Selfishness, soap opera lives and infantile emotions: Why so many marriages end in murder trials
15th October 2009
David Wilson, a Professor of Criminology at Birmingham University, explores the disturbing cultural forces at work which have resulted in increased hostility within relationships
City banker Neil Ellerbeck strangled his unfaithful wife Kate last year
A sense of deepening moral crisis hangs over modern Britain.
The bonds of ethical responsibility that once held our society together appear to be dissolving.
Physical aggression is endemic, while restraint has been replaced by a brutish eagerness for immediate gratification or money.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this pattern is the growing incidence of violence within relationships, a worrying proportion of it perpetrated by women.
The traditional feeling that marriage should be a source of mutual safety and support seems to have evaporated.
Instead, in too many partnerships, marriage has become an engine of competition and loathing, with the most lethal consequences.
Only this week there has been a string of court cases depicting destructive violence in marriage, all of which paint today's Britain in an alarming light.
In one, millionaire banker Neil Ellerbeck was found guilty of manslaughter after strangling his wife Kate.
He was said to have 'exploded in pent-up anger' during a row over his wife's adultery, though Ellerbeck had been conducting his own affair.
In another, husband Alisdair Sinclair stands accused of stabbing to death his wife, mobile phone executive Sally, in front of two children.
It is alleged that Sinclair knifed Sally more than 30 times during a jealous rage at their home in Hampshire after she admitted to having an affair.
Sinclair, who denies the charge, told police when he was arrested that the killing was self-defence as his wife had launched a frenzied attack on him.
In the third case, poet Joanne Hale is accused of luring her husband Peter into the woods with the promise of a ' drugfuelled sex session' driven by a herbal aphrodisiac called Horny Goat Weed. She then allegedly slit his throat and left him for dead.
Her motive, the prosecution claim, was that she wanted to start a new relationship with a man she had met on the internet. Hale, who denies the charges, said in her police statement that her husband had threatened to cut his own throat.
Hale's alleged violence towards her husband has understandably attracted widespread shock, since it runs counter to the stereotyped image of women as compassionate home-makers.
The recent child abuse case in which former nursery worker Vanessa George has been named as the leader of a paedophile ring centred on a nursery in Plymouth could be taken as a sign of a worrying trend where women are becoming as dangerous as their criminalised male counterparts.
Sally Sinclair was allegedly stabbed to death in a jealous rage by her partner Alisdair George Sinclair
Yet it is important to maintain a sense of perspective. There have always been vicious women in our society. Violent female offenders are nothing new.
The late Victorian age, for instance, was horrified at the revelations of the crimes perpetrated by Mary Cotton, who murdered four successive husbands, partly for money and partly because she wanted to start a new sexual relationship each time.
She was also believed to have murdered several children. When she finally went to the gallows in 1873, she was suspected of having killed at least 20 people.
We should also remember that one of the worst serial killers in British history was the nurse Beverley Allitt, who murdered four children, attempted to kill another three and caused grevious bodily harm to a further six while working at a Lincolnshire hospital.
Nor should we forget the more notorious offenders such as Rose West and Myra Hindley. So, from a historical perspective, there is nothing unique about the offences to which Vanessa George has confessed.
It should also be noted that in the recent glut of so-called 'misery memoirs' - where adult writers recall the horrors of their childhoods filled with physical and sexual abuse - the worst offenders in these books often turn out to be women.
Again, in contrast to the traditional gentle female image, the figures who lurk in these pages are savage matriarchs or brutal mothers, their menace all the more terrifying because of their gender.
It would also be equally foolish to deny that violence is still predominantly perpetrated by men. Indeed, more than 90 per cent of violent offenders in prison are male, while even in the cases highlighted this week, women were usually on the receiving end.
But even acknowledging this gender imbalance, we have to face the reality that something has gone disastrously wrong in our society, and this change is manifesting itself dramatically through the incidence of hostility within relationships.
I believe that there are a number of disturbing cultural forces at work. One is the legacy of the 'every man for himself' economic revolution which engulfed Britain from the 1980s.
Many aspects of this upheaval were beneficial, such as in the encouragement of enterprise. But when translated to the social sphere, this has ultimately led to a narrow, short-term attitude in which individuals are inclined to think only of themselves and their own instant gratification.
The concept of self-sacrifice, of overcoming short-term difficulties in a relationship for the long-term good, is rapidly disappearing.
Relationships can always break down and splits are bound to be unhappy. But there used to be an idea that partners would try to talk through problems and accept that not everything could be changed overnight.
In contrast, today there is a belief that any crisis should be immediately resolved; that we have a right - even an entitlement - to permanent happiness; that we can shove aside anything that stands in our way, regardless of the feelings of others.
It is a spirit that is summed up in the increasingly prevalent American phrase 'Move on', as if we should always be able to dump our social baggage whenever we want.
We can also see the worrying influence of infantalisation. One of the key steps of maturing into adulthood is to learn restraint, but again that no longer seems to be happening.
'I want' is one of the guiding forces of our times. In all too many instances - as in the three recent cases mentioned - adults behave like toddlers, going into a hysterical rage if anyone denies them.
There is also something childish in the possessiveness that seems to have superseded love as the key part of marriage, wanting to smash up a cherished toy if there is a threat that it might be taken away or given to someone else.
Other influences are also at work. One is undoubtedly television, where soap operas encourage the belief that relationships are things of permanent instability, as characters flit from one liaison to another, sometimes even changing their sexuality on their personal odyssey.
In Hollywood films and much commercial, downmarket literature, there is also a worrying emphasis on gratuitous violence, such as that in the notorious Saw movies in which a sadist plots how much torture to inflict on his victims.
The internet, which featured in the George case through the use of social networking sites, has played its malign part, tearing apart the social and geographical boundaries that once held immoral behaviour in check.
Online, everyone is the centre of their own imaginary universe. But, sadly, imagination sometimes spills into reality, as grotesque fantasies are enacted.
And when the institution of marriage becomes little more than a violent battleground, we should be deeply worried. The moral fabric of our nation depends on it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1220485/Selfishness-soap-opera-lives-infantile-emotions-Why-marriages-end-murder-trials.html#ixzz0UIZb2qQ1
