There is a much bolder programme struggling to get out of I Cut Off His Penis: The Truth Behind the Headlines. By and large, it sticks to the traditional format of the behind-the-headlines genre, which is to recap the famous examples of whatever phenomenon is under discussion then add the context, the information that came out later and/or at trial and the distortions and omissions made by the media at the time.
Here, we have Lorena Bobbitt, who notoriously dis-membered her husband, John, with a kitchen knife in 1993, and, as she fled the scene, threw the severed appendage out of her car window into a field. She called 911, told them what she had done and where they could find the organ, which was then reattached to John in a nine-hour operation. What came out at her trial, and which she has spoken about in a handful of programmes since and as part of her activist work around domestic violence, were accounts of years of abuse – including rape and beatings, denied by John, who was acquitted of rape – that she says she suffered during her marriage. She was acquitted of assault by reason of temporary insanity, served a mandated 45 days in a psychiatric hospital, which she says now was a welcome refuge from the media attention, then rebuilt her life without him.
A spate of attacks in Bangkok between 1973 and 1980 is recalled by a former nurse, Jeraja Trakuldit, who attended many of the patients. The attacks became so prevalent that the ministry of health published public guidelines for preserving organs for reattachment. “If a man breaks his wife’s heart, fails to support her, leaves the children … ” says Trakuldit, “Repression can turn into anger. If the wife cannot leave … it bottles up. Eventually you can be capable of anything.”
Most terrible of all is the case of Brigitte Harris, who cut off her father’s penis when she feared that he was about to start abusing his young niece, as, she says, he had sexually abused her since she was three. “Three years old,” she keeps repeating, as if she still cannot believe it. She researched how to do it without killing him (“My plan was just to stop him hurting anyone else”), and, like Lorena, she called 911 afterwards – but he choked on the gag she had put on him and died. The jury sentenced her to five years for manslaughter. She has since been released and says she feels physically and mentally free for the first time in her life.
One victim, “Ollie”, is included in the service, presumably, of some kind of balance rather than deepening our understanding. He does not know why in 1988 his casual girlfriend “Linda” took a knife to his penis towards what he felt was the end of their relationship, and she could not be traced to give her account. Maybe, he suggests, she thought if she couldn’t have him, nobody else should, either.
Perpetrators’ stories take up the bulk of the programme, and are used to build a picture – that is surely obvious to anyone with an ounce of experience of the world and empathy in their heart – of a world in which women do not usually commit this sort of violence without being driven by extreme and prolonged provocation, often including fear for their own lives. The vocabulary of rage or revenge does not appear. Canny self-preservation, some would argue. Perhaps.
Less formulaic, much bolder and more novel is the candour from people such as the founder and director of the London-based Centre for Women’s Justice, solicitor Harriet Wistrich, and Prof Jacqueline B Helfgott, an expert in psychopathy and copycat crime from Seattle University, who all ask probing and difficult questions. Why, asks Helfgott, is this crime so shocking, “when cop shows and most other dramas present the brutalisation of women’s bodies in a million different ways,” as entertainment? Society venerates the penis but for many – many, many, many – women it is a source of danger and of pain. If you contextualise the women’s actions, “they have their own inner logic,” notes Wistrich. It is, in many ways, “a normal response to an abnormal experience.”
“We put Lorena Bobbitt in her place; we put all women in their place” says Helfgott of Bobbitt’s experience in the court and the media, broadening the programme’s perspective yet further. But it is Wistrich who voices the thought that has surely occurred to every viewer, living as we do in a world in which men inflict the vast majority of sexual violence, in which the vast majority of the victims are female: “It’s almost surprising there aren’t more cases.”
• I Cut Off His Penis: The Truth Behind the Headlines aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now.
