Lookism, A Societal Problem

 

We’d be outraged if a business owner told an employee she wouldn’t receive her bonus unless she lost weight. With most jobs, our looks should be regarded as irrelevant to our suitability and remuneration. What matters is that we have the skills for the job and put them to good use. Yet appearance discrimination, or ‘lookism’, is pervasive and consequential in the workplace. Can lookism in employment ever be justified? And, when it can’t, should we legislate against it?

 The first of these questions might seem to have an easy answer, namely, that lookism can be justified only when appearance is a genuine qualification for work, that is, has a real bearing on a person’s ability to do a job or do it well, such as modelling or some acting roles. But this just pushes back the problem. We must now ask: when is appearance a genuine qualification for a job? And even: should genuine qualifications always count, or can there be moral reasons for not counting them?

Much the same questions arise in relation to race and gender. There are cases when each of these can be regarded, reasonably, as a ‘genuine occupational requirement’, for example, ‘being a woman’ for a women’s refuge support worker. But it is equally clear that ‘being a man’ cannot justifiably count as a qualification for being a doctor, even if patients might be happier receiving medical advice from a man because, for sexist reasons, they rate men’s medical skills more highly. And that is so even though there’s a sense in which being a man is a genuine qualification for the job when a male doctor would be better able to minister to patients’ needs because their prejudices mean they’d trust him more and hence be more receptive to his advice. In other words, there are some genuine qualifications that it is not justifiable to count.

Consider two cases that concern the treatment of employees in the workplace and vividly raise worries about appearance unjustifiably counting as a qualification. The first relates to a performance evaluation of an employee called Courtney at a Canadian fashion company whose manager said her looks were affecting her ability to do her job. Interviewed by the BBC in 2022, Courtney said:

  “He point-blank told me that he thought I was too fat to be in the position I was in. He told me he was embarrassed having me around our vendors in meetings, and that it ruined his reputation.”

He then advised her to start going to the gym and avoid wearing fitted clothing. Unsurprisingly, Courtney felt shell-shocked. Subsequently, her appearance anxieties had a negative impact on her work because she was distracted by worries about what her colleagues thought of her.

The second case relates to an accusation in 2020 by the UK radio journalist Libby Purves against the BBC. Purves claimed that, for presenters on both television and radio, older women were under greater pressure than men of a similar age to appear younger, since women are judged on their looks, and part of what it is to be attractive for women is to look youthful. In an opinion piece for the Radio Times, she wrote:

“Sue Barker has been binned from A Question of Sport after 23 years. She is 64. More willingly, Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey depart from Woman’s Hour, aged 70 and 56. They are replaced by Emma Barnett, a mere 35. What is this? … Are we written off as old trouts while men become revered elders, sacred patriarchs, silver foxes?”

In both cases, lookism seems entangled with sex or gender discrimination, and, in the second case, with age discrimination too. This might provoke the thought that appearance discrimination is problematic only when it is entwined with some other form of discrimination, and that there is no reason to be concerned about it when it occurs on its own. But that seems clearly false. Appearance discrimination matters in its own right, and indeed operates in many of the same ways as other forms of discrimination we are committed to fighting, such as racial discrimination. Just as prejudices influence behaviour consciously and non-consciously in racial discrimination, so too they operate in conscious and non-conscious ways in lookism. Our responses to the looks of others often involve unjustified associations, whether positive or negative, between appearance features and character traits. These associations may function as implicit biases, or sometimes take the form of stereotypes that are endorsed with varying degrees of unreflectiveness.

Women especially are often seen as lazy or lacking in self-discipline if they are perceived as overweight. But even though lifestyle choices make a difference to shape, the hunger we experience and how much we weigh are largely determined by metabolism or physiology. So the idea that all or even most people with a heavier weight lack self-control is unsustainable when brought into contact with the evidence. In her book Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia (2024), Kate Manne concludes that ‘fatness has a strong genetic basis … at least 70 per cent of the variance in body mass that we find in the human population is likely due to genetics.’

Of course, it is not just selectors evaluating qualifications who are prone to biases. Good looks tend to be beneficial in doing a range of jobs because of how others respond to them. Viewers may prefer to watch attractive newsreaders deliver the TV news, perhaps in part because they associate their appearance with desirable character traits, such as trustworthiness. Customers may be put off interacting with employees they regard as fat because they find their appearance unattractive or judge them to be ill-disciplined. It’s for reasons of this sort that good looks can be genuine qualifications for working in customer-facing roles, even though there is a further question about whether it’s justifiable to count them.

Qualifications that arise in this way are often referred to as ‘reaction qualifications’, meaning qualifications produced by customer reactions to employee characteristics. As a result, even selectors who do not share the customers’ biases have a reason to appoint people with their customers’ preferred features, and to reject those with features their customers dislike. In contrast, when a technical skill is a qualification for a job, its role as a qualification, and indeed its status as a skill, doesn’t generally rely on others’ reactions to it. All that matters is that it is deployed in making a product that people want or providing a service they need. For example, the skill of giving competent legal advice is a qualification for being a lawyer, regardless of how others respond to it.

In addition to the association between heavier weight and laziness or lack of self-control, people routinely make other appearance-related associations. Short men are often regarded as prickly or prone to aggression on the basis that they have inferiority complexes. Facial scarring, and other so-called ‘facial disfigurements’, are often associated with unpleasantness or nastiness – think of Hollywood villains. Again, these associations don’t stand up against the evidence. When reaction qualifications are rooted in unjustified associations, is it fair to count them? We don’t think it’s morally acceptable to count reaction qualifications when they are grounded in, say, customers’ prejudices against women or members of a particular race, so why think it’s morally acceptable to count such qualifications when they are grounded in customers’ prejudices against particular appearance features?

Even when they don’t involve prejudices or unjustified associations, customers’ perceptions about whether an assistant is good looking, and indeed the perceptions of job recruiters, are usually a product of ‘internalising’ appearance norms – that is, rules concerning how we should look – that reflect conventional aesthetic preferences. Some of these norms may have gained currency over many generations, as a result of the way that being disposed to act from them when choosing sexual partners bestows evolutionary advantages, as Nancy Etcoff argues in Survival of the Prettiest (2000). Perhaps this is true of norms that favour unblemished skin or symmetrical faces. But other appearance norms expressing aesthetic preferences emerge from practices that are specific to particular cultures, and may even be a product of differences in power and privilege. For example, the emergence of norms regarding tightly coiled hair as messy, or favouring narrow rather than broad noses, or lighter over darker skin tones, can perhaps be fully explained by the way in which they reflect and perpetuate racial hierarchies – that is, they come to be endorsed because they legitimate the power and privilege that accrues to membership in particular racial groups. Even when norms are not the product of power and privilege, their application may end up benefiting people who are already advantaged, and further disadvantaging those who are already disadvantaged. Think here of norms biased against women or the elderly, or both, such as norms that regard youthfulness as part of what it is to be an attractive woman, which Purves thinks are influencing decisions at the BBC.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that ignoring customer preferences would be bad for business. Therefore, reaction qualifications grounded in such preferences provide some credibility to recruitment decisions based on them. In contrast, when selectors but not customers are influenced by looks, then no such justification is available. We don’t know whether vendors were put off by Courtney’s appearance or whether it was only her manager who had a problem with it. But it is surely unfair to candidates when managers’ hiring (or promotion) decisions are influenced by employees’ appearance if it is not even a reaction qualification. Indeed, it is generally unfair to take into account features of a person, whether racial membership or looks, when these have absolutely nothing to do with their ability to do the job.

Prejudices and negative associations concerning various appearance features unfairly reduce the range of career opportunities for people with these features. This then contributes to an unjust distribution of resources, and may even reinforce structural injustices. According to Daniel Hamermesh’s analysis of data from the United States in Beauty Pays (2011), the overall ‘beauty premium’ for above-average-looking women, compared with below-average-looking women, is 12 per cent; for above-average-looking men, compared with below-average-looking men, it is 17 per cent. Perhaps appearance is a legitimate qualification for some jobs, such as modelling, in which case not all such inequalities will be unjust, but often lookism seems analogous to racial discrimination, and condemnable for many of the same reasons.

But there are also cases of lookism that are rather different from racial discrimination because they involve responding to chosen features of appearance, such as tattoos, hairstyles and piercings. It is tempting to say that if a person is disadvantaged by an appearance feature they’ve chosen, in full knowledge that acquiring it will affect their employment prospects, then there is no injustice. But even here, customers may be opposed to such features for no good reason, for example, when tattoos are unjustifiably associated with aggression or mental health problems. Is it fair, in a job market, to disadvantage a person by her choices when that disadvantage reflects the prejudices of selectors or customers responding negatively to features she’s chosen for herself and that may even have become part of her identity?

