Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  A few years ago, my family was lucky enough to have two Chinese students stay with us on an exchange. They explained how they started school at 6am and were often still there studying at 9pm. They rarely got to bed, they said, before eleven because they had so much homework they wanted to do. And, much to the horror of my children, they went to school on Saturdays. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ perhaps, but there is a Chinese proverb that warns: ‘Be afraid only of standing still.’

  The top universities in the developed world are targets for the brightest and most highly motivated young people from the developing world. Go to many British institutions and you will find that, during the lunch hour, the lecture rooms are filled with Chinese, Korean and Indian students doing extra revision and having group discussion around their topics. Domestic undergraduates tend to be relaxing.

  One measure of a society’s ability to ‘meet the knowledge challenges of the twenty-first century’ is the proportion of young people with a degree. The most recent figures published by the OECD show that while 34 per cent of British students end up graduating, it is over 40 per cent in Australia, Norway, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Finland, and Denmark, and over 50 per cent in Poland, Russia and Iceland. Since the mid-1990s, many European countries have seen their graduation rates overtake the UK.

  Just processing lots of people through often meaningless degrees is not enough, of course. If Britain is going to do well in the twenty-first century, it needs to produce the right kind of knowledge workers, to recognise the skills and abilities that will be most sought after by the global economy.

  ‘Knowledge’ is a misunderstood word, perhaps. Being able to learn and recall bits of information is important but there is no shortage of people who can do that. And in our Google age, knowing facts may become less critical.

  The Canadian author of the book Wikinomics, business strategist Don Tapscott, recently argued that what he called ‘the old-fashioned model’ of education, involving remembering facts ‘off pat’, was designed for the industrial age. ‘Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the Internet is,’ he said. ‘Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.’ It is important to have a solid foundation of facts one can call on without relying upon Wikipedia or Yahoo. But it is only the foundation. Knowledge is a hierarchy with memorising facts at the bottom.

  In 1956, American University examiner Dr Benjamin Bloom published a book entitled Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain. It was not the snappiest title, but the book was seized upon for its ideas on how to compare achievements in learning and is still used in teacher training today.

  So ‘knowing the facts’ is the first step on the knowledge ladder. Then comes ‘comprehension’: understanding or interpreting the meaning of instructions and problems. These are still rudimentary knowledge skills. Next is ‘application’: taking that knowledge and comprehension and using it in a new situation. After that we have ‘analysis’: understanding what it is about the material or concepts that works so we might reproduce it in new situations. We are approaching the summit of the cognitive pyramid now, and educationalists differ on the description of the final steps. Bloom puts ‘evaluation’ at the very top — the ability to present and defend opinions about information based on evidence, the bedrock of academia. But his model has been revised in recent years, taking into account the most valued knowledge skills. The new taxonomy has at its peak ‘synthesis’: the ability to take elements of the previous steps and use them to create new knowledge.

  Synthesis is the pinnacle — people who can synthesise are virtual gods in the knowledge economy, the most sought after talents in the globalised twenty-first century. British success in the new age is going to depend on workers who have knowledge and understanding, but also the ability to analyse and evaluate and synthesise information and ideas from multiple sources all at the same time. They will be individuals unrestricted by a single narrative.

  And what do such people look like? They are eclectics, curious magpies taking intriguing shiny bits of knowledge into their nest and shaping them into something new. They are probably doing their homework while conducting three keyboard conversations and surfing the web and listening to music and switching between obscure television channels and chatting on the mobile. They are members of the NetGen. They could be our children.

  M is for Murder

  Morse stood for a few minutes, gazing down at the ugly scene at his feet. The murdered girl wore a minimum of clothing — a pair of wedge-heeled shoes, a very brief dark-blue miniskirt and a white blouse. Nothing else.

  The first time we meet Chief Inspector Morse, in the murder mystery novel Last Bus to Woodstock, he is investigating the brutal killing of a hitchhiker, Sylvia Kaye, whose body is found ‘cruelly streaked with blood’ in an Oxford car park. Thirteen novels and thirty-three television programmes later, it becomes clear that Matthew Arnold’s sweet city with her dreaming spires is Colin Dexter’s malevolent city with her shocking murders. Through the books and episodes the corpses pile up, scores of gruesome deaths suggesting a propensity for lethal violence in Oxford at odds with its international reputation for civilised and genteel scholarship.

  The city, though, does have a murderous past. In the 1340s, immediately before the Black Death visited its own fatal curse upon Oxford’s population, records suggest that for every 900 inhabitants, one would be bumped off during the course of the year. If the same homicide rate were applied to the citizenry today, Morse would have at least three bodies each week to gaze upon. However, figures for contemporary Oxford show that an ambitious detective these days might only get the chance to solve a murder once or possibly twice a year.

  Murder exerts a primal fascination upon us. Such is society’s obsessive interest in the grisly, macabre and distressing details of what happens when one human being deliberately takes the life of another that our folklore, our culture and our daily routines are smeared with the blood of crime victims: the whodunnit on the bedside table, the psycho-noir flick at the local cinema, the frontpage splash of the paper on the doormat.

