Extreme violence against women seems to have become a staple of TV crime shows. Writers and producers reveal what’s behind the high female body count – and what needs to change
“A few years ago I was sent something: ‘Here’s the premise, a woman’s body found naked wrapped in clingfilm, where do you go next?’”
That one example from an anonymous screenwriter perfectly captures crime drama’s obsession with violence against women. Sometimes we talk about that a lot, other times it just washes over us. It’s easy to get broad agreement that violence against women in real life is bad, but it’s harder to say for certain that the prevalence of that violence on screen feeds into it, and it is more or less impossible to maintain it as a social priority. It drops out of fashion, and takes some new non-fiction horror such as a real-life, high profile, killing of a woman walking home to revivify the interest, then we go back over the same terrain again, like goldfish.