 People may also make choices designed to improve their chances in particular job markets, for example, they may have liposuction, Botox injections or hair transplants, often to appear younger. This is especially so in visual media where, as Purves points out, part of what it is for women to be attractive is to look youthful. It would be easy to describe these interventions as chosen, but we should hesitate before doing so. Decisions to have them are often a product not only of seeking to improve one’s employment opportunities but also body-shaming practices. Indeed, as Heather Widdows argues in Perfect Me (2018), appearance norms form an ethical ideal, with those who fail to comply being regarded as not merely unattractive but morally flawed, because they are seen as failing in their duty to make the best of themselves. This ideal has become so demanding that it is oppressive to many people, especially women and younger men. When jobs are allocated in a way that rewards people who conform to these norms, then they are reinforced, and the pressures to conform to them become even greater.

Appearance features that are favoured or disfavoured in the job market may also be chosen by people in a way that reflects their own ethical commitments rather than dominant appearance norms. For example, some women choose not to wear makeup because they want to resist the idea of women as aesthetically appealing objects. As Clare Chambers writes in Intact (2022), they endorse the principle of the unmodified body – that our bodies are alright just as they are. As a resistance to body-shaming practices, people may consciously eschew body modifications and withstand the pressures placed on them by the often vicious comments they receive. Others may be committed to ethical principles derived from their religion requiring conformity to unconventional appearance norms or dress codes.

So appearance features may express deeply held convictions about how one should live. When companies have an ethos that reflects such convictions, and they discriminate in their selection practices to promote that ethos, then that often seems unobjectionable. Suppose, for example, that a company has an ethos that reflects a commitment to not wearing makeup, and requires their employees to adopt ‘a natural look’ as a condition of employment. That does not seem morally problematic in the context of a society where there is an expectation in a wide range of jobs that women should wear makeup. Yet in other cases, appearance codes may discriminate against members of a particular religion, even if they do so unintentionally. For example, a dress code forbidding employees from wearing head coverings seems morally problematic because of the way in which it disadvantages Muslim women.

Lookism in employment is therefore a mixed bag. Some cases seem to involve the same characteristic mechanisms as racial discrimination, including prejudices influencing hiring decisions, to be morally condemned for much the same reasons. Other cases seem rather different. They may differ because the appearance-related values that companies express in their hiring practices neither reflect prejudices nor deny the fundamental equality of different people. Or they may differ because the appearance features that recruiters count as reaction qualifications are unobjectionable, perhaps in part because these features are genuinely a matter of choice for job applicants.

In cases where lookism is morally problematic, what should we do about it? Should we think of it as posing a moral problem of sufficient magnitude that there is a case for seeking to prevent it by legislation? Or is it better to tackle it without recourse to the legal system? There is evidence that lookism in employment is comparable in pervasiveness and harmfulness with other forms of discrimination, including racial discrimination. On the basis of his analysis of the data, Hamermesh maintains that, in the US:

“African American men’s earnings disadvantage, adjusted for the earnings-enhancing characteristics that they bring to labour markets, is similar to the disadvantage experienced by below-average compared to above-average-looking male workers generally.”

Of course, there are differences between racial discrimination and appearance discrimination that may impact upon the case for enacting legislation to prevent it, and not merely the fact that (unlike race) some appearance features are chosen. Racial membership is commonly transmitted from one generation to another, whereas the inheritance of appearance-related characteristics is less reliable. The way in which racial discrimination contributes to and reproduces structural disadvantages through practices of segregation gives rise to distinctive problems in tackling it. Nevertheless, some of the same reasons that provide a strong case for prohibiting racial discrimination also apply to appearance discrimination.

The long-term solution to the injustices of lookism involves taking measures to reduce the enormous weight ordinarily placed on appearance in our society and seeking to change appearance norms so that they become more inclusive. But given the magnitude of the problem, we should take seriously the idea that legislation also has role to play. Should we make ‘appearance’ or appearance features such as height, weight and facial differences protected characteristics, in the same way that, in countries like the UK, race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, religion and age are ‘protected characteristics’, meaning it is illegal to discriminate on their basis?

Perhaps legislation against ‘indirect’ discrimination, that is, against policies and practices that unintentionally affect people with a protected characteristic in a negative way, is enough to criminalise much appearance discrimination in hiring and promotion decisions, providing an underutilised way of combatting it. Suppose that appearance norms and dress codes are biased against people with tightly coiled hair, or with darker skin tones, or with asymmetrical faces or bodies, or with wrinkly skin, or against those who see it as part of their religious duty to dress modestly, or against women who object to being required to wear makeup or heels. Then selecting people on the basis of their conformity to these norms (or their willingness to conform to them) will stand in need of justification in any legislative scheme that requires indirect discrimination on grounds of race, sex, disability, age or religion to be a proportionate means to a legitimate goal. But it is not clear that legislation against indirect discrimination is enough to deal adequately with the moral challenge posed by lookism in employment.

My proposal would be this: we make it illegal to reject a person on the basis of their appearance, or particular appearance-related features, when no plausible case can be made that these features are qualifications for the job in question – when possession of them can’t even be seen as a way of conforming to a company’s ethos or attracting its customers or clients. We could add to this the requirement that reaction qualifications, that is, qualifications that rely on the responses of customers, shouldn’t be given any weight if they rest upon customers’ prejudices about an appearance feature, where prejudices are generalisations or associations that aren’t sustained by the publicly available evidence. And we could make it a presumption that when the background culture is infused with these prejudices about a particular appearance feature, then reaction qualifications related to that feature should be regarded as illegitimate, unless evidence can be produced for thinking that customer preferences for it are unconnected to such prejudices.

Some may be sceptical about whether legislation against lookism could be effective, with good reasons. Part of the problem with legislation in this area is that there is likely to be resistance to making use of it – who wants to admit that others regard them as unattractive? Furthermore, appearance discrimination can be hard to detect and monitor. The legislation itself wouldn’t require us to make objective judgments about people’s attractiveness. We just have to know that selectors have been influenced by the candidates’ appearance, or by the particular appearance features they possess, when these have nothing to do with their ability to do the job. But we do need to be able to monitor different companies to see whether there is any reason to think that they aren’t complying with the legislation. With race and gender, we can examine percentages in the workforce or selected through the appointment process. But how can we do that in relation to an attractive appearance?

There is a surprisingly large amount of intersubjective agreement concerning judgments of attractiveness, and it may well be enough to collect the data required for monitoring purposes. So I think that the objections to legislation against appearance discrimination are not insuperable. It is feasible, and no less desirable than other forms of antidiscrimination legislation. But perhaps the main function of legislation against appearance discrimination would be to send out a message to employers, and society more generally, that lookism is unacceptable, and to give companies a reason to examine their practices and reform them if they encourage lookism or give it too much space in which to operate. We might even regard it as good practice for recruitment interviewees to be behind a screen, as is sometimes done when auditioning musicians. In the context of employment at least, we should combat what Francesca Minerva calls the ‘invisible discrimination’ that takes place right before our eyes. We’ve been too complacent about lookism at the workplace for too long.

The scourge of lookism. By Andrew Mason. Aeon, April 4, 2024.

Today, let’s peel back the layers on a topic that’s as delicate as it is pervasive: the beauty bias. You know, that unspoken rule in both professional and social circles that often dictates who gets ahead and who gets overlooked based on looks alone. It’s a bit like choosing players for a team based on their jerseys rather than their skills. Sounds unfair, right? Because it is.

A Personal Wake-Up Call

I’ll never forget my first real encounter with lookism. It was during a job interview right out of college. I was prepared, my resume polished to a shine, but the feedback I got was a curveball I didn’t see coming. “You just don’t fit the image we’re looking for,” they said. It was a moment that made me question: since when did capability come with a “look”?

The Unfair Advantage of Beauty

Lookism, or beauty bias, is this unwritten rule that attractive people are more likely to succeed. Studies have shown that those deemed more attractive are often hired sooner, promoted faster, and even paid more. It’s as if their appearance adds an invisible boost to their qualifications. In social settings, this bias can dictate who gets noticed and who fades into the background, shaping friendships and relationships in subtle but significant ways.

1. The Professional Impact

In the workplace, lookism can undermine meritocracy, creating an environment where looks can trump talent. It’s a tricky terrain to navigate, especially when feedback on performance gets entangled with appearance. The message it sends? That your skills and hard work might not be enough if you don’t “look the part.”

2. The Social Spiral

Socially, the beauty bias can be equally damaging, setting unrealistic standards for acceptance and belonging. It can lead to a spiral of comparison and self-doubt, affecting our self-esteem and how we interact with others. It’s like being back in high school, where the social hierarchy was often based on appearances.

