Gruesome and Graphic

Ann Cleeves, who writes the Vera and Shetland stories, claims Scandinavian fiction treats women victims badly. She doesn't like graphic violence against women and children. Her work is less violent because "we tend to write what we want to read." 

There have been studies on violence against women in the thriller genre. Is it necessary, or for entertainment? Some say it reflects sexism in society. Others think if a strong female predominates, such as Gillian Anderson's character in The Fall, then it is OK to have such violence against women. What do you think?

I think there is graphic violence right through tv these days, and often it is so gruesome I won't watch. Luther was one of these, and The Wire another. Somehow it has become a race for tv shows to show more and more graphic violence, often but not always against women. I don't want to see a man or child or a woman - or an animal - tortured. I don't read enough thrillers to know if the violence is in the text before it translates to the screen. I do know it is labelled as realism, sometimes gritty realism. I now know enough to be very wary of programmes hyped with this sort of label. 

It is possible to buy and read, or borrow and read, non-fiction accounts of forensic investigations into murders which - you would think - would turn the stomach of the ordinary citizen. Yet murders and stories of murderers have always had a fascination. When I worked in a public library the murder/war crimes section was one of the most popular. It seems the general public wants to be horrified, or turned on by graphic violence in the same way they want to be scared by vampire and ghost stories. 

 "I'm aware families sit around the telly to watch Vera, which is making entertainment out of murder," said Cleeves. "But I don't enjoy reading about people's pain. I tend to put myself in that position and it's not somewhere I want to be."

 I'm afraid that Ms Cleeves and I buck the trend. A lot of people do enjoy reading about people's pain and watching actors deliver it on screen.  Until they start avoiding or switching off, it will go on being delivered and will very likely get even more gruesome, if that is possible.

What is danger?

Our friends arrived bearing English newspapers yesterday, and I read that a boy has died because a goalpost fell on his head. Tragedy though this is to his grieving family, I don't see the sense in the subsequent demand that a risk assessment must be done on goalposts up and down the country.

Thus goalposts become close kin to the childhood game of conkers, which has now been ruled out of safe sports in schools. I have heard that chestnut trees should be cut down so that said conkers would not fall on anyone's head. Then there's the rumour that trees should in fact be felled because they may drop branches on people passing beneath.

How much of this is true I do not know. But it seems to me that as video games, films, novels become or contain more violence, real life is being tied down to the equivalent of walking in straight lines because bends and zig zags may contain hazards.

Common sense seems to have gone out of the window in the last thirty years. Life is dangerous, has always been dangerous, and it is up to the invidivual to circumnavigate those dangers, whatever they happen to be. Driving cars is dangerous, perhaps one of the most dangerous things we ever do, and yet people feel so safe and cocooned that they speed through houseing estates and motorways with equal abandon.

Forget the goal posts and conkers; one the whole, they are among the safer things in life.