A new museum opened in London’s East End in early August. Yet locals — and now, many around the world — are angry that what was sold to them as a museum that would “recognize and celebrate the women of the East End who have shaped history, telling the story of how they have been instrumental in changing society” ended up calling itself the Jack the Ripper Museum.
Some critics have pointed out a museum that seemingly celebrates the gruesome murders of women by Jack the Ripper achieves the exact opposite purpose of a museum that was ostensibly intended to celebrate suffragettes and other female history-makers.
Many have expressed outrage that the project gained funding and local support by initially posing as a
museum of women’s history.
While we on the Editorial Board understand their frustration, we are more upset by the incredibly
tactless statement from the museum’s founder, Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, defending his decision to change the museum’s focus.
“It is absolutely not celebrating the crime of Jack the Ripper but looking at why and how the women got in that situation in the first place,” he said.
What exactly is Palmer-Edgecumbe implying here? Is he suggesting the women might not have been violently slaughtered by a serial killer if only the women had done something differently?
It is shameful that this sort of victim-blaming still occurs in the year 2015. It is surely possible to design a museum that explores the crimes of Jack the Ripper from a feminist angle. The newly opened Jack the Ripper Museum in London, however, fails to accomplish that.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the notion of examining an atrocity from a victim’s perspective. In fact, trying to see things from the victim’s perspective is a basic use of our human capacity for empathy, and it is an important exercise in developing compassion for other people.
However, that is not what this museum project is actually about.
Where the museum went wrong is epitomized by Palmer-Edgecumbe’s statement about “how and why the women got in that situation” and by the building’s name and façade, both of which prominently feature Jack the Ripper but ignore women entirely.
There is a fine line that must be walked when discussing victims of gender-based, violent and sexual crimes.
Victims are not only victims; before they were victimized, they had lives, hopes, dreams, families and friends.
But it is also important not to blame them for having become victims — something that we should all keep in mind when thinking about, for example, Bill Cosby and the dozens of women who have come forward to disclose that he drugged and raped them.
Too many have asked “why and how the women got in that situation in the first place” rather than asking why these men prey on women.
What we appear to have here then, is a project that utilized public interest in the telling of women’s history to gain funding and site approval, only to morph into a museum that not only removes women from the spotlight, but also blames those women who are mentioned for their own murders.
Instead of paying lip-service to women while continuing to blame them for any and all gender-based violence perpetrated against them, perhaps we should start asking why we are so interested in defending and even glorifying the men who commit violence against women.
