Análisis de RPA en el mercado con orientación similar al proyecto

The above section dealt with newspaper articles that invited readers to make moral

judgements about the relative merits of the perpetrator and victim, but this was only one of several strategies open to journalists. Many newspaper stories were designed to arouse quite different responses. Some were closer to whodunnits while others used humour. Finally, there were stories in which the event was presented as a tragedy for both the perpetrator and the victim.

One fictional genre that numerous stories in the Dutch newspapers drew on was that of the detective novel.100 As noted in Chapter 3, the newspapers were part of a wider

98

“Echtscheiding met onderling goedvinden,” Leeuwarder Courant, 23 February 1910, 5;

“Echtscheidingspraktijken,” Leeuwarder Courant, 26 February 1910, 7; “Het Weekblad van het Recht over het echtscheidingsontwerp,” De Telegraaf, 14 September 1910, 5; “Echtscheiding!” Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 7 February 1910, 1.

99 _{“Poging tot doodslag,” De Telegraaf, 14 July 1920, 7; “Poging tot doodslag,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 14 July}

1920, 10.

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media ecosystem in which crime fiction fuelled crime reporting. The genre of the detective story originated in the mid-nineteenth century and reached a peak in popularity with Conan Doyle, whose stories were regularly serialized in the Dutch newspapers. The interwar period was the golden age of the whodunnit. In these stories, the crime was presented as a puzzle, an intellectual conundrum. There is a lack of emotional engagement and the

violence is downplayed.101 In many Dutch press stories of intimate partner violence, it was only too clear who the perpetrator was, but murder stories where this was a matter of doubt often used stylistic elements from whodunnits. A case in point is that of Antonia Van Gaans in the Netherlands. A married woman, she had disappeared in May 1919 after withdrawing a large sum of money and telling relatives she was planning to run off with her lover. Her body was found two months later. In December 1920, her lover stood trial for her murder. The journalists could have chosen to delve into the victim’s amorous relationships, but instead the trial reports in the newspapers concentrated on the clues that linked the victim to the accused (a hair matching the accused found in the victim’s larynx, a piece of rubber hose and so on). Most space was devoted to the expert witnesses. The overall effect was for the victim to be reduced to a body, the site of clues, rather than a personality with emotions and character traits. Moreover, attention was detracted from the act of violence and the reports were rather cold and unsensational.102

Another tactic the newspapers used was humour. This could take the form of an ironic headline, for example “Pleasant husband” (prettig echtgenoot) for an item on a man who had kicked his wife in the face.103 Or it might take the form of hyperbole –

inappropriately high-blown language in the description of an incident. Humour was often used to describe minor incidents among the Dutch working class, for whom such high-blown language would seem ‘naturally’ comic.104 The Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad used this approach to describe the revenge of a 35-year-old Rotterdam woman on her former lover, a cinema doorman. Entitled “The nose of the cinema doorman”, the first article stated that when she found out that “the object of her tender love was married and the father of five children”, she “swore she would hurt him and do so via the most beautiful thing that L. possessed, namely his well-formed nose”.105 The trial report has the headline “The drama of the

almost-cut-off tip of the nose”.106 In the interwar period, the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad and

De Telegraaf started to include regular courtroom scenes. These were humorous sketches

101

Light, Forever England, 65-71.

102

“Moord en diefstal,” Leeuwarder Courant, 20 December 1920, 6; “Moord en diefstal,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 18 December 1920, 7; “De moord bij Rozendaal!” Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 20 December 1920, 8.

103

“Prettig echtgenoot,” Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 8 December 1920, 9.

104

Richardson, Analysing Newspapers, 65. In northern England, D’Cruze finds dialect used in newspaper reports with a similar function: D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, 186-187.

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“dat haar teerbeminde gehuwd en vader van vijf kinderen was. Dies zwoer zij hem te zullen treffen en wel in het mooiste wat L. bezat, n.l. in zijn welgevormden neus.” “De neus van den bioscoop-portier,” Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 1 October 1930, 9.

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of trials in the local courts, making gentle fun of the little people. They usually concerned property crimes but occasionally dealt with minor violence in the family.107 The effect of the humorous articles was to trivialize the incident, while the reader was invited to laugh at all the protagonists rather than feel emotionally involved with any particular one of them.

At the other extreme were the stories that were constructed as tragedies for all those involved. These stories used highly emotive language and portrayed the perpetrator as a kind of victim as well. This frame was often used in murder-suicide cases and for respectable members of Dutch society – in other words, where both perpetrator and victim were firmly entrenched in the imagined community. One such case involved a butcher and his wife that took place in the Dutch town of Deventer in July 1930. De Telegraaf caught the reader’s attention with the headline “Horrific drama in Deventer”. The item created

suspense by introducing the story from the point of view of an employee setting off

unsuspectingly to work in the morning. Finding the shop still closed, he rang repeatedly until one of the children opened up. “It turned out something awful had happened in his boss’s house” (Het bleek, dat ten huize van zijn patroon iets onzettends was gebeurd). Later in the article, the journalist reports that the preliminary investigation suggested the butcher killed his wife first and then himself “but nothing is certain in this regard” (hoewel hieromtrent niets zekers vaststaat). This reluctance to explicitly label the man a killer was also evident in the other newspapers’ reports. The Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, in an item entitled “The drama in Deventer” about the funeral, ambiguously referred to “the married couple P. who died in such a tragic way” (de beide echtelieden Ph., die op zoo tragische wijze zijn om het leven gekomen).108

Allied to the concept of the ‘tragedy for all’ was the notion of the complicit victim.

