How we think about killers like Peter Sutcliffe tells us who we value in society

‘Men are afraid that women will laugh at them,” said Margaret Atwood. “Women are afraid that men will kill them.” In his account of Peter Sutcliffe’s regime of terror, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, Gordon Burn recounts how Sutcliffe’s first murder was apparently triggered by a woman laughing at him, which sounds a more plausible reason than the one Sutcliffe put forward when he was finally arrested in 1981: that God told him to do it.

This laughing woman was a sex worker and it has become a lazy, dangerous commonplace that Sutcliffe mutilated and killed “prostitutes”. He did not. He mutilated and killed women. The names of those 13 women, and their photographs, filled the newspapers when Sutcliffe’s death was announced: Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Patricia Atkinson, Jayne MacDonald, Jean Jordan, Yvonne Pearson, Helen Rytka, Vera Millward, Josephine Whitaker, Barbara Leach, Marguerite Walls, Jacqueline Hill. On social media, they were also remembered and mourned, including by the historian Hallie Rubenhold, who in her eloquent book The Five recreated the lives of five of Jack the Ripper’s victims in order to give them back their stories and their selves.

At the time, this was not how the murders were treated. Then, the dead women were “prostitutes”, not people with lives and friends and children, and hopes and futures that had been snuffed out. The murders were motivated by sex, not by the misogynistic hatred that swilled around the 1970s, which in Sutcliffe metastasised into lethal violence. When a “normal” or, as the police put it, an “innocent” woman was killed, it was a “mistake” that further derailed the police’s farcically incompetent investigation. Sutcliffe blundered around Yorkshire, grotesquely killing women almost in plain sight, but his nickname of “the Yorkshire Ripper” gave him a folkloric stature, like his Victorian predecessor or an evil Robin Hood. He had been a gravedigger; he used screwdrivers and hammers; he heard voices in his head. He became a ghoul. He was the shiver in the dark.

Sutcliffe’s ghastly killing spree took place between 1975 and 1980. In 2006, a forklift truck driver called Steven Wright killed five women over the course of six weeks: Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Annette Nicholls and Paula Clennell. All had been sex workers in Ipswich, and some of the media compared Wright to Sutcliffe, naming him the “Suffolk Strangler”. But our attitudes had humanised by then. The figure of Wright never gripped the public imagination. He was banal, careless, stupid, casually using prostitutes like lots of men use them (but killing them as most men do not), arrested because of DNA evidence. There was public discomfort when the dead women were labelled as sex workers and a new sympathy and respect shown towards the victims, who were remembered and mourned as daughters, sisters, partners, mothers, friends; young and vulnerable women who – sometimes – traded their bodies for money out of desperation and who were as “ordinary” and “innocent” as the rest of us. Attitudes shift but misogyny remains, as does an indifference to the sufferings of those we cast as “other” (those who we do not see as innocent, ordinary, one of us). How the blind spots change shows something about what and who we as a society value. At the same time Sutcliffe was murdering women in Yorkshire, Fred and Rosemary West were sexually torturing and killing young women in Gloucestershire, although they were not arrested until 1994.

Several of their victims, including their own daughters, went unmissed until they were found all those years later, buried in the basement and garden of the terrace house that had been turned into an abattoir. They were in care, had slipped through all the slack safety nets, had disappeared from sight, were not searched for. Only one, Lucy Partington, a middle-class student from a safe and loving family, caught public attention: as if every life does not have an equal value.

Or Harold Shipman, the GPbelieved to be the most prolific serial killer in modern history, thought to have murdered more than 200 patients. But by and large, these people were old (or at least middle-aged, which can be glossed as old). By and large, they were women. By and large, they were not well-off. By and large, they were invisible. Or the greatest child protection scandal in British history: the grooming, exploitation and sexual abuse of children in Rotherham between the 1990s and the 2010s and which for a decade at least the police and the council were aware of, knowing but not caring, a hideous blind spot that erased compassion. The 2014 Jay report found that at least 1,400 girls had been abused. How did it continue for so long? Because they were girls. They were working class. Many were in care. They had no power. They were not valued and not seen.

For years, Sutcliffe was held at Broadmoor, the hospital for the criminally insane; only in 2016 was he transferred to prison. Was he mad, with roaring voices in his head? Or was he just an extreme version of the misogynistic hatred that many men feel – and that many, as Laura Bates argues in her book on the sewer of online misogyny, Men Who Hate Women, are groomed to feel? Extremism is a distraction from the mundanity of misogyny, the gory, saturated version of a nasty world where hatred of women is often coupled with masculine self-pity.

Sutcliffe, wrote Burns, grew up in a world where women are for “frying bacon and for screwing”, where to be laughed at by a woman was a source of visceral, self-obliterating shame. How many reasons are there to hate a woman? Women as objects of contempt, of terror, of humiliation, of self-hatred. Women as defiling (Sutcliffe said he was just “clearing the streets”), as powerless, as horribly powerful. As pure or as dirty. Women as temptresses, as deniers of pleasure, as sluts, as frigid, as nags. Women who mock; who look at a man or who don’t look at him. Who like men or who don’t like men. Women who say no, who say yes, who don’t say anything at all.

So many reasons to hate a woman. Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Patricia Atkinson, Jayne MacDonald, Jean Jordan, Yvonne Pearson, Helen Rytka, Vera Millward, Josephine Whitaker, Barbara Leach, Marguerite Walls, Jacqueline Hill.

• Nicci Gerrard’s books include Soham: A Story of Our Times. She also covered the arrest and trial of Harold Shipman for The Observer