Women are all so much more than a label or a cliche - Christa Ackroyd

Not that he said anything wrong. Really. And not that I am anything but eternally grateful that he chose to see me in person during what is a horrendous time for the NHS, for a problem with my foot.

It was his introduction that made me laugh out loud. It might raise a smile with you too. “Thank you,” he wrote to my GP, “for referring this pleasant

63-year-old lady...”

“Pleasant!” Of all the words I can think of to describe me “pleasant” would not be the first that springs to mind. As for being 63, I do not need reminding of that. And as for “‘lady”, even I think that’s stretching it a bit.

Of course my mum would have been delighted. “Nothing wrong with being pleasant,” she would have said. “And you are 63, so be glad you have made it this far. Plenty of people haven’t.”

nd she would have been right. It is just not how I see myself. Strong, determined, opinionated, valued perhaps? But never just a pleasant 63-year-old lady.

Friends and family found it hilarious. One immediately told me the story of her high-profile partner who had described her in a magazine as being “good value.” “You make me sound like a supermarket’s own brand of beans,” she said.

So forgive me if we seem a little over sensitive but for too long women have been labelled. For me and my friend those labels are just a funny story to share and laugh at. For others it can be a much more serious matter.

Last week, West Yorkshire Police apologised for the “language, tone and terminology” used during their investigation into the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. For me that apology, though well intentioned, came 40 years too late. But any apology about the way women were divided into the “innocent”, and by inference the not so innocent, was to be welcomed.

At last, I thought, the authorities are seriously examining the words they use to describe women, terminology which at the time not only hampered the investigation but also gave women a false sense of security if they found themselves in well-lit residential areas walking home alone.

So why did it matter? Firstly, their description all those years ago fed into the narrative later taken up by Peter Sutcliffe that he had a mission from God to kill prostitutes. He didn’t. He never did.

He simply wanted the soft option of being incarcerated in a mental-health unit rather than prison. And for 35 years or more, that’s where he was. That’s where he relished his notoriety.

Peter Sutcliffe was not on a “moral” crusade. He did not have an obsession with prostitutes as police told us he had. Peter Sutcliffe was a cowardly beast for whom any woman walking alone was a target. Vulnerable women were easy prey. But more importantly, and this is at the heart of the failure to catch him sooner, who really cared about a woman labelled a prostitute?

Who would admit being in an area labelled a red-light district even if they had important information? What is more damning down the years is how some families have not been able to come to terms with not just how their loved ones died, but how they were described. It hurt then and hurts now.

Detectives were not just morally wrong they were factually wrong. Just because a woman was out for a drink with a friend does not make her a “good-time girl”. Just because she was sexually active does not make her promiscuous.

But that is how people were encouraged to see some of them. It was, and is, indefensible. What on earth was wrong with simply describing them all as women? And so here was the apology. A recognition that investigating officers added to the pain felt by the victims’ families with their judgemental insensitivity.

A week last Friday was a busy day for me. A day when I was called upon by many media outlets to comment on the news of Sutcliffe’s death and reflect on the way the lives of some of these women were not only ended but stained by association.

And then I opened the newspapers and turned on the television to read and hear in some instances more of the same. Yes, many media outlets had sanitised their description of those who died, choosing to refer to some as sex workers. Yes, they reported on the apology for the branding of Sutcliffe’s victims at the time.

But too many repeated the mistakes of the past in doing so. I cringed at the phrase “many of whom were sex workers”. A sex worker is just another word for prostitute. And prostitution is just another word for the abuse of women. What is worse, changing the words to sex worker suggests a degree of career choice.

Not one woman, then or now, chooses to “work” selling sex on the streets. They are forced to, either by another human being or by circumstances. They were all women. That is who they were way back in the 1970s and who we are now.

I started this column with a label that may have amused many of you, about being described as a pleasant, 63-year-old lady. I hope it did. But the message is important. We are all so much more than a cliche.

How many times have you seen a woman described as curvy, stunning or age defying? Too often we are judged by how we look. It is the reason so few rape cases come to court, because the victim knows that what she was wearing, where she was and her sexual history will play a part in the outcome.

Put simply, you would never describe a man first by his looks. So let us stop doing it to women. There is so much more to each and every one of us than that.

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