De Telegraaf implied this in its report on the Deventer case: the correspondent understood that the wife’s death may not have been a crime as her bedroom, where she had been found dead, had been in an orderly state. This was despite the fact that the couple’s four young children were in the house at the time.109 The idea of the willing victim played a key role in two 1910 cases. The first concerned monsieur Parat, a pharmacist in Paris who, as the Algemeen Handelsblad put it, had “chained his wife up in a dark room because he loved her so much” (die zooveel van zijn vrouw hield, dat hij ze in een donkere kamer aan den ketting legde). According to this initial report, the wife found this behaviour quite

acceptable. When asked by the head of the investigation whether her husband had treated her badly, she apparently replied, “Not at all, Sir, he was passionately in love with me and he was jealous. That excuses a great deal of violence”. The Algemeen Handelsblad went on to quote the French writer Myriam Harry at length; she had spent much time in the East,

107

For example: “Gebroken huisvrede,” De Telegraaf, 4 November 1930, 9.

108 _{“Het drama te Deventer,” Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 25 July 1930, 10; “Ontzettend drama te Deventer.}

Echtpaar dood in zijn woning aangetroffen. Financieele moeilijkheden?” De Telegraaf, 23 July 1930, 5.

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where women considered such tyrannical jealousy to be the ultimate proof of love.110 Here, the alleged submissiveness of Parat’s wife was construed as something foreign, even

Oriental.111

It was unthinkable that a Dutch woman would allow herself to be abused by her partner, but a suicide pact in which the woman was killed at her express wish was

conceivable. This was the main question in a case that came to trial in the summer of 1910. The student and aristocrat G. v. S. had shot and killed his lover, the wife of an industrialist, in his room before attempting suicide. The defence argued that the couple had agreed in advance that he would kill her and then himself. Much was made of the fact that the victim was not wearing a corset, which would have impeded the path of the bullet. The implication was that she had gone to his room prepared for the event. G. v. S. had a legal interest in proving the woman’s complicity as Dutch law allowed for a reduced sentence if a

premeditated killing was at the victim’s “express and earnest desire” (op uitdrukkelijk en ernstig verlangen) – this was in fact the final verdict. But this reading of events also reduced his moral responsibility, transforming the event from a cold-blooded murder into a tragic love affair gone wrong.112

Conclusion

This chapter aimed firstly to examine how the changing readership and the sources affected newspaper reporting of intimate partner violence. The expansion of the readership to include female and working-class readers was a key factor behind the changing coverage. Newspapers printed more items on violence between partners, particularly cases involving high-status protagonists in foreign settings, in the years leading up to the First World War as part of the strategy of appealing to women readers. Moreover, the articles showed more empathy over time for the women involved. The portrayal of Dutch lower-class domestic violence changed too as the working class became incorporated in the Dutch imagined community as ‘us’ rather than ‘them’. In the early years, domestic violence was depicted as endemic among the urban working class, part of a general narrative of the drunk and disorderly lower classes. In later years, stories were more likely to involve individuals on the margins of society, and the disruptive male perpetrator was contrasted against chivalrous local citizens and police protecting the female victims.

110

“Volstrekt niet, mijnheer, maar hij hield hartstochtelijk veel van mij, en hij was jaloersch. Het verontschuldigt veel gewelddadigheden.” “De jaloersche apotheker,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 22 February 1910, 6.

111

In later reports, it transpired that the woman had not submitted willingly at all. The man was committed to a mental asylum, his wife took over the pharmacy and filed for divorce. When he was released from the asylum after only a few months, she called it scandalous. See: Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, 9 September 1910, 11; Algemeen Handelsblad, 3 December 1910, 6.

112 _{“De moord te Rijswijk,” De Telegraaf, 26 July 1910, 2; “Het drama te Rijswijk,” Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad,}

The sources had a mediating effect on the content. They affected the geographical spread of stories. Foreign items largely concerned countries where the newspapers had foreign correspondents while stories of minor violence in the Netherlands in the national papers were concentrated in the urban vicinity of the newspapers’ offices. There is also evidence that the Dutch stories reflected the priorities of the institutional sources. At the most obvious level, they invariably presented the police in a positive light. The focus on public disturbances and the neglect of chronic violence are also consistent with what is known about the priorities of the criminal justice system.

The second question concerned the strategies journalists used in presenting stories of intimate partner violence. It is argued that the moral assessment in which the perpetrator was weighed up against the victim was just one of several strategies. Moreover, that moral assessment depended crucially on whether the protagonists were deemed to ‘belong’. Journalists could be critical of men who drank and were idle and of men or women who were unfaithful, but such evaluations were directed primarily at those positioned outside the imagined community. Thus married women’s work could be a positive attribute if journalists chose to empathize with the woman in domestic violence articles. Many stories, however, were not aimed at inviting a moral judgement. Foreign items frequently drew on romantic fiction, with glamorous settings and protagonists motivated by passion and honour. Other stories were framed as whodunnits and reflected the influence of the

detective novel. Humorous items on minor violence among the ‘little people’ were intended to amuse the reader. Other cases were presented as a tragedy in which the perpetrator was as much a ‘victim’ as the person they had attacked.

We have seen that newspapers printed numerous stories of intimate partner violence throughout the period, stories that demonstrated that men could be a danger to women at all stages in the relationship. Yet we have already seen in Chapter 2 that domestic violence never became a social problem in the Netherlands. Potential claimsmakers such as feminists or temperance campaigners never took up this issue. Child protection, on the other hand, was the subject of major policy initiatives between 1880 and 1930. This was the context for the second form of family violence – the maltreatment by parents of their own children – which is considered in the next chapter.