Challenging Lookism

So, how do we confront this bias? It starts with awareness. Recognizing that lookism exists is the first step toward dismantling it. From there, we can actively challenge our perceptions and the stereotypes we’ve unconsciously bought into.

1. Promoting Diversity and Inclusion

In professional settings, promoting diversity and inclusion goes beyond race and gender. It’s about valuing individuals for their talents and contributions, not their conformity to a certain aesthetic. Companies need to lead by example, creating cultures where diversity in appearance is celebrated as much as diversity in thought.

2. Fostering Genuine Connections

Socially, we can strive to build connections based on shared interests, values, and mutual respect. It’s about looking beyond the surface and appreciating people for who they are, not just what they look like. True beauty, after all, is found in the depth of our character and the kindness we extend to others.

Your Thoughts?

I’m curious to hear about your experiences with the beauty bias. Have you felt its impact in your professional or personal life? How do you think we can work together to challenge and change these deep-seated perceptions?

Remember, confronting lookism isn’t about diminishing the importance of self-presentation; it’s about broadening our definition of beauty and recognizing the value in diversity.

 

The Beauty Bias: Confronting Lookism in Professional and Social Arenas. By Brightbluemind. Medium, February 15, 2024. 

Miss Universe is turning 71 — not the current titleholder, who is aged 29, but the competition itself. A proud septuagenarian sashaying toward its next birthday (the more modestly titled Miss World is only a year older), Miss Universe will hold its annual show on Saturday, 18 November. Many readers might be surprised to learn both competitions are still going strong. In fairness, from the stiletto heels and robotic hand waves to the pouting pursuit of world peace, it is hard to deny that these pageants seem passé. If beauty contests seem pitiful and anachronistic, a phenomenon from a bygone era, it would still be a mistake to believe we live in a post-beauty world.

 Whilst the crowned winner of Miss Universe can expect to net some lucrative marketing deals and make a cool million or two from endorsements and advertising, for the rest of us, beauty is also bankable.

I speak not of the billion-dollar industries devoted to peddling makeup and skincare products, nor of the trade in nips, tucks and tweaks from cosmetic surgery or Botox. Instead, I speak of the most concealed, yet in-your-face bias known to humankind: pretty privilege. The fact is that beauty is not merely skin-deep; it has deep pockets.

You might suspect that “attractiveness bias” is a bogus source of bigotry, a parvenu of prejudice eager to jump on the injustice bandwagon. In fact, beauty bias is a force for some pretty ugly modern discrimination. Sometimes called “lookism” the phenomenon has even given rise to an economic field called “pulchronomics”. Less attractive people are less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired. In contrast, beautiful people do better when it comes to loans, employment and even restaurant tips. In 2015, a US study reported that more attractive servers pocketed $1,261 more per year in tips than their unattractive peers.

The better-looking aren’t just better off; beauty is a life-altering asset. It can interfere with teachers’ accuracy in rating students’ academic performance. Beauty also influences our life-long earning potential. Earlier this month, a study tracking the fate of American adolescents twenty years into adulthood found that physical attractiveness independently predicted social mobility, with the effect size greater for men than women.

One of the most underreported side effects of the pandemic was that social distancing seemed to momentarily take off the beauty blinkers. COVID-19 afforded countless more opportunities to show that covering up can influence our judgments. A study conducted in China during the pandemic found that after masking up, more average-looking hotel employees received a boost in their customer service ratings; this reversed when the wearers were better-looking. In Sweden, when classes moved online, attractive female students missing the boon of face-to-face teaching scored lower grades (though for male students, the “beauty premium” remained).

Beauty can also serve as aesthetic armour, protecting the fate of the physically fortunate when they screw up. Multiple studies show that even when they commit crimes, the gorgeous are less likely to be found guilty. In the U.S., a recent long-term study reported that young people who were judged to be more attractive were “less likely to be arrested and convicted than less attractive persons”.

If all this isn’t enough, aside from crowning them with tiaras, we bestow on the beautiful halo of morality. Whilst movie moguls cast the blemished, scarred or pockmarked as baddies, the rest of us are equally guilty of casting the good-looking as, well, morally good and stereotyping the less captivating amongst us as less moral and more impure.

Despite this, and decades of research holding up a mirror to humankind’s ugly tendencies, defending the less lovely hasn’t exactly taken off. Maybe that’s because it’s less Instagram-able. My best bet is we’ll never witness celebrities with an activist bracelet highlighting beauty bigotry or adopting the hashtag “end lookism”. In an epoch of social activism, attractiveness bias is the last taboo. We shouldn’t give up, though, just because the bold and beautiful literally have skin in the game.

 In the quest to right these wrongs, some have taken an unhelpful if well-meaning tack. One such common approach is to deny beauty exists in any objective sense. Earlier in November the Guardian inaugurated “Ask Ugly” — a self-styled anti-attractiveness agony aunt column. Here, the word beauty was embarrassed to be seen without scare quotes: “‘Beauty’”, the feature declared “is a culturally constructed illusion … It is meaningless …” Yet, in a Schrodinger’s cat-like confession, the columnist seemed to admit beauty did exist after all, since “it affects how a person is perceived”.

Attractiveness certainly does have a subjective aspect. When it comes to pin-ups, we can and do differ in our personal tastes and preferences.

Beauty is not merely in the eye of one beholder, though. The truth is people tend to agree about who is more and who is less attractive, both within and across cultures. Of the 7.8 billion of us on planet Earth, we do not all get to become a pin-up.

The Guardian column’s suggestion that beauty is simply imprinted on our minds by some external force, like a giant cultural embossing stamp in a Terry Gilliam Monty Python cartoon, does not hold either. Ideas of attractiveness did not demand to grace the cover of Vogue magazine, like some alien diva determined to manipulate human thinking.

Reality is more prosaic. We are great apes, and our mindware is primarily influenced but not implacably determined by the four fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproduction. It should come as no great surprise to any human being that beauty is linked to health, fertility and strength. Consequently, it is unlikely a 71-year-old will win Miss Universe, that consumers will demand cosmetic surgeons create wrinkles, or that Boots will ever sell products to make crepey skin. Beauty will always be the provenance of the young. We all know this.

Of course, attractiveness has its place. Who doesn’t enjoy a looker? In some jobs, beauty might be exactly what we need and want. In other contexts, when it leads to injustice or harm, we need to work harder and do better. We can’t do that if we don’t first admit beauty exists.

When the Miss Universe candidates start to strut their stuff on Saturday, rather than labelling them shallow, we would do well to remember we’ve all got a touch of the pageant jurist. The only difference is, outside the sequined realm of beauty queens, the rewards at stake are more substantial than rhinestone tiaras.

 

The tyranny of beauty. By Charlotte Blease.  The Critic,  November 18, 2023. 

 

 

A manager sits behind a table and decides he’s going to fire a woman because he doesn’t like her skin. If he fires her because her skin is brown, we call that racism and there is legal recourse. If he fires her because her skin is female, we call that sexism and there is legal recourse. If he fires her because her skin is pockmarked and he finds her unattractive, well, we don’t talk about that much and, in most places in America, there is no legal recourse.

This is puzzling. We live in a society that abhors discrimination on the basis of many traits. And yet one of the major forms of discrimination is lookism, prejudice against the unattractive. And this gets almost no attention and sparks little outrage. Why?

Lookism starts, like every form of bigotry, with prejudice and stereotypes.

Studies show that most people consider an “attractive” face to have clean, symmetrical features. We find it easier to recognize and categorize these prototypical faces than we do irregular and “unattractive” ones. So we find it easier — from a brain processing perspective — to look at attractive people.

Attractive people thus start off with a slight physical advantage. But then people project all sorts of widely unrelated stereotypes onto them. In survey after survey, beautiful people are described as trustworthy, competent, friendly, likable and intelligent, while ugly people get the opposite labels. This is a version of the halo effect.

Not all the time, but often, the attractive get the first-class treatment. Research suggests they are more likely to be offered job interviews, more likely to be hired when interviewed and more likely to be promoted than less attractive individuals. They are more likely to receive loans and more likely to receive lower interest rates on those loans.

The discriminatory effects of lookism are pervasive. Attractive economists are more likely to study at high-ranked graduate programs and their papers are cited more often than papers from their less attractive peers. One study found that when unattractive criminals committed a moderate misdemeanor, their fines were about four times as large as those of attractive criminals.

 Daniel Hamermesh, a leading scholar in this field, observed that an American worker who is among the bottom one-seventh in looks earns about 10 to 15 percent less a year than one in the top third. An unattractive person misses out on nearly a quarter-million dollars in earnings over a lifetime.

The overall effect of these biases is vast. One 2004 study found that more people report being discriminated against because of their looks than because of their ethnicity.

