UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 12 NOVEMBER 2020
Men who kill women are increasingly using a ‘sex game gone wrong’ excuse in a bid to secure more favourable sentences, new research has found.
Elizabeth Yardley, Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City University, analysed data relating to 43 women killed in Britain between 2000 and 2018 in cases where perpetrators had been convicted of murder, manslaughter or culpable homicide.
“I decided to look at cases which had resulted in a conviction given that there is considerably more detail about such cases in the public domain than in prosecutions without a conviction”, explained Professor Yardley.
“Such cases enabled me to explore instances where claims of a ‘sex game gone wrong’ had not stood up in court. These were cases where perpetrators hadn’t managed to convince juries that these women’s deaths were the accidents they made them out to be.”
Yardley’s search for cases began on the We Can’t Consent to This website, which documents the stories of women killed in so-called sex games gone wrong and is the first and only comprehensive repository of UK cases.
The research found that the normalisation and mainstreaming of ‘rough sex’ in popular culture through films like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’, and the way in which porn and women’s magazines present acts like strangulation as ‘play’ have created a culturally approved script for perpetrators of violence against women – regardless of whether they have an established relationship with a victim.
Professor Yardley also found that on average perpetrators were significantly older than their victims and that many perpetrators had previous convictions for violence.
“These men did not become killers overnight”, said Yardley. “Their behaviour formed part of longstanding patterns of harmful, abusive and criminal conduct towards others in general – and women in particular.
When it came to sentencing, men convicted of murdering their partners received shorter sentences on average than men convicted of killing women with whom they did not have a partner relationship. The average sentence length for men who murdered their female partner was 15.7 years. This compared to an average of 19.2 years where the victim was an ex-partner, 22 years when she was a friend and 27.3 years in cases where the perpetrator and victim had just met.
“The ‘sex game gone wrong’ would appear to be something new - it isn’t,” explained Yardley.
“It’s a new disguise for age-old misogyny. These deaths are not accidents. They are the outcome of patriarchal belief systems that position women as subordinate, and imbue perpetrators with a sense of entitlement to treat women as property. The neoliberal context creates the perfect conditions in which women’s liberation and formal equality are used to justify and explain violence against them – and they aren’t able to correct the narrative.
“The term ‘game’ implies rules, fairness, transparency and a level playing field. The so called ‘sex game gone wrong’ is anything but. We must continue to challenge the use of this defence and the cultural and social context in which it has been allowed to thrive.”