The Fritzl case and media hypocrisy
11:06 am - May 15th 2008
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This weekend has not been a good one for the dangerous freaks and dissenters among us. I spent it mostly in the garden under a scrap of boiling London sky, contemplating all the things I’m suddenly not allowed to do anymore. That, and reading the papers, most of which have spent the post-Boris comedown wanking grotesquely over the Fritzl case.
In case you’ve spent the past month hiding in a box, this is the big Austrian incest story that made headlines across the world when it emerged that a grandfather in his seventies had imprisoned his daughter in a custom-built dungeon under his house and fathered seven children by her whilst the rest of the family lived upstairs in complete ignorance.
Horrific, utterly, stunningly horrific. And not something you’d ever see on these civilised islands, of course.
When was the last time you read a home-grown incest story in the British press? You can’t remember, can you? There’s a reason for that. No, it’s not that they don’t happen. It’s that both the law of the land and the journalists’ code of practice (PCC, ed.2006) expressly forbid the reporting of child sex cases and especially of incest cases.
Here’s the PCC:
Article 7. Children in sex cases
1. The press must not, even if legally free to do so, identify children under 16 who are victims or witnesses in cases involving sex offences.
2. In any press report of a case involving a sexual offence against a child, i) the child must not be identified; ii) the adult may be identified iii) the word ‘incest’ must not be used where a child victim might be identified; iv) care must be taken that nothing in the report implies the relationship between the accused and the child.
All jolly sensible stuff; thank you, the PCC. This law is specifically in place to prevent, just for example, the terrible feeding frenzy with which the British tabloids and dailies and even the broadsheets have descended on the hapless, vulnerable Fritzl children, ensuring that wherever they go in later life, they will be ‘those kids from the cellar’.
In the UK, a story like this simply would not have broken, or not in any matter which would have retained the human interest of this staggering piece of news. If Fritzl was identified, any sexual activity or abuse would have been omitted from the reports; if ‘incest’ was retained, reporters would have had to leave out everything else: a non-story. But because it happened in middle Europe, it’s open season for the press, and no doubt the bones of this tragic story will be picked clean before the summer is out. That, after all, is what the British press are here for.
But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen here, too. Incest happens in this country, every day. The sexual abuse of young girls and boys happens in this country, all the time, which is why gloating over something that happened in ‘Hitler’s homeland’ makes for such teeth-itching cultural hypocrisy. Everywhere, sad men are getting their grizzled rocks off on sexual power-trips over the young and fragile. It happens.
This, of course is also why internet paedophila is such a news fascination over here: as long as the story’s not about actual sex with an actual child, we can break it gloriously, splashing snaps of picture-hoarding perverts across the tabloids, whilst actual pederasty – physical sexual interference with children rather than just sick appreciation thereof – remains practically unreported.
But it happens. Violence against women and children happens. And whilst the law of this country protects young people from media scrutiny up to a point, we’d do well to remember the number of things we still don’t adequately protect them from. Perhaps we’re not quite as civilised as we think.
And that, frankly, is all I have to say on the matter. If anyone wants me, I’ll be in the garden smoking a fat reefer the size of a baby’s arm and watching zombie-porn. Come and join me, bring drinks.
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Laurie Penny is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. She is a journalist, blogger and feminist activist. She is Features Assistant at the Morning Star, and blogs at Penny Red and for Red Pepper magazine.
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Story Filed Under: Blog ,Feminism ,Humour ,Media
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Reader comments
It better not be Zombie Strippers. It was rubbish.
Excellently put Laurie. As with the Madeline case, they can get away with such shit as it happened overseas. The behaviour of the UK press over this has been been as utterly loathsome as it has been totally unsurprising.
Surely the Fritzl case -could- have been reported in the UK, because the victim was over 18 at the time of the offences with which Fritzl has been charged?
ah, but not all of the victims were. And there are also a lot of laws in place for reporting rape cases too, particularly incest/rape.
It’s really quite stunning what doesn’t get said.
“ah, but not all of the victims were.”
I don’t think there have been any reports – possibly because Austria has similar reporting restrictions to the UK on this (?) – that any *sexual* offences were committed against children under 18. As I understand it, Fritzl is in custody charged with rape and incest against an adult, and manslaughter of the baby that died, and that is all that’s been released by the police.
“And there are also a lot of laws in place for reporting rape cases too, particularly incest/rape.”
True. But Fred and Rose West still attracted some pretty sensationalist reporting, even though many of the family members and lodgers they’d abused as children and adults were still alive.
Media frenzy – agreed, things that happen overseas don’t have reporting restrictions,as are UK crimes where no charges have yet been brought etc, but who ever reported that such things ‘don’t happen’ over here? I’ve not read a single report that says or has implied that, and my job is to read the papers for a living to find press coverage.
The Jersey care home abuse/murder investigation, though not incest, is analagous to Fritzl, and that was extensively in the papers every day with new salacious details. And isn’t Jersey under British sovereignty? Berate the press as much as you like, though a better target is the highly selective PCC guidelines and their toothless approach towards enforcing them, but do it for things they’ve implicitly or explicitly said, not stuff you’ve conjured up.
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