In a study published in the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Ellis P. Monk Jr., Michael H. Esposito and Hedwig Lee report that the earnings gap between people perceived as attractive and unattractive rivals or exceeds the earnings gap between white and Black adults. They find the attractiveness curve is especially punishing for Black women. Those who meet the socially dominant criteria for beauty see an earnings boost; those who don’t earn on average just 63 cents to the dollar of those who do.

Why are we so blasé about this kind of discrimination? Maybe people think lookism is baked into human nature and there’s not much they can do about it. Maybe it’s because there’s no National Association of Ugly People lobbying for change. The economist Tyler Cowen notices that it’s often the educated coastal class that most strictly enforces norms about thinness and dress. Maybe we don’t like policing the bigotry we’re most guilty of?

My general answer is that it’s very hard to buck the core values of your culture, even when you know it’s the right thing to do.

Over the past few decades, social media, the meritocracy and celebrity culture have fused to form a modern culture that is almost pagan in its values. That is, it places tremendous emphasis on competitive display, personal achievement and the idea that physical beauty is an external sign of moral beauty and overall worth.

Pagan culture holds up a certain ideal hero — those who are genetically endowed in the realms of athleticism, intelligence and beauty. This culture looks at obesity as a moral weakness and a sign that you’re in a lower social class.

Our pagan culture places great emphasis on the sports arena, the university and the social media screen, where beauty, strength and I.Q. can be most impressively displayed.

This ethos underlies many athletic shoe and gym ads, which hold up heroes in whom physical endowments and moral goodness are one. It’s the paganism of the C.E.O. who likes to be flanked by a team of hot staffers. (“I must be a winner because I’m surrounded by the beautiful.”) It’s the fashion magazine in which articles about social justice are interspersed with photo spreads of the impossibly beautiful. (“We believe in social equality, as long as you’re gorgeous.”) It’s the lookist one-upmanship of TikTok.

A society that celebrates beauty this obsessively is going to be a social context in which the less beautiful will be slighted. The only solution is to shift the norms and practices. One positive example comes, oddly, from Victoria’s Secret, which replaced its “Angels” with seven women of more diverse body types. When Victoria’s Secret is on the cutting edge of the fight against lookism, the rest of us have some catching up to do.

Why Is It OK to Be Mean to the Ugly? By David Brooks. The New York Times, June 24, 2021. 

The Beauty Bias.

So-called “ugly” persons and persons with facial difference for example, are being discriminated against. We rack our brains on questions of discrimination on the basis of race, gender or sexual preference, but people whose appearance may be considered unattractive are discriminated against at least as often. Is ‘lookism’ – discrimination on the basis of attractiveness – morally problematic? And if so, why are we doing so little about it? Listen to Italian philosopher Francesca Minerva on the beauty bias and the need to address this form of discrimination.

Radboud Reflects, June 16, 2021. Lecture by Francesca Minerva. Followed by a conversation with Rona Jualla van Oudenhoven. 

The way we perceive and look at each other has consequences. Beautiful people get more attention and have more chances in society. Philosopher Francesca Minerva clears out the topics of this so-called lookism and beauty bias.

In our culture, we are constantly surrounded by images of beautiful people: from movie or sport icons on the screen to people that we meet daily. Since we pay a lot of attention to visuals, we tend to think of what is attractive is good. However, these notions of what is attractive and what is not, cause a lot of bias. Scientific studies show that beautiful people are more likely to get a job or even get bigger wages. People who’re considered unattractive might get lesser chances in society.

 Italian philosopher and researcher Francesca Minerva (University of Milan), even calls it another form of discrimination. Thursday, she will give a lecture on so-called ‘lookism’ at Radboud Reflects.

What is lookism?

‘Lookism is a term that describes the discriminatory treatment of people who are considered to be physically unattractive. The Western standard of beauty is really narrow, such as fair-skinned, youthful, thin, toned, and able-bodied.’

Isn’t beauty a subjective concept?

‘Of course, there are subjective elements, as people have different aesthetic preferences. But it’s surprising how people tend to agree on what or who is attractive or not. We know for example, that there’s a lot of agreement when it comes to famous icons, people, who are considered attractive over time.’

Different cultures have different understandings of beauty, can we generalize this?

‘While each culture has its own standards of beauty, there are certain features that we all consider to find attractive no matter what our culture, time, or geographic differences are. These general features are related to our evolution.’

 ‘Also, the Western standard of beauty is the one that people are the most exposed to. It has been exported due to historic and economic reasons, such as colonization, globalization, et cetera, thus it became dominant.’

Why is lookism more apparent now than before?

‘Nowadays, social media made it more radical than it used to be. All the apps and platforms enhanced our focus on appearance, especially in terms of relationships. The fact that we rely on these little pictures makes it difficult for people who are considered to be visually not attractive.’

And is there a gender dimension involved?

‘The question of physical appearance affects women more than men. Men have evolved to pay more attention to appearance, while women have evolved to look at other aspects, such as social status. Of course, there are a lot of exceptions, but this would be a biological explanation for why men are more interested in looking than women. However, social media globally shifted our attention towards appearance and made it more totalizing, thus gender dynamics in terms of lookism slowly dissolve.’

Can we undo this bias?

‘We should be more aware that the narrow Western standard of beauty is not inclusive. Though I think this change has started, now we have more diverse representations of people, but it still needs to expand. Hopefully, this will happen with time. Also, this field of study needs to be researched more.’

 

Beauty bias: another form of discrimination?  By Fausta Noreikaitė. Vox,  June 10, 2021. ,

Universities position themselves as places where brains matter. It seems strange then that students at a US university would rate attractive academics to be better teachers. This was the finding of a recent paper from the University of Memphis, which concluded that female academics suffered most from this.

It raises an uncomfortable proposition, that beauty trumps brains even in 21st century workplaces. It would certainly be supported by veteran female broadcasters such as radio presenter Libby Purves, who recently complained about the way the BBC dispenses with women of a certain age.

Another survey, this time in the UK, gave a deeper sense of the problem. It reported that employers were asking female employees to dress “sexier” and wear make-up during video meetings.

Published by law firm Slater and Gordon over the summer, and based on a poll of 2,000 office-based staff working from home during lockdown, the report found that 35% of women had experienced at least one sexist demand from their employer, usually relating to how they dressed for video meetings. Women also reported being asked to wear more makeup, do something to their hair or dress more provocatively. Reasons offered by their bosses were that it would “help win business” and be “pleasing to a client”.

It seems as though the shift to more virtual working has not eradicated what Danielle Parsons, an employment lawyer at Slater and Gordon, described as “archaic behaviour” which “has no place in the modern working world”. When employees’ performance is judged on the basis of their physical appearance, potentially shaping their pay and prospects in work, it is known as lookism. It’s not illegal, but arguably it should be.

Beauty and the boss

The Slater and Gordon survey findings affirm that many trends that we describe in our recent book, Aesthetic Labour, are widespread and continuing despite remote working. Our book reports over 20 years of research and thinking about this problem. Although our research started by focusing on frontline work in hospitality and retail, the same issue has expanded into a diverse range of roles including academics, traffic wardens, recruitment consultants, interpreters, TV news anchors and circus acrobats.

Companies think that paying greater attention to employees’ appearance will make them more competitive, while public sector organisations think it will make them more liked. As a result, they are all becoming ever more prescriptive in telling employees how they should look, dress and talk.

It happens both to men and women, though more often to women, and is often tied in more broadly with sexualising them at work. For example, while Slater and Gordon found that one-third of men and women had “put up with” comments about their appearance during video calls, women were much likelier to face degrading requests to appear sexier.

When we analysed ten years of employees’ complaints about lookism to the Equal Opportunities Commission in Australia, we found that the proportion from men was rising across sectors but that two-thirds of complaints were still from women. Interestingly, the University of Memphis study found no correlation for male academics between how their looks were perceived and how their performance was rated.

Society’s obsession

Of course, workplaces cannot be divorced from society in general, and within the book we chart the increasing obsession with appearance. This aestheticisation of individuals is partly driven by the ever-growing reach and importance of the beauty industry and a huge rise in cosmetic – now increasingly labelled aesthetic – surgery.

These trends are perhaps understandable given that those deemed to be “attractive” benefit from a “beauty premium” whereby they are more likely to get a job, more likely to get better pay and more likely to be promoted. Being deemed unattractive or lacking the right dress sense can be reasons to be denied a job, but they are not illegal.

Some researchers have described an emerging aesthetic economy. Clearly this raises concerns about unfair discrimination, but without the legal protection afforded to, say, disabled people.

Not only has this trend continued during the pandemic, it might even have been compounded. With the first genuine signs of rising unemployment reported this month, research already suggests a 14-fold increase in the number of applicants for some job roles. For example, one restaurant in Manchester had over 1,000 applicants for a receptionist position, while the upmarket pub chain All Bar One reported over 500 applicants for a single bar staff role in Liverpool.