  Shortly after I first joined the BBC in the mid-1980s, the new head of current affairs John Birt expressed concern that the corporation’s news bulletins were overdosing on murder in the search for ratings. Editors were urged to reduce the body count. His argument was that the preoccupation with untimely and violent death painted an inaccurate portrait of British society and risked unnecessarily alarming our viewers.

  The death of Sylvia Kaye had figured dramatically in Thursday afternoon’s edition of the Oxford Mail, and prominently in the national press on Friday morning. On Friday evening the news bulletins on both BBC and ITV carried an interview with Chief Inspector Morse…

  So what clues can we muster to solve the mysteries of murder? Let us begin by asking whether a murder has actually been committed. We may, like Morse, have a body with a smashed skull and a bloodied tyre-spanner nearby, but classifying such crimes is rarely straightforward.

  Murder has a strict legal definition that concerns the slayer not the slain. In England and Wales ‘the crime of murder is committed, where a person: of sound mind and discretion (i.e. sane); unlawfully kills (i.e. not self-defence or other justified killing); any reasonable creature (human being); in being (born alive and breathing through its own lungs); under the Queen’s Peace; with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. In Scottish law, murder is defined as ‘the unlawful killing of another with intent to kill, or with wicked recklessness to life’. One may be able to prove that Colonel Mustard killed Professor Plum in the Billiard Room with the candlestick — but was it murder? Within the prerequisites, caveats and legal arguments, there lies opportunity to demonstrate that no such crime has taken place. In England and Wales, for example, only 30 per cent of homicide prosecutions result in a conviction for murder. Detectives may launch a great many murder investigatio
ns, but until such time as one has nailed the murderer, no murder has been committed.

  As a result, although this chapter is entitled ‘M is for Murder’, our inquiries will require us to keep an open mind on motive and offence — assembling clues that relate to killings of all kinds. What is beyond debate is that we are investigating a crime that has, at its core, a corpse.

  Let us examine the body.

  How old is the victim? The most likely age for a person to be unlawfully killed is, actually, in the first year of life. In England and Wales, infants under twelve months face around four times the average risk of becoming a victim of homicide. The offender is most likely to be one of the baby’s parents — mothers and fathers are equally likely to kill their infant. Mothers, however, are offered special legal protection from a murder charge. Since the Infanticide Acts of 1922 and 1938, English law has recognised that the death maybe the result of her mind being ‘disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of giving birth’. However, less than a quarter of women accused of such crimes are convicted of infanticide — a significant proportion are sentenced to life imprisonment for murder.

  The risk of being murdered falls sharply over the first two years of life and, although the press often dwell on the violent deaths of children, the chances of becoming a homicide victim during childhood are described by the Home Office as exceptionally low. The dangers do start to rise sharply, though, when we enter the teenage years, peaking and plateauing in our twenties and early thirties. During this period, homicide is the third most common cause of death but, should we survive until our thirty-fifth birthday, the risks start to tail off. By the time we collect our bus pass, the Grim Reaper has probably got other plans for our demise.

  The typical homicide victim, then, is relatively young and probably male: seven out often of those killed at another’s hands are men.

  What can we surmise about the background of the deceased? Well, chances are that he or she will not be wearing a business suit. Less than 7 per cent of homicide victims had a professional, managerial or skilled occupation. Twice that proportion (14 per cent) will have had a manual job. But by far the most likely status is that they didn’t have a job at all — 53 per cent of victims had ‘no current occupation’, with one in four classed as unemployed. If they did work, there are a few occupations that appear to be associated with above average risk of being murdered: security staff, medical staff, social workers and, often overlooked in the official statistics, prostitutes.

  The spanner and the solitary white button lay where Morse had seen them earlier. There was nothing much to see but for the trail of dried blood that led almost from one end of the back wall to the other.

  We know something of the victim but what of the cause of death? In Britain, more than a third of homicides involve the deceased, whether male or female, having been stabbed. The weapon is likely to be a knife but may be one of many sharp instruments, including broken bottles. Beyond that, the modus operandi alters depending on whether the victim is a man or a woman.

  The next most common implement for a male death is a fist or a foot — about a quarter are hit or kicked to death. For women it is strangulation, accounting for roughly one in five female victims. A blunt instrument (such as a tyre spanner) is used only rarely — in about 7 per cent of homicides of either sex. Although popular culture might suggest murderers often shoot people, in the UK this is described as relatively unusual. Around 7 per cent of male victims and 2 per cent of women are shot. It is a different story in the United States, however, where the gun is by far the most commonly used weapon in murders. At the height of the ‘murder boom’ in New York in the late 1980s and early 90s, almost 80 per cent of homicides involved firearms.

  Around 60 per cent of homicides take place between 8pm and 4am. More than twice as many homicides occur on a Saturday as a Monday. (There is more than a whiff of alcohol in the figures, as we shall find out.) April and October are the most common months to be bumped off, February and November the least likely.

