Exploring gender and fear retrospectively:stories of women’s fear during the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders

The murder of 13 women in the North of England between 1975 and 1979 by Peter Sutcliffe who became known as the Yorkshire Ripper can be viewed as a significant criminal event due to the level of fear generated and the impact on local communities more generally. Drawing upon oral history interviews carried out with individuals living in Leeds at the time of the murders, this article explores women’s accounts of their fears from the time. This offers the opportunity to explore the gender/fear nexus from the unique perspective of a clearly defined object of fear situated within a specific spatial and historical setting. Findings revealed a range of anticipated fear-related emotions and practices which confirm popular ‘high-fear’ motifs; however, narrative analysis of interviews also highlighted more nuanced articulations of resistance and fearlessness based upon class, place and biographies of violence, as well as the way in which women drew upon fear/fearlessness in their overall construction of self. It is argued that using narrative approaches is a valuable means of uncovering the complexity of fear of crime and more specifically provides renewed insight onto women’s fear

Interview: school of hard knocks

Catherine Campbell (Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics) talks with psychologist, feminist, activist and film-maker Janice Haaken about the challenges facing the domestic violence movement

Women\u27s Perspectives on War and Peace in Sierra Leone

As part of an effort to bring women’s voices into public dialogue on armed conflict and peace, the current research explores how women address issues at different levels of the conflict context in terms of responsibility for the Sierra Leonean civil war and the subsequent peace process. An adaptation of the Listening Guide method (Gilligan, Spencer, Weinberg, & Bertsch, 2003) was used to analyze narrative material gathered from eight Sierra Leonean women. This analysis produced 4 emergent categories through which women communicated their views on the civil war and peacebuilding priorities. The categories were interpreted based on the Integrated Framework for Peacebuilding (Lederach, 1997) to illustrate how women’s perspectives inform peacebuilding. Results support calls to integrate women’s perspectives into mainstream peace processes by illustrating how these women informed issues important for society as a whole at each level of the conflict context, ranging from concrete needs in the immediate aftermath of war to more remote problematic social forces organizing the structure of society