Employers are now clearly spoilt for choice when it comes to filling available positions, and those perceived to be better looking will likely have a better chance. We know from research by the University of Strathclyde’s Tom Baum and his colleagues that the hospitality industry was precarious and exploitative enough even before COVID.

It all suggests that lookism is not going away. If we are to avoid the archaic practices of the old normal permeating the new normal, it is time to rethink what we expect from the workplace of the future. One obvious change that could happen is making discrimination on the basis of looks illegal. That would ensure that everyone, regardless of their appearance, has equal opportunity in the world of work to come.

Lookism: beauty still trumps brains in too many workplaces. By Christopher Warhurst and Dennis Nickson. . The Conversation, October 16, 2020. 

 

It’s deep, unconscious, and surprisingly universal—and means beautiful people get a much better deal. But righting injustice isn’t easy when no one wants to call themselves plain.

It’s not your imagination: Life is good for beautiful people. A drumbeat of research over the past decades has found that attractive people earn more than their average-looking peers, are more likely to be given loans by banks, and are less likely to be convicted by a jury. Voters prefer better-looking candidates; students prefer better-looking professors, while teachers prefer better-looking students. Mothers, those icons of blind love, have been shown to favor their more attractive children.

Perhaps even more discouragingly, we tend to assume that beautiful people are actually better people—in realms that have nothing to do with physical beauty. Study after study has shown that we judge attractive people to be healthier, friendlier, more intelligent, and more competent than the rest of us, and we use even the smallest differences in attractiveness to make these judgments. A startling study published earlier this year found that even identical twins judge each other by relative beauty: The more attractive twin assessed the other as less athletic, less emotionally stable, and less socially competent. The less attractive twins agreed, ranking their better-looking siblings ahead. If even minute differences in attractiveness affect us so deeply and predictably, the authors wrote, “the power of appearance-based stereotypes is greater than any study has yet suggested.”

The galloping injustice of “lookism” has not escaped psychologists, economists, sociologists, and legal scholars. Stanford law professor Deborah L. Rhode’s 2010 book, “The Beauty Bias,” lamented “the injustice of appearance in life and law,” while University of Texas, Austin economist Daniel Hamermesh’s 2011 “Beauty Pays,” recently out in paperback, traced the concrete benefits of attractiveness, including a $230,000 lifetime earnings advantage over the unattractive.

Still, the issue has generated few serious solutions. Though to a surprising degree, we agree on who is attractive and who isn’t, differences in looks remain largely unmentionable, unlike divisions of race, gender, disability, sexual orientation. There is no lobby for the homely. How do you change a discriminatory behavior that, even though unfair, is obviously deep, hard to pin down, and largely unconscious—and affects people who would be hurt even to admit they’re in the stigmatized category?

Tentatively, experts are beginning to float possible solutions. Some have proposed legal remedies including designating unattractive people as a protected class, creating affirmative action programs for the homely, or compensating disfigured but otherwise healthy people in personal-

injury courts. Others have suggested using technology to help fight the bias, through methods like blind interviews that take attraction out of job selection. There’s promising evidence from psychology that good old-fashioned consciousness-raising has a role to play, too.

None of these approaches will be a panacea, and to some aesthetes among us, even trying to counter the bias may sound ridiculous. But the reason to seek fairness for the less glamorous isn’t just social or charitable. Our preference for beautiful people makes us poor judges of qualities that have nothing to do with physical appearance—it means that when we select employees, teachers, protégés, borrowers, and even friends, we may not really be making the best choice. It’s an embarrassing and stubborn truth—and the question is now whether, having established it, social researchers can find a way to help us level the playing field.

***

We remember  many great beauties of yore—Helen of Troy, Alexander the Great—but great contributions of history have also come from famously homely people. Socrates was considered ugly, with a pot belly and snub nose; there was the ogre-like, lazy-eyed Sartre, and George Eliot, whom Henry James called a “great horse-faced bluestocking.” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that Abraham Lincoln was “about the homeliest man I ever saw.” Lincoln himself joked often about his looks, replying to a debater who accused him of being two-faced, “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”

Yet the more we know about our brains’ biases, the more remarkable it seems that these plain folks achieved such prominence. Our preference for beauty “has existed for a very long time,” said psychologist Nancy Etcoff, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School whose 1999 book, “Survival of the Prettiest,” defended beauty as empowering and universal. “It’s not a 20th-century phenomenon and not a Western phenomenon, but a human dilemma.”

 

As subjective as “beauty” sounds, human beings agree to remarkable degree on who is attractive and who is not. Beauty, as it turns out, is not in the eye of the beholder. Generally, it means feminine features for women, like large eyes and a round face, and masculine features for men, like a square jaw. Even newborn infants have been shown to prefer gazing at faces adults agree are attractive.

 “Friends might have an argument about who’s more attractive, Brad Pitt or George Clooney, but both are going to say they’re both attractive, and that both are more attractive than Steve Buscemi,” Connor Principe, an assistant professor of psychology at Pacific University and the lead author of the twin study, said. “We know who the attractive people are and who the unattractive people are, and there’s a lot of agreement.” This is true both within and across cultures, even those presumed to have radically different standards of beauty.

In the 1990s, psychologists thought that beauty was merely facial symmetry. Today the emerging consensus is more subtle: A beautiful face, it appears, is an “average” face—one sheared of most idiosyncrasies, or what Principe calls the most “face-like face.” One theory for why this would be is that it’s because we’re able to recognize such faces a split second earlier, and we prefer images we can process faster. “Instead of saying that someone who is beautiful is ‘easy on the eyes,’ we should say that they are ‘easy on the mind,’” Principe explained in an e-mail. “Unfortunately for less attractive people, their appearances make our brains work harder.”

The human preference for attractiveness does seem to serve an evolutionary purpose. Qualities like pink cheeks and facial symmetry are real indicators of health and fertility—even more so before modern medicine and makeup—so it makes sense that we’d be drawn to them. But we tend to extrapolate wildly on those meager cues, and apply those extrapolations to a far wider group of scenarios than mate selection. The “what is beautiful is good” bias, as psychologist Karen Dion and colleagues called it in an influential 1972 paper, is an aspect of the broader “halo effect.” Since humans have limited cognitive resources, we use shortcuts, including taking something we know (Angelina is beautiful) and generalizing about something we don’t yet know (Angelina is kind and competent).

Those shared shortcuts, and our broad agreement on standards of beauty, are what give the human beauty bias its shocking social power. And that’s not just bad for the below-average; it raises the possibility that the next Abraham Lincoln or George Eliot is going to be ignored. Just as American society is now benefiting from previously untapped talents of minorities and women, it’s reasonable to expect we are losing out because we—all of us—put too much stock in handsome leaders and friends, and systematically underestimate the gifts of the plain.

***

How to fix  this problem depends on what kind of problem, exactly, you think it is. A number of scholars see it as fundamentally a civil-rights issue, with the unattractive a class of people who are provably and consistently discriminated against. It’s an idea that seems poised to resonate beyond the academy: A 2004 survey conducted by an economist and a legal scholar found more people reporting that they’d been discriminated against based on their looks than on their ethnicity.

 

The Constitution forbids employment discrimination on the basis of things like race, sex, and religion, but only a few jurisdictions have tried to add appearance to the list, starting with the parts of appearance you can measure. The state of Michigan banned height and weight discrimination in 1977, and six municipalities, including Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, have followed suit with similar statutes. These laws haven’t led to a flood of frivolous suits, as libertarians might fear—in fact, they haven’t led to many suits at all, which suggests they aren’t doing much more than tackling the most egregious cases. (Rhode’s book reports that in Michigan, an average of just one case a year makes it to court.)

Even with remarkable agreement on who is attractive and who is not, ugliness doesn’t feel like the same kind of quality as race or sexuality. In an ideal world, descriptors like “Asian” or “gay” are neutral, but “ugly” carries a universal emotional charge. “There are no ‘unattractive’ lobbies,” Principe said. “Who is going to fight for these people? For that to really work, you have to have people who are willing to be recognized as unattractive, and that’s going to be the hardest thing.” Who’s going to lead the way in the Ugly Pride parade? It’s hard to imagine it will be easy to find volunteers.

Hamermesh, however, thinks some people might raise their hands. He points out that when people rank photographs on a 5 to 1 scale of attractiveness—the most common method in beauty research—only 1 or 2 percent end up labeled “1,” and there’s a strong consensus about who belongs at the low end of the scale. “I would bet these people already feel themselves disadvantaged, are aware that their looks disadvantage them, and will be pleased to have some protection,” he said.

