The excuses
The cases of Brianna Ghey, Emma Pattison, and Lettie Pattison show that after certain kinds of killings, the press hunts for distractions and excuses.
Content warning: This post discusses violence against women, though I avoid any specific or explicit detail.
The killing1 of a 16-year-old girl — especially a 16-year-old white girl — would usually dominate the front pages of British newspapers. The killing of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old girl from Warrington — who was trans — has not. The Sun sticks its report down-page on page 15, giving it less space than a story about Dancing On Ice costumes; The Times has a short story at the top of page 5; The Daily Mail gives over the majority of its page 5 to coverage.
The Independent’s digital front page makes a photo of Brianna2 its main image with the headline Two held after school girl stabbed to death but its splash is on the BBC chairman; The Daily Express has the story in the top deck of its front page (Girl, 16, stabbed to death in park); The Daily Telegraph puts the story at the bottom of its front page as part of a kind of ‘news in brief’ rundown (Girl, 16, stabbed to death in park at 3pm); and The Daily Star delivers the crassest front page acknowledgement, putting the news at the top of a stack of stories that includes Maya’s glamour and a baffling promo for a man making shirts from old crisp packets (Crisp White Shirt), and next to a jokey splash predicting the weather for Valentine’s Day (PHEW LA LA!).
The story does not appear on the front pages of The Mirror, the i paper, The Guardian, or The Metro.
The content of the reporting on Brianna’s killing has been far worse than the editorial choices on prominence and placement. Though the Mail did not deadname3 Brianna Ghey in its print story, earlier versions of its online coverage did, and the copy still contained this paragraph:
Brianna was born male, but is believed to have been living as a female for months.The Times used the Mail as its source for deadnaming Brianna in its print copy; its initial online story did not mention that she was trans and comments were left open for several hours provoking a number of virulently transphobic messages. The Independent also used the Mail as a source, repeating its claims, as did the Telegraph in early versions of its story.
In a subsequent version of its report, The Times changed the headline from Girl, 16, stabbed to death in ‘targeted attack’ — as it stands in the print version — to Transgender girl Brianna Ghey, 16, stabbed to death in ‘targeted attack’. The copy shifted from describing her as “a teenage girl” to “a transgender teenager”. It has now changed again to “a transgender girl”.
Early versions of the BBC News report included a quote — which also appears in all the other news stories — from Detective Chief Superintendent Mike Evans saying there “is no evidence to suggest that the circumstances surrounding Brianna’s death are hate related,” without including a reference to her trans identity. The BBC report has subsequently been amended without a correction.
Evans was also quoted as saying that the killing was “a targeted attack” and that Cheshire Police are, in the words of The Times report, “keeping an open mind about whether her gender was relevant”. There have been suggestions that previous reports had been made about her being bullied and harassed at school; video footage of another girl being attacked was posted on social media.
It’s possible to believe — and I do — that there are two terrible and cruel things at work here: Newspapers are both obscuring the relevance of Brianna’s identity and discussing her being trans in the worst possible way by deadnaming her and making other insinuations. The police have been indecently quick to imply that the killing was not a hate crime and newspapers have leapt on that.
I do not know what motivated the killing of Brianna Ghey but to move so quickly to dismiss the fact that she was trans in a country where the very existence of trans people has been made a heated ‘debate’ is grotesque. The press’s general tendency to take what the police say at face value — despite libraries of proof that they lie and cover up with Johnsonian frequency — has combined with its desire to keep this story distanced from the rhetoric of its own columnists.
A statement from Brianna’s family, released via Cheshire Police, reads:
Brianna was a much-loved daughter, granddaughter, and baby sister.
She was a larger-than-life character who would leave a lasting impression on all that met her. Brianna was beautiful, witty and hilarious. Brianna was strong, fearless and one of a kind.
The loss of her young life has left a massive hole in our family, and we know that the teachers and her friends who were involved in her life will feel the same. We would like to thank everyone for their kind words and support during this extremely difficult time. We would like to thank the police for their support, and witnesses for helping with the investigation.
The continuation of respect for privacy is greatly appreciated.Near the end of the Daily Mail’s report, there’s this paragraph:
Brianna is believed to have lived with her mother, a food technologist, in nearby Birchwood, and attended Birchwood Community High School. There was no answer at her home last night. On the evening after her daughter’s killing, Brianna’s mother had a Daily Mail journalist at her door. He won’t have been the only one. I’m just surprised the paper hasn’t printed the value of the house yet.
Just hours after her death, Brianna was denied dignity and a respectful description of who she was. The law will continue that disconnection as she was too young under the current English law to get a gender recognition certificate. Thirteen pages after the Daily Mail’s news report on Brianna’s death, a column by Andrew Pierce howled:
When the news broke that the recently-appointed head of Epsom College had been found dead with her husband and their young daughter, the initial reports focused on the school’s ‘prestigious’ reputation, as if “prestige” has never served as a thin and cracked veneer for all kinds of horror.
Once it became clear — following a grotesquely familiar pattern — that George Pattison had murdered Emma Pattison and 7-year-old Lettie Pattison, before killing himself, much of the press coverage shifted to an equally familiar register: Making excuses for a murderer.
The Daily Mail’s headline asked Did living in the shadow of his high-achieving wife lead to unthinkable tragedy? Details emerge of the tensions behind the picture-perfect lives of the Epsom College head and her husband who 'killed her and their daughter before turning the gun on himself'.
Feature writer Barbara Davies and news reporter, Andy Jehring, wrote:
What makes their deaths doubly shocking is that, outwardly at least, the Pattisons, who had been married for 12 years, appeared to enjoy the kind of family life to which so many aspire.
Emma was one of the most high-flying teachers in the UK and only six months into her role as Epsom College's first ever female head. Her husband was a company director. In recent years they had spent thousands creating their dream home and landscaped garden in Caterham, Surrey, where neighbours eyed up the expensive cars on the drive. The Daily Telegraph pretended to have some secret knowledge of what was going on Behind the closed doors that led to the Epsom College tragedy. One of the paper’s Associate Editors, Gordon Rayner, wrote:
Emma and George Pattison were a couple who appeared to have won the game of life – successful, wealthy, and with a beautiful daughter to dote on. Beneath the surface, though, the Pattisons had their secrets, which might hold the key to why all three of them were found dead last weekend in an apparent murder-suicide.Both these articles — and they are just two examples among many — have the rough shape of reporting but none of the content of an honest investigation; they are horror stories for the middle class where the twist is that the obvious monster — the man who killed a woman and a child before killing himself — is not the true villain. That’s the woman who had the temerity to be successful and admired, who failed to suitably manage and massage a man’s ego.
When the police first made a statement about the deaths, they made a big point of saying they were “an isolated incident”; they meant to reassure residents in the local area that there was not a killer on the loose but more generally such incidents — men killing their partners and children — are not isolated. They are common and criminologists have a name for them: Family annihilators.
If The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail weren’t just interested in shaming and terrifying women, they might have looked beyond the biographical details of the Pattison family to studies on family annihilators. In 2013, a paper in the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice reviewed and analysed newspaper articles from 1980 to 2012 to identify 71 family annihilators who committed their crimes in Britain.
The researchers found that 59 out of 71 people who killed their families were men and 55% of them were in their thirties when they committed the crime. They also discovered that the frequency of this kind of homicide case is increasing. Professor David Wilson, one of the paper’s authors and then Director of the Centre of Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University, told Wired:
What's interesting and different about this category of murderer, is that those typical murderers will be well known to the criminal justice system, they'll have a criminal record, or they'll be known to the mental health services or drug counsellors. Family annihilators were overwhelmingly not known to criminal justice or mental health services. For all intents and purposes these were loving husbands and good fathers, often holding down high-profile jobs and seen publicly as being very, very successful. They were simply not on the radar.The researchers defined four categories of family annihilators, dismissing a common myth that murders of that kind are motivated by revenge or “altruism”:
Self-righteous killers who hold the mother responsible for family breakdown
Disappointed killers who believe their family has let them down
Anomic killers who see the family as a symbol of their economic success but consider it to no longer serve that ‘function’ if they fail
Paranoid killers who want to ‘protect’ their family from a perceived threat, such as social services intervention.
These crimes are not mysteries but papers such as The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail have to pretend they are or they might have to face up to the misogyny that is central to many of the middle-class fantasies they peddle.
You can expect to read a lot this week from newspapers that usually claim to be terribly influential that the things they publish, in fact, have no effect at all.
There is a verified fundraiser to support Brianna’s family here.
Thank you to SKM, FW, Ipsini, MFW, and PF for reading the draft.
I am referring to the event as a “killing” because, at the time of writing, two individuals have been arrested on suspicion of murder but no one has been charged yet.
The usual style of this newsletter and most journalism is to refer to someone by their surname after the first mention but it felt horribly cold to do that in this case.
Deadname (v.) to call a transgender person by their birth name when they have changed their name as part of their gender transition. Here’s a good thread on what it means to be deadnamed.
Brilliant, Mic.
This is an important article. Thank you Mic.