Don't forget the real victim in the Knox case

Fashion victim: the Duchess of Cambridge, called "beige and boring" for appearing like this, is now being criticised for wearing a scarlet lace dress
12 April 2012

First Amanda Knox was likened to Joseph Goebbels. Then she was a "she-devil". Now she is "Jessica Rabbit". Both the prosecutors and defence lawyers in Perugia certainly like to keep the world's headline writers happy. Given the media's polarised approach - Knox is either all-American innocent or murderous whore - that the cartoonish caricatures have invaded the courtroom is perhaps unsurprising.

But amid this renewed debate about Knox's disposition, the most important part of the case has again been forgotten: the victim, Meredith Kercher.

The current - possibly final - series of the Amanda Knox show is approaching its end, with closing arguments from the defence today. If their appeal is successful, Knox and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito will walk free. The pain of Kercher's family has no such possible end.

Only a court can determine guilt, even if, in Knox's case, that hasn't stopped the media from trying. Guilty or innocent, the carrying out of the legal process through a lens and her marketing almost as a product - "hot demoness" - has been disturbing.

Parts have been unfair on Knox: the dredging up of her sexual history especially, when there was minimal interest in those of the men accused. She (shock! horror!) carried condoms and a vibrator; that she wasn't a vestal virgin isn't an indication of a twisted mind though.

But even more troublingly, the Knox obsession has seen Kercher edited out of the story; the tasteless references to "Foxy Knoxy" trivialising the Leeds University student's death.

We don't always consign victims to the footnotes.

When Vincent Tabak - the engineer accused of murdering Joanna Yeates - appeared in court earlier this month, the reports were mostly accompanied by pictures of Yeates, not him.

When the alleged murderer is male and the murdered female - the "ordinary" way of the world - our interest in the victim can be maintained, but when there's a wide-eyed apparent villainess, she is promoted to lone protagonist. Knox's alleged accomplices have only bit parts too; appropriately, a book about the case is called Amanda and the Others.

Clearly Knox is the wet dream of callous editors and TV producers but the media are simply responding to demand. When women write to rapists and killers in prison, we think they are strange, probably disturbed. But hasn't the world collectively been indulging in a similar exercise with Knox, or rather, an imagined form of who Knox is?

Kercher, meanwhile, is overlooked, allowed only a cameo role. Worst of all, though, we seem to have forgotten that this story isn't a work of fiction.

Give Kate's outfits a break

The Duchess of Cambridge can't win on the fashion front. Criticised just a few weeks ago for being too beige and boring, now she's being told off for daring to wear a scarlet lace dress (knee length, high neckline) to a friend's wedding. In the dress by Aussie designer Collette Dinnigan, she looked, one columnist sniped, "hard and a little cheap".
Middleton's role doesn't exactly lend itself to dressing like Daphne Guinness but why - at 29 - do others expect her to be constantly decked out in cashmere twinsets? We should be thrilled that she has put down the feather fascinators, chucked the nude shoes to the back of the wardrobe and has championed both British designers and our high street. My only gripe about her outfit last Sunday? I have a dress just like it and I don't want people thinking I'm a Kate copycat.

Black humour may not be the best medicine

"We have to have a sense of humour: we work for the NHS." So a doctor friend told me recently. He had just spieled off a long list of acronyms and slang, long vanished from patients' notes but still making the medical students over at Barts, Guys and beyond snigger: from TF Bundy (totally f***ed but unfortunately not dead yet) and ash cash (the money made from completing a cremation form after Doris's demise from emphysema) to pumpkin positive (shine a pen-torch in the patient's mouth and their eyes light up).

Now, in a tad-too-convenient a "discovery" given her chosen career, a medical researcher who teaches comedy on the side has found that the black humour doctors employ may also benefit patients. I am all for some gallows wit to cope with witnessing death and disease but sometimes that light touch can come across as callous, such as the surgeon who told a patient: "The Cancer Club has a new member today - you." Perhaps humour and tumour aren't always meant to be bedfellows.

Strip puts art in the shade

Last night was the press evening for Decades, a new burlesque and cabaret show at the Proud Cabaret club in the City. A burlesque virgin, I left still unsure where I fell in the art form vs stripping-under-another-name debate. But Decades - which seems to target the hen night market, with its music borrowed from the West End stage - certainly wasn't for me.

There was little attempt at humour, seduction or even a story: each act was simply a wham bam here-are-my knickers ma'am sprint. And interestingly, the most powerful, talented woman in the room - compere and singer Coco Dubois - kept all her clothes on.

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