Other ideas, based on traditional legal and economic remedies for unfairness, can seem a bit utopian (or Orwellian): Hamermesh has proposed “affirmative-action programs for the ugly,” or extending the Americans with Disabilities Act to include the unattractive. But without a broad public understanding of the concrete disadvantages of unattractiveness, these ideas sound to many critics like social engineering run amok.

Recognizing our beauty bias as a cognitive problem offers a different kind of traction: For one thing, it’s possible to set up evaluation methods in the workplace that ignore differences in physical beauty. The field of industrial psychology has developed a set of best practices for businesses that want to avoid discrimination in hiring, including the use of online or standardized interviews that remove an interviewer’s unreliable gut instincts from the equation. Other best practices include scoring interview answers numerically, and committing to ask every candidate the exact same set of questions, since subtle bias often appears in the form of extra follow-up questions. (Of course, shifting the hiring process online isn’t foolproof: A 2012 study found people said online interviewees with attractive avatars deserved higher salaries.) The more systematic approach can produce interviews that feel “less like a conversation and more like a test,” said Tara Behrend, lead author of the avatar study and an assistant professor of organizational sciences at George Washington University. “But that means there’s less opportunity for bias.”

 ***

 There will be resistance , obviously, to changing the status quo to account for our bias toward beauty. A few industries have made an open case for hiring attractive employees. If customers or clients are attracted to beautiful people, they point out, then it’s perfectly rational to hire them, particularly for sales or front-office positions.

But that kind of pragmatism doesn’t hold water for many advocates. “To say that hiring salespeople who are attractive is good for business is the same argument whites made for hiring whites only during the early civil rights era,” Rhode pointed out. The law no longer allows airlines to cater to the preferences of male business travelers with all-female steward staff, for example, so why is looks-based discrimination acceptable just because customers may prefer it?

Moreover, it’s clear that we trust beauty beyond the realms in which it actually makes a difference. Beautiful people may be likelier to receive loans and receive lower interest rates, but research says they’re just as likely to default. That alone suggests there are areas where more objective kinds of evaluation would be helpful.

One means of attack is perhaps the simplest of all: There’s a chance that merely making us aware of the bias can help diffuse it, by allowing us to remind ourselves that we’re wrong if we assume that beautiful and good are one and the same. Etcoff also notes that prolonged exposure to media images skews our brain’s notion of that “average” face: In a plugged-in era in which I see Jennifer Lawrence’s face more than my own sister’s, my brain’s concept of “average” is skewed wildly far from reality. It’s up to us to put down the magazines.

Research on how to prime ourselves to overcome this bias is still in its infancy, but Principe says there are promising hints from the more robust research on racism that bad cognitive habits can be broken. A paper published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed how researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison devised a “habit-breaking intervention” that included teaching subjects to recognize their own responses and adopting the stigmatized person’s perspective. The intervention drastically reduced subjects’ racial biases, even months later.

So if we’re ever going to break our addiction to beauty, perhaps the first step is to admit we have a problem. “We do ourselves a disservice by saying looks don’t matter in society,” Principe said. “We’re told it’s what’s on the inside that matters, and to never judge a book by its cover. That’s counterproductive. We need to say, Looks do matter.”

Who will fight the beauty bias? By Ruth Graham. The Boston Globe, August 23, 2013. 

The Murder of Emma Caldwell : Sex Workers, Misogyny and Police

 

 

In​ the darkness, high above the glare of the streetlights, Emma Caldwell gazed out over Cumberland Street. It was a Monday evening in May 2005 and the young woman’s photograph had been projected onto a block of flats near where she was last seen in Glasgow, on the edge of the Gorbals, not far from the Clyde. She had been murdered just seven weeks before. Appealing for witnesses in this way was an innovation, the detective leading the inquiry told reporters. If it was, it would not be repeated. The decision of Strathclyde Police to beam a 70-foot image of a recently murdered woman across five floors of a condemned building seemed crass even then.
 
In recent weeks, the same photograph has appeared in every British newspaper after a man finally stood trial, almost nineteen years later, for Caldwell’s death. Yet the bringing of this long-delayed prosecution was not the result of advances in DNA technology, or testament to dogged detective work. Instead, the trial exposed a shameful failure of Scotland’s justice system, as the country’s most senior police officers and prosecutors became complicit in concealing a killer.
 
The photograph was the family’s last picture of Caldwell, snapped in the countryside and found on an undeveloped film after her death. It looks like it was taken on a cold, bright spring day: there are leaves on the trees and she is wearing a winter jacket with a fur-trimmed hood. She is half-smiling, looking off to the left. Emma’s mother, Margaret Caldwell, thinks her husband, Willie, took the picture. Her daughter was, she says, determined to get off heroin, an addiction which began after her older sister died of cancer and which forced her onto ‘the drag’, the red-light streets just west of the city centre. She would get clean and then return to her parents’ house in Erskine, just twenty minutes down the M8.
 
Margaret and Willie Caldwell were there that night on Cumberland Street. ‘No one asked us to go, the police didn’t know,’ she remembers. ‘We had driven up to Glasgow so many nights after Emma disappeared, just driving around, looking for her, asking if anyone had seen her. We parked in a side street near the flats and waited in the car until Emma’s picture appeared. It was a damp night and we just sat and looked at Emma through the windscreen. Then she disappeared and it all went dark.’
 
A young woman, thin, blonde, dressed in black, can be seen on grainy CCTV footage leaving a hostel on the Southside of Glasgow at 10.56 p.m. on 4 April 2005. Caldwell was also caught on camera walking into the city centre and her phone was last traced to a street that crosses the Clyde. The discovery of her naked body, five weeks later, by a man walking his dog in forestry land forty miles south of the city prompted one of Scotland’s biggest and most expensive murder investigations. Strathclyde Police – which was merged with the other regional forces into a single national service in 2013 – had come under sustained criticism after a series of unsolved murders of sex workers, and the inquiry into Caldwell’s death was promised every possible resource.
 
The police took statements from many of the women working on the streets around Glasgow Green, just east of the city centre, and among the deserted night-time office blocks of Anderston, on its western edge. One man in particular recurred often in these statements, slowly driving around the streets looking at the women, talking to them, paying for sex, demanding more than he paid for. He was short but powerfully built, and his lack of personal hygiene was so extreme that some of the women believed it must be a power thing. A few knew him as Peter, others as Craig or John. One woman had him in her phone as Blue Van Man. Shown ranks of photographs by detectives, however, the women all pointed to the same man. His name was Iain Packer.
 
He knew Emma, they told the police. He’d had sex with her regularly, at least once by force, according to a woman who had comforted her afterwards. In one statement made in June 2005, weeks after Caldwell’s body was found, one of her friends told detectives Packer had been obsessed: ‘Once he started going with Emma, I can’t remember him going with anyone else. Even when Emma was not out, he would drive around looking for her. I thought he was stalking her. He would not leave her alone, constantly following her, pestering her.’ In March 2006, the same woman was interviewed again: ‘I really had bad vibes from him. It was Emma, Emma, Emma, no one else interested him.’
 
By the summer, detectives were looking at Packer, a 32-year-old neon-sign maintenance man, with increasing suspicion. His former colleagues, friends and partners had been interviewed, his vehicles traced. On 21 June, he was picked up kerb-crawling and interviewed by detectives for the first time. He said he might have seen Caldwell at one of her usual spots in Cadogan Street but had never spoken to her. An officer noted that he became ‘increasingly agitated and uncomfortable’ when asked about her. He was interviewed several times in the following months, changing his story every time. Meanwhile, other witnesses described his compulsive use of sex workers, which had cost him, as he later admitted to the police, £30,000 and two marriages; his enthusiasm for rough, outdoor sex; his habit of picking women up in the city centre and driving them far into the countryside to have sex; his tendency to lose control and fly into violent rages; and the way he enjoyed throttling women, and had threatened at least one with a knife.
 
He eventually admitted that he had known Caldwell, and during his sixth police interview, almost two years after the murder, in March 2007, he offered to take detectives to the woods where he used to go with her and the other women he picked up. He directed the officers out of the city and south down the M74, off at Junction 11 and along a succession of small country roads, before telling them to take a hard right onto a farm road potholed with broken red asphalt. After a quarter of a mile, they stopped at a turning point, with a battered cattle grid on one side and a silver gate on the other. ‘This is it,’ Packer told the detectives. They were at Limefield Woods, not far from Biggar, where Caldwell’s body had been found. He told them he had taken her there six times, although he would later change that story too. On their return to Cathcart police station, the detectives, certain that Packer was on the verge of confessing, asked for guidance from senior officers, but were told to let him go and not to speak to him again. He left soon after. It was Tuesday, 13 March 2007.
 
