectives that she had found magazines which he had flicked through, slashing out the faces of all the blonde models. Bellfield had also once confided in her that he used to go into alleyways, wait for blonde women to walk past and watch them, feeling that he wanted to "hurt them, stab them".

He had a reputation for following under-age girls in his van and pestering them for sex. Any who might have agreed to get into his vehicle would have found that behind the blacked-out windows he kept a mattress, blankets and a baseball bat. While dating a 16-year-old, who was described as "naive", he offered his employee, Ricky Brouillard, the chance to buy sex with both her and her 14-year-old sister; Brouillard turned him down and later described Bellfield to police as "an animal". Another colleague, whom Bellfield had worked with at a Maidenhead nightclub during his days as a bouncer, recalled his giving Rohypnol to a young female clubber before raping her in the car park and stealing her mobile phone. When the woman's mother called, Bellfield answered and described what he had just done to her daughter.

His ex-partner, Becky Wilkinson, with whom he has four children, was beaten by him, as were other partners. Wilkinson says that if she "refused him sex, he would hold me down and rape me", once at knife point. Even after she moved house to try to escape him, he followed her, broke into her new home and waited for her. Then he raped her again, saying that "it was to teach me a lesson" she says. "He carried on watching and tormenting me for years." The violence and intimidation only stopped when he was arrested in November 2004 for the murder of Delagrange.

The past week has brought us not one, but three horrific cases of misogyny-inspired murders, which have ended in the convictions of Bellfield, Mark Dixie and Steve Wright. In each case, what comes through most strongly is just how open, violent and persistent the killer's misogyny was, and how they were allowed to indulge it, and even boast of it, for years. The reports paint a picture of a society in which misogyny is taken as a given, in which someone can crow to his friends, without fear of redress or chastisement, as Bellfield did, that he had shaved himself from top to toe to ensure he didn't leave any DNA behind at a crime scene.

In the case of Dixie, who stabbed Sally Anne Bowman seven times, before raping her while she was dead or dying, it wasn't just friends and partners who knew him as a monstrous misogynist - the police were well aware of it too. Over the years, he had picked up 16 convictions in the UK, five for sex offences, which might lead one to suppose that this 37-year-old pub chef had spent most of his adult life in prison. Not so. The sentences he served allowed him plenty of time in between to travel around the world, committing more crimes - including, it is suspected, other sexually motivated murders. So, for instance, in the late 1980s, he was convicted of attacking a Jehovah's Witness, a friend of his then girlfriend. He had trapped her in a lift in the tower block he lived in in Plumstead, south London, before punching her in the face, grabbing her by the throat, and then demanding sex. "I definitely thought that he was going to rape me," the woman has said. "He was holding my arms, I fought a lot, and it was then that he hit me. It was my eye mostly and my upper jaw. After I struggled to my feet, he got hold of me by the throat with both of his hands. When we got outside, he told me not to scream, or he would kill me."

The woman managed to escape. For this attack - which came only a few months after Dixie had been found guilty of indecent exposure and indecent assault - he was sentenced to just six months.

In all three of these murder cases, the men had been violent towards one or more of their partners in the past. Dixie's ex-partner, Stacey Nivet, has told of how she broke up with him after he beat her up; she and another of Dixie's exes, Kate McConaghie, have both confirmed that he used to bite them viciously during sex.

Wright, who was convicted last week of murdering five women in Ipswich, was known by many as a quiet, apparently harmless loner, but his ex-wife Diane Cole has told how he beat her repeatedly, scrawled "slag" and "whore" on her door, and banged her head against a wall as punishment for folding some bed sheets in the wrong fashion. Wright wasn't violent to Pam Wright, the partner he lived with at the time of his arrest for the Ipswich murders, but his attitude to women was still clearly on show. Pam Wright said: "He was very old-fashioned in that he wanted me chained to the kitchen sink ... he was constantly leering at other women: at bus stops, in the pub, while out shopping, everywhere. I would tell him off about it ... He was a jealous man, and would always fling his arms round me if he saw another man looking at me. If I was out with my friends he would bombard me with phone calls, which I thought was odd, asking where I was and who I was with. He often said, even early in our relationship, that if I ever left him he would kill himself".

Given the litany of violence carried out by each of these men, how did they stay free to attack women for so long? Why didn't their partners go to the police and complain that these men were vicious wife-beaters?

At this stage, it is impossible to know just how many women did make specific complaints against these three men. But of those who were attacked by them and didn't go to the police, there is a good chance that it was because, consciously or not, they recognised the misogyny that runs through our criminal justice system. Maybe they had read about Ian Huntley, who was investigated for nine allegations of sexual offences - without a single conviction - before he was charged for the Soham murders. Maybe they had heard of the 2004 case of Paul Dalton who killed his wife, invested in an electric saw, chopped her body into nine pieces, stored them in his fridge - and was given just two years in prison for manslaughter, and an extra three for the apparently more serious crime of "preventing a burial" (in Dalton's defence he had argued that his wife taunted him with suggestions of an affair). Maybe they had read about the fact that only 5.3% of rape cases ends in a conviction or that one in five women are abused in childhood, or that one in four women experience domestic violence in their lifetime and mostly it all just goes unpunished. Maybe they had picked this up by osmosis, from the fact that people so often joke about violence towards women, from the fact that it is considered perfectly ordinary to find women's bodies splayed and naked, all orifices exposed on the top shelf of the local newsagents, in poses that reduce the models to nothing more than holes to be violated. Maybe it was the widespread buying and selling of women that had made them suspect that, in our society, women are considered second-class citizens, at best. Figures show that one in 10 men admits to having visited a prostitute - as had all three of these killers.

The Home Office has recently been conducting an ongoing consultation on prostitution, looking at how the sex trade should be tackled in the UK. As soon as it was suggested that it was considering the Swedish model - in which men are criminalised for buying sex, but the women working in prostitution are decriminalised - a slew of prominent male columnists started arguing against this infringement on a man's right to purchase a woman's body.

Ignore the fact that 95% of street prostitutes are apparently addicted to drink and drugs, that around half have been abused as children, that 85% of women in brothels come from outside the UK - meaning that, in the case of trafficking victims, every sexual encounter they have is essentially rape - that women in prostitution are 18 times more likely to be murdered than the rest of the female population. No, what's important is that men are allowed to buy and sell women at will, whatever human misery they have to both fuel and ignore to do so.

And for anyone looking for more evidence of misogyny, just consider who is being blamed for these murders: their mothers. Wright's hatred of women has been ascribed to his mother leaving the family when he was a boy, while Dixie's has been blamed on his mother abandoning him outside a care home when he was 12. Dixie's childhood does, indeed, sound horrific, but it's interesting that his mother seems to be getting at least as much of a kicking as the stepfather who allegedly abused him. And, wouldn't you know, it's not just maternal neglect that apparently leads to misogynist psychosis. It has also been said that Bellfield's mother is a "strong-willed matriarch", whose close relationship with him (he visited her almost daily after leaving home at the age of 22) contributed to his psychiatric problems. In a misogynist world, women just can't win.