When the Sun was struggling to establish itself in the mid-60s, The Moors murderers must have seemed like the biggest, juiciest gift from the gods. Journalistic convention at the time used the language of circumspection in criminal cases, but, offered this banquet of depravity, the newspaper took off its gloves and hurled epithets at the headlines. Suddenly the person in the dock was no longer "the accused", he or she was an ANIMAL!!, a BEAST!!, a MONSTER!! Such headlines seduce because they flatten complexity's folds into an easy-to-swallow slogan. The slogans of the mob that gather like locusts outside courts when an accused paedophile appears. The slogans that result in a cut-to-the-chase attack on a paediatrician's house.
History is peppered with collective and personal monsters. Hitler might top the collective list, but Fred West and Pol Pot dog his heels, and Attila the Hun wasn't best known for his social work. Then there are the personal monsters, the bogeyman a callous parent invokes to terrify a child into sleep or to stop him from sucking his thumb. The bogeyman behind a bush on his way to school. Like the headlines, these monsters guarantee a kneejerk response that requires no thinking or exploration or investigation of meaning.
And now we have a new monster who abused his daughter for nearly a quarter of a century, traducing the role of the paterfamilias and bringing new dishes of depravity to the table. We have a new image too: Josef Fritzl's face, destined to become as grimly symbolic as Myra Hindley's with her unwavering eyes, peroxide helmet-head and lips shaped for sadism. Fritzl looks at us with the same beady eyes, his brows lifted in shameless challenge, his lopsided mouth almost smiling. His photograph looks set, like Hindley's, to become an image of such power that it acts like a societal reflex - oh, so that's what evil looks like!
Monsters spoil things. They spoil our idea of humanity as being essentially good, and at the same time warn us to be vigilant. When news broke about what was festering in Fritzl's basement, a shocked neighbour said it had wrecked her picture of Amstetten; it had forced her to know that her community was capable of hosting this evil and she could never again believe that she lived in a safe place. Fritzl and his cohorts spoil for us the belief that the family is a safe place for children and that the adults who bring them into the world will nurture them into adulthood. Having spoiled that belief, they become the canker that we must lop off in order to restore the organism to health.
For we need monsters. When James Bulger was murdered - by two child monsters - he became Jamie Bulger, a diminutive that his family apparently never used. He thus became our Jamie and by appropriating him and his innocence we were able to identify away from the perpetrators. So long as the venality is lodged in someone else - Thompson and Venables, Brady, Fritzl - we can reassure ourselves that there's nothing of the monster in us. We're spared the need to examine morally compromised aspects of ourselves so long as we are not-them. And having shriven ourselves of any common humanity, we can incarcerate them far away. Now they're beyond the pale we're relieved for the moment of the anxiety that there's something bad about society and, by extension, about ourselves. We're relieved, too, of the desperate feeling of vulnerability and passivity that such stories evoke.
When deliberate harm is done to someone, particularly children, part of us identifies with the victim. We've all been children, after all, we've all been dependent on our guardians, and when it goes right we learn to trust. When it goes wrong, we're in peril. America's picture of itself as inviolable was shredded on 9/11, and for a moment the world's most powerful nation was flayed. Just as its solution to the agony of vulnerability was to attack Afghanistan and Iraq, so the solution to the presence of monsters in our midst is to rid ourselves both of them and any identity with them. They become the receptacle for everything that is bad, and in casting it away we can believe that we are good enough and once again in charge.
Carol Topolski, a psychotherapist and author of the novel Monster Love.