Five months later, in August, officers involved in the case were called to a meeting at Baird Street police station. ‘It’s all in here,’ Detective Superintendent John Cuddihy said, smacking the fat file on the desk in front of him. ‘The evidence is all in here.’ Months of covert inquiries had targeted a Turkish café on Bridge Street and identified four men as Caldwell’s killers. These were supposed to be Scotland’s first murder convictions based on surveillance evidence. A long and elaborate investigation, costing £4 million, had involved undercover officers from foreign forces, electronic surveillance of the café, and the translation and transcription of countless hours of allegedly incriminating conversations. Cuddihy, one of the detectives who had led the surveillance operation (codenamed Operation Guard, which ran in tandem with Grail, the public-facing murder inquiry), summarised the investigation for the assembled officers and detailed the evidence against the suspects. He seems to have realised the room was not with him, however, and, his voice rising, insisted that the Turkish men were guilty.
 
Caldwell’s phone records showed that the final call to her mobile, made at 11.20 p.m. on the night she disappeared, was a 76-second call from a Turkish man. Police interest in the man grew when they found out he had returned to Turkey soon afterwards. The call had been made near the Turkish café on Bridge Street, not far from the last spot where Caldwell’s phone had pinged. The café was, according to some of the women the police had interviewed, a drinking and gambling den. Some claimed they had been raped there, and after Caldwell’s DNA was found there too, in a drop of blood on a quilt, the detectives’ focus on the café became relentless.
 
At the end of May 2006, transcripts of conversations covertly recorded in the café suddenly began to deliver new evidence. ‘They brought her here.’ ‘They killed the girl.’ They killed her like an animal.’ ‘Halil did it.’ The men were recorded apparently confessing to killing Caldwell and removing her body wrapped in a carpet: ‘They lifted her with the rug cover.’ ‘Who doesn’t have cable? Did you take it?’ The transcripts seemed conclusive, but after the men were arrested translators commissioned by their lawyers found no talk of murder and bodies, rugs and cables. Kerem Öktem, an academic who was asked to listen to four hundred hours of tapes during a police review of the inquiry, said ‘It was not possible to make any conclusive statement about their involvement in the murder. It was simply not possible.’ Experts would later suggest the men had talked about being questioned at the police station, which had resulted in some of the seemingly damning quotes; others were phrases used in a game called okey. Aksoy Ozer, a Grampian Police officer who had been drafted in to help translate the tapes, despite having no training with the equipment or qualification in translation, later said he had been put under ‘immense pressure’ and told to suppress some things he had heard. He also admitted that his Turkish was limited. Ozer left the force in 2010 claiming he had been made a scapegoat. The tapes had been the only real evidence. There were no witnesses and, despite a painstaking search of the café after the men were arrested, there was no forensic evidence. After spending eighty days in custody, they were freed. The café owner, Huseyin Cobanoglu, was sentenced to ten years for rape and sexual assault in 2009.
 
It remains difficult to understand why the detectives set Packer aside to focus entirely on the Turkish men. They weren’t rookies. Ruaraidh Nicolson, later deputy chief constable of Police Scotland, was in charge of Strathclyde CID when Willie Johnston, a detective superintendent, was put in charge of the murder inquiry. Johnston was trusted by Caldwell’s family and kept in touch when he retired from the force and took a consultancy job in the Middle East. His texts and calls from Abu Dhabi ended abruptly, however, after the suspicions about Packer became public. John Mitchell, a detective chief superintendent, took over the investigation when Johnston left. He also became head of CID at Strathclyde Police and, after retiring, the director of investigations for the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner. Two more senior detectives, Cuddihy and Colin Field, took charge of the surveillance operation against the Turkish men. The exciting trappings of that investigation, the covert taping and Turkish-speaking undercover officers, seem to have blinded these men to the more mundane truth. ‘They thought they were in an episode of The Wire. Their heads were turned,’ one former colleague said. The endless suspicion around Packer must have given them pause: they spent months vainly attempting to link him to the Turkish men. Yet after the case against those men collapsed, they did not go back to reinvestigate Packer. They did nothing at all.
 
Back​ in the days when papers had newsrooms and desks had telephones, my first editor told me never to let one ring. ‘You just never know,’ she would say. When my phone at the Sunday Mail rang at half-past six on Wednesday, 25 March 2015, I was tempted to ignore it. Off-stone was three days away, and if it was important my mobile would be ringing. Well-trained, I picked up anyway. ‘Jim, it’s Gerry Gallacher,’ the caller said. ‘I might have the biggest crime story for ten years.’ My heart sank: if a reporter knows anything, it is that big stories never arrive so easily. Gallacher was a retired police detective, an experienced investigator and a trusted contact. We had kept in touch after the Mail serialised his memoirs a few years before. He had been reinvestigating the inquiry into Caldwell’s murder for a potential book and had some documents to show me. He had scoured the paperwork from the original investigation, methodically marking it up with pink and yellow Post-it notes and handwritten annotations, but the signposting was hardly necessary – Packer’s name was all over the lever arch files. Every mention trailed suspicion: the accounts from women who didn’t like him, the recollections of colleagues who didn’t trust him, his own interviews with detectives as his story twisted and turned. Finally, there was his journey with the detectives to the woods where Caldwell was killed, only for him to be let go within hours and remain free for years. It seemed preposterous to me then, almost unbelievable. It still does.
 
I rang to arrange to meet Gallacher at Limefield Woods, but was told I would never find it on my own. Instead, we met in a service station car park before twisting our way through the South Lanarkshire countryside. Finally, we turned onto a farm track that led into a pine forest. We stopped where the track was blocked by a silver gate and sat in silence for a moment. Almost nine years later, the jury at Packer’s trial made the same journey in a minibus escorted by ten police motorbikes. The trial judge, Lord Beckett, lawyers, court staff and Packer, now 51, wearing a mask and walking with a stick, were there too. They went off the track and into the woods to the stream where Caldwell was found. I had been almost persuaded of Packer’s guilt by the police files, but the length and intricacy of the journey to this remote spot was, for me at least, conclusive.
 
In 2015, I had been editing the Sunday Mail for six years and, after returning from South Lanarkshire, I asked deputy editor Brendan McGinty for his help. Normally, editors pass tip-offs to reporters, but accusing a man of murder – a man who hadn’t been arrested, never mind charged – and the police of concealing his crime was the kind of story that, if it goes badly, gets journalists the sack. If anyone was to be in the firing line, we agreed, it should be us. The next few days were frenetic. We wrote thousands of words based on the police files, interviewed Gallacher at length, and traced Packer to his parents’ home in Baillieston. We spoke to women who had known him. Some were terrified of him. Some were furious. One was sick when shown his photograph. Finally, I invited Caldwell’s mother to our office, to tell her what we were about to report. She had never heard of Packer and seemed at first bewildered and then dismayed as I summarised the evidence against him.
 
We gave Police Scotland the chance to comment or offer guidance off the record. There was no substantive response. Late on Saturday afternoon, with the pages being checked and the deadline looming, the paper’s duty lawyer was unimpressed with our intention to identify Packer. We were, she said, not just suggesting he was a suspect but calling him the killer. If he sued for defamation, how could we prove it? If the police didn’t have the evidence to charge him, never mind convict him, how did we? Why not run the story but remove his name and picture? These were hard, inconvenient questions, but I was, by then, certain of the story. Anonymising Packer would reduce the clarity and impact of the reporting and it seemed important that this first account was as clear and impactful as it could be. We ran it on Sunday, 5 April 2015, which was, coincidentally, the tenth anniversary of Caldwell’s disappearance, clearing the front page of the Mail and eight pages inside. The headline was ‘The Forgotten Suspect’ and there was a six-column photograph snatched in the street of a scowling Packer, wearing a black hoodie and with an unlit cigarette clamped in his mouth.
 
Then we waited. Perhaps the police had good reason for not pursuing Packer? Perhaps he was abroad when Caldwell died? Or in prison? Perhaps we had missed the obvious proof of his innocence in the files? Surely he wouldn’t have been allowed to remain free for so long if the evidence against him was so damning? Early on the Tuesday, Police Scotland launched an urgent investigation, but not into Caldwell’s murder. They wanted to find our sources.
 
Not only was the inquiry mounted by the force’s Counter Corruption Unit (CCU) an appalling misjudgment, it would later be ruled unlawful. The detectives involved ignored warnings from their own colleagues that the law had changed and they now needed judicial approval before seizing data in an attempt to identify journalists’ sources. Four officers, two serving, two retired, including Gallacher, had their phone and email records secretly examined. This was discovered during a routine inspection by a watchdog, the Interception of Communications Commissioner, and in 2016 an Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled that the collection of the officers’ data breached the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. Six years later, another IPT hearing in Edinburgh heard that the CCU had also obtained my number and, despite dropping plans to seize my call data after being told it would be unlawful, had breached the ECHR in my case too. The three-judge panel ruled that ‘the information about individuals was recovered with a view, it is now admitted, to discovering Mr Wilson’s sources, therefore it represents an interference with his Article 10 rights as a journalist ... There is a real risk that conduct of that sort will have a chilling effect on his ability to obtain and disseminate information in the public interest.’
 
