A new Netflix series, The Ripper, uses archive footage from the 1970s to show detectives in West Yorkshire insisting that they were looking for a killer who hated “prostitutes”, a word they used repeatedly in interviews. The police have always had a poor understanding of what drives violence against women. Sutcliffe was not a rapist but he was a misogynist, and the criminal justice system is hardly better now at identifying and convicting such men.
Rape convictions have declined to the point where some argue it has been decriminalised, a failure that is encouraging serial predators. But it should not be consigned to history, because the errors made by the police in that flawed investigation are being repeated to this day.įorty years after Sutcliffe’s final murder, violence against women is at epidemic levels. Peter Sutcliffe’s death last month appeared to mark the moment when the case receded into the past, his murders remembered by a dwindling number of people. T he Yorkshire Ripper has become a bogeyman.
