Rethinking prostitution and its victims

Jack the Ripper's victims were real people; prostitutes are real people.

Fed up with ‘Jack the Ripper’ tours sensationalising the murder of innocent women, activists from London's Tower Hamlets put on an alternative tour to celebrate the victims’ lives and show how prostitution and violence blights women’s lives today.

Last year a group of women living and working in Tower Hamlets, East London were concerned about the high numbers of arrests of street-based prostitutes in the run-up to the Olympics.

They set up the Living in Freedom Together (LIFT) campaign, to press for more services and support to enable women to leave prostitution.

They are urging local residents to write to Tower Hamlets Council, asking them to ensure support is available to women who sell sex in brothels as well as street-based sex workers, given that the violence 

that takes place indoors is hidden.

They also want the authorities to take action against perpetrators - those who buy sex, pimp or traffic women - rather than prosecuting the victims, the prostitutes.

Tower Hamlets was home to the infamous Whitechapel murders. In the 1880s, five women were murdered, all of them prostitutes. The killer was never caught, but was nicknamed ‘Jack the Ripper’.

These days numerous ‘Jack the Ripper’ tours ply the streets of Tower Hamlets.  The tours go to the different murder sites of the women and describe their deaths. Visitors are warned to prepare themselves for ‘a terrifying experience’.

“They sensationalise Jack the Ripper and the murders of the women,” said LIFT member and Tower Hamlets resident Tessa Horvath,  so LIFT decided to stage alternative Jack the Ripper tours.

Charlotte Mallinson, who is researching the removal of self from the Whitechapel victims for a History MA at the University of Huddersfield, joined us on the LIFT tour I went on.

She has been on some of these ‘Jack the Ripper' tours as part of her research.

She said that on one tour the guide projected the image of one of the victims onto a wall.  The guide described the victim as an ‘eyesore’ and remarked that ‘he [the murderer] didn’t go for lookers did he’.

By contrast, Horvath explained,“This [LIFT] tour is designed to remind us that the women he murdered were real people – we want to tell you a bit about their lives and to celebrate them and commemorate their deaths.

"Rather than visiting the sites where they were murdered we will be visiting the places where they lived” said Horvath, as we set off.

But LIFT does not just dwell on the past.

Shannon Harvey, a Tower Hamlets resident who works for Against Violence and Abuse (AVA), a local charity working to end violence against women and girls, uses the historic stories to illustrate some of the concerns of women selling sex on the streets of Tower Hamlets today.

Mary Anne Nichols, the first of the Whitechapel murder victims, had five children when her marriage broke down after her husband had an affair.

At first, her husband gave her 5s a week, around £18 in today’s money, for support. It was not enough, so she turned to prostitution and became alcohol dependent.

But when her husband found she was earning her money through ‘illicit means’ he was no longer required to support her.

Harvey explains that today, too, alcohol and drug addiction makes some women more vulnerable to prostitution.

Or Elizabeth Stride, who was born in Gothenburg in 1843.  By 1865 she was working as a prostitute.

By 1869 Elizabeth was living in London and married John Thomas Stride, a ship’s carpenter. They ran a coffee shop together in Poplar. By March 1877 she had been admitted into the workhouse, suggesting that their marriage had broken down.

She told acquaintances that her husband had drowned in the sinking of the Princess Alice in the River 

Thames in 1878.  She said she had been kicked in the mouth by another of the victims as they both swam to safety, which had caused her to stutter. In fact, John Stride died of tuberculosis in Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum in 1884.

From 1885 until her death she lived much of the time with a local dock labourer, Michael Kidney. She had laid an assault charge against him.

"Today it is extremely common for a woman in prostitution to be involved in an abusive and controlling relationship, often the partner acts as a pimp and the woman is coerced to sell sex to provide and support their partners drug and alcohol dependencies," said Harvey.

We learned about the lives of Katherine Eddowes, born in Wolverhampton in 1842, who friends described as ‘intelligent and scholarly, but possessed with a fierce temper’.  Another said she was a ‘very jolly woman, always singing.’

Mary Jane Kelly, born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1863, who, in 1879, at the age of 16, married a collier.  She turned to prostitution after he was killed in an explosion shortly afterwards.

And Annie Chapman, who was born in 1841 in Paddington, and married her maternal relative, John. They had three children. One child died at the age of 12 and one was severely disabled. Both Annie and John developed alcohol addiction and they separated in 1884.

Horvath and Harvey say while their tour highlights some of the circumstances that often surround involvement in prostitution such as poverty and drug use, focussing on these alone runs the risk of marginalising women who do not enter prostitution against this background.

They said that vulnerability comes in many guises, and quote a supporter of the LIFT campaign who said: 

“I wasn’t homeless, in poverty or on drugs. And I didn’t need the money – he did!

“But I was a vulnerable, trapped, traumatised person, frozen in time. I was 24. I had no family to turn to; traumatised from incest and other childhood sexual abuse.

“The man who pimped me was someone I thought was a friend. I was pimped, and no one knew there was a pimp making me stay out. I just didn’t have the words to explain what was happening to me. I was not a criminal, I was abused.

“Again. Everyone deserves protection from exploitation and abuse and you can’t necessarily tell when someone is being controlled.

"Choice didn’t come into it. What a stupid word! The only one with the choices was him.”

Story published on Women's Views on News, June 18, 2013