By the time of that hearing, the second investigation into the murder of Emma Caldwell was in its seventh year. While the hunt for our sources was launched within days, the murder inquiry was not reopened until seven weeks after the story was published, and then only after the direct intervention of Frank Mulholland, the lord advocate, Scotland’s most senior prosecutor. Caldwell’s mother was disappointed when told the new inquiry might take two years. It was very complicated, they told her. It was going to take time to have all the conversations from the Turkish café retranslated and retranscribed. Well, it would, but why was that necessary? It is difficult not to believe that the delays in bringing Packer to trial were caused by the deep reluctance of senior officers in Police Scotland and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service to explain in court why they had not put him in the dock ten years earlier.
 
Journalists were reluctant to say anything further, fearful of jeopardising a future trial by influencing the jury. They might have been less concerned if they had known Packer would not stand trial for another nine years. Eventually, the patience of BBC Scotland journalists snapped and, resisting pressure from police and prosecutors, they broadcast an interview with Packer in February 2019. He had approached them in an attempt to clear his name, but at his trial, a former partner said he was as ‘white as a sheet’ after filming and looked like he had been ‘found out’. Mulholland’s successor as lord advocate, James Wolffe, seemed to have done little to advance the case. He agreed to meet Emma’s mother – ‘A condescending man,’ she remembers. ‘He never looked at me once’ – but not much more. His successor, Dorothy Bain, arriving in 2021, quickly met Margaret Caldwell and Aamer Anwar, her lawyer, and Packer was finally arrested in February 2022.
 
Many of the women who gave statements about Packer nearly twenty years ago are themselves now dead, lost to addiction, violence or illness. There are still some who remember Caldwell fondly, while insisting she was too polite, too well-spoken, for the life she was living. Her mother did not understand the depth of her daughter’s addiction or the reality of her life. ‘After she died, a police officer asked if we had known Emma had frequented the city centre and I said, well, I know she goes to this shop and that one, but that wasn’t what he meant at all, not at all.’ She and her husband would visit Emma twice a week in the hostel, bringing her food and seeking reassurance that this was only temporary, that she would, one day, come home. ‘Willie and I were so naive,’ she says now. ‘We didn’t realise Emma was taking drugs for such a long time and when she finally told us, we didn’t have a clue what to do. I remember we took her to the hospital the night she told us to ask for help but the doctor just looked at us as if we were daft. We went home and talked and talked, cried and cried. I remember thinking we had got through to her and went to bed that night happy, thinking we had got her back. Looking back, I think that was the night we lost her.’
 
On 28 February, at the High Court in Glasgow, a jury found Iain Packer guilty of murdering Emma Caldwell. He was also found guilty of 32 other charges against 22 women, including 11 rapes and multiple sexual assaults, most of them committed after the murder. He was sentenced to a minimum of 36 years, the second longest sentence ever handed down in Scotland. The verdict answered some questions of guilt, but many more remain, for Police Scotland and for the Crown Office. The trial heard no compelling evidence that had not been available within months of Caldwell’s death. For example, one key witness was Dr Stefan Uitdehaag, from the Netherlands Forensic Institute, who told the jury that soil found in Packer’s van was very likely to have come from the woods where Emma’s body was found. The soil sample was collected in 2005; Dr Uitdehaag was asked to analyse it in 2022. On 7 March, eight days after the verdicts, the Scottish government announced a judge-led public inquiry; the lord advocate confirmed that a criminal investigation into the first police investigation is also planned.
 
Margaret Caldwell sat in court for much of the evidence and was there to hear the verdict. She is scathing about those responsible for delaying justice so long, for allowing Packer to attack and abuse so many more women. She believes only an outside police force and independent prosecutors can properly scrutinise the decisions made in the first inquiry into her daughter’s murder and throughout the years since. ‘At so many points, the police and the lawyers could have done the right thing but instead did the opposite. They will all have something to say now, blaming each other, but the time for them to say something was all those years ago. Let them say it to a judge.’

Shameful. Jim Wilson on the Investigation into the Death of Emma Caldwell. By Jim Wilson.  London Review of Books, March 21, 2024. 

The mum of Emma Caldwell has slammed her daughter's killer Iain Packer after he was jailed for life.

Margaret, 76, fought for justice for 19 years while Packer, who was interviewed several times by cops, remained a free man.

 Recently, the 51-year-old serial rapist was caged for a minimum of 36 years last month after being found guilty of murdering the 27-year-old in 2005 and rapes and multiple sexual assaults against a total of 22 women.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain, the Daily Record reported Margaret said: "My family and I have been in so many dark places while this man walked the streets. It took far too long for justice to be served.

"The day after the trial I woke up and felt strange. I can't explain it and I thought throughout the day that maybe it was a relief but it wasn't. It was more that I felt at peace that this man has been put behind bars.

"Now he is absolutely irrelevant to any of us. He matters nothing to us anymore. He got his justice and he is where he is."

Margaret was joined on the show by her lawyer, Aamer Anwar.

Emma, who was a former stable worker turned to drugs and sex work after her older sister, Karen, died of cancer.

She continued to say: "Emma was lucky, she had a voice.

"She had her family and we kept in contact with Emma throughout this whole time.

"We knew that heroin was a killer and we knew that Emma was a heroin addict but we didn't have any knowledge that Emma worked on the streets, we were completely naive, we had no idea how she got her money.

"We rang each other every day and had a very close relationship. I saw her twice a week and she was near to going into rehabilitation."

Yesterday the Scottish Government confirmed an independent public inquiry into the police handling of the case would take place.

Margaret added: "There were many good police officers. David McLaren and Graham Mackie were excellent and they came forward for the second investigation when others thought the case was left in a dusty corner and they brought it back into the light of day.

"They were fighting on our side."

Speaking on the show, Mr Anwar said: "I think there are a whole series of allegations and reasons for a public enquiry but I think it is also important that the Lord Advocate has to order a criminal investigation finally after 19 years.

"Some of the most senior police officers in this country have fingerprints in this case and they have never answered questions.

"Police officers betrayed justice, they betrayed 22 women and many others who didn't come forward, and there has to be a criminal investigation into their conduct.

 "They knew [Iain Packer] was a killer and a serial rapist and we were told by Scotland's most senior prosecutor that, as a senior law officer in 2008, she said that this is the man to go after and she told the police to do it and then the case just disappeared.

"Those officers brought shame on their uniform. They should be held to account, there should be change and if those officers are found to have engaged in criminality then they should face prison."

He added: "It has been described as probably the worst scandal in Scottish legal history. He has been described as one of the worst sex offenders in the UK.

"No women should ever feel because of her status, her vulnerability, her actions, her job - that they need to accept sexual violence."

 Emma Caldwell's mum has slammed her killer Iain Packer. By Ben Waddell. Glasgow Times, March 12, 2024.

An independent judge-led public inquiry will be held into how police handled the investigation into Emma Caldwell’s murder, the Scottish government has announced. The announcement came as Scotland’s most senior law officer said she believed there was sufficient evidence in 2008 to prosecute Caldwell’s killer, who was convicted only last week.

Caldwell’s mother, Margaret, has campaigned tirelessly for nearly two decades to bring her daughter’s murderer to justice. She listened from the public gallery as Scotland’s justice secretary, Angela Constance, told MSPs on Thursday afternoon: “There can be no doubt of the serious failings that brought a grieving family to fight for justice.”

The inquiry is expected to examine the sustained police failings that emerged during the trial of killer and serial rapist Iain Packer.

Packer was jailed last week for 36 years for the 2005 murder of Caldwell, as well as multiple other cases of sexual violence against 22 other women.

 Caldwell was living in a hostel in Glasgow when she disappeared in April 2005, aged 27. Her mother told the trial that her daughter had started taking heroin to numb her grief after the death of her sister and was funding her drug habit through sex work. Caldwell’s naked body was found five weeks after she went missing, in Limefield Woods near Biggar, South Lanarkshire.

An emotional Constance told the Holyrood chamber: “Given … the gravity of this case, the length of time that it took for justice to be served for so many women and the horrific extent of the sexual violence suffered by the victims and survivors, the case for holding a public inquiry is overwhelming”.

An hour before the statement, Caldwell’s family concluded a meeting with the lord advocate, Dorothy Bain, who worked on the case as crown counsel in 2008.

Bain told the family that after taking the view that there was no murder case against the four Turkish men who the original police investigation had focused on, she and the solicitor general directed investigators to look at Packer, whose name appeared in police papers.

Speaking after the meeting, