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It is appalling how differently cases, victims, as well as perpetrators are treated and I think class indeed plays a big role! Thank you for digging into this, it is so important to do!

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Thank you Julie

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This is true week in week out across the criminal justice system, victims are continually assessed and judged on their like ability, race and socioeconomic background.

I wasn’t familiar with this case but having now read up on it what also stopped me in my tracks, in addition to the sheer horror of the crime, is that had it not been for the trial judge at Leeds Crown Court there would undoubtedly have been a terrible miscarriage of justice. An innocent man imprisoned for years (probably killed if we had capital punishment) and the killer out and about and never traced.

This case also highlights yet more evidence of poor policing where they seemingly had decided on who the perpetrator was and then kept going at him til their ‘evidence’ stuck.

What a horrific case on all fronts.

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I think class is clearly a factor in how important people are deemed to be by society, and how worthy of attention and compassion. The people who run everything, not being from the lower end of the economic scale, take a reductive attitude to working class issues whilst exercising a "there but for the grace of God" attitude to crimes that happen within their own milieu. The misogyny is ubiquitous though: those who blame a blameless mother may do so because they are searching for a logical explanation for an atrocity, possibly as a means of dealing with the horror and fear that it could happen to them. I also remember hearing a pundit commentating on the McCann case saying that one reason for the interest in the case was Mrs McCann's good looks. Even now it makes me feel physically sick that this man said that in such circumstances. To speak about a woman in this way at a time of intolerable anguish was beyond all comprehension. To him she was just a news story to be analysed.

It is really important that you have kept the attention on Nikki and on Sharon. A shameful, shameful story. Thank you

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