  ‘I can only repeat to you that I am formulating a hypothesis, that is, a supposition, a proposition however wild, assumed for the sake of argument; a theory to be proved (or disproved — yes, we must concede that) by reference to facts, and it is with facts and not with airy-fairy fancies that I shall endeavour to bolster my hypothesis.’

  Having identified the victim, the cause and the time of death, it is high time to begin tracking down the killer. If our murderer conforms to type, what kind of person will he or she be? Well, the odds are overwhelmingly in favour of the killer being a man. Around 90 per cent of offenders are male, and they are likely to be a similar age to their victims — between eighteen and thirty-five.

  What about a description? Does a murderer have a distinctive look? Eyebrows too close together, an evil stare? According to Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s influential 1876 work L’Uomo Delinquente, there is a direct relationship between physical appearance and murderous tendencies. Lombroso spent years conducting post-mortem examinations and anthropometric studies on criminals and concluded that the skulls of born killers exhibited a deficiency in their frontal curve, a projecting occiput and receding forehead.

  Warming to his theme, the scientist applied his theory to the skull of Charlotte Corday, the young woman who famously and fatally stabbed Jean-Paul Marat in his bath during the French revolution. ‘Not even the purest political crime, that which springs from passion, is exempt from the law which we have laid down,’ he claimed. A statue of Valeria Messalina, the Roman empress who plotted to assassinate her husband Claudius, was also employed to support his argument. He sees in her effigy a heavy jaw, a low forehead and wavy hair — the marks of a killer!

  However absurd these ideas may seem today, such was their currency that in June 1902 Sir Bryan Donkin and Sir Herbert Smalley, the senior medical staff of the English prison system, agreed to test them out. The heads of thousands of inmates incarcerated in Parkhurst, Portland, Dartmoor and Borstal gaols were measured, including those of convicted murderers who had been spared the death sentence.

  In 1913 Charles Goring, the Deputy Medical Director at Parkhurst, published The English Convict: A Statistical Study. When the measurements had been tabulated and cross-referenced, the conclusion was that murderers and other criminals ‘possess no characteristics, physical or mental, which are not shared by all people’. Tracking down a killer could not be achieved with a simple tape measure.

  A century later and researchers were again inside prisons trying to spot the common factors among murderers. In 2000, David Freedman and David Hemenway published the results of long and detailed interviews with sixteen men on death row in the United States. As the stories of the condemned men unfolded, remarkable similarities emerged. All sixteen had experienced family violence; fourteen of the men had been severely physically abused as children by a family member. Three of them had been beaten unconscious. Twelve of the death row inmates had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.

  Psychiatrist James Gilligan, while director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, also explored the life histories of incarcerated killers. Violent men, he concluded, have often been the victims of extreme physical and psychological violence during childhood. They have feelings of worthlessness, failure, embarrassment, weakness and powerlessness.

  Research by the World Health Organization in Europe found a similar link: ‘Exposure to violence and mental trauma in childhood is associated with atypical neurodevelopment and subsequent information-processing biases, leading to poor attachment, aggression and violent behaviour. Children who experience neglect and maltreatment from parents are at greater risk for aggressive and antisocial behaviour and violent offending in later life.’

  He pondered the case, at first with a slow, methodical analysis of the facts known hitherto and then with what, if he had been wider awake, he would wish to have called a series of swift, intuitive leaps, all of w
hich landed him in areas of twilight and darkness.

  The profile of our typical killer, then, may involve an abusive childhood. We can also make a guess as to where he or she lives: offenders tend to come from poorer neighbourhoods. Research on English murders in the 1980s by the social anthropologist Elliott Leyton concluded: ‘It is clear that nine out of ten homicides, perhaps more, are now committed by members of [the] underclass — persons with little education and no professional qualifications, chronically unemployed and on welfare.’

  However, assuming that poverty alone explains higher murder rates might prove a red herring. The link between homicide and deprivation is not as strong as its link with income inequality: several studies have demonstrated that murder rates go up as differences in wealth increase. An examination of violent crime rates in 125 of the largest cities in the US concluded that it wasn’t objective poverty that could be linked to violence, but relative deprivation. The World Health Organization came to a similar conclusion, reporting that rising income inequality in Europe had resulted in an increase in homicide.

  For the first time Morse seemed oddly hesitant. ‘He could have done it, of course.’

  ‘But I just don’t see a motive, do you sir?’

  ‘No,’ said Morse flatly, ‘I don’t.’

  He looked around the room dejectedly.

  We have a body and we have a description of the suspect. What we do not have yet is a motive. To help complete the picture, our detective will want to know the probable relationship between the murder victim and the killer. Are they strangers, acquaintances, friends or family? The answer is likely to depend on whether our murderer is a man or a woman.

  According to UK government research, one in four of the victims of male killers will probably be a stranger to their assailant. Among those killed by women, one in twenty-three is likely to be a stranger. In fact, female killers often know their victims intimately — in half of cases research suggests it will be their husband or partner, an ex-partner or a relative. For male perpetrators, the proportion of their victims who are likely to be close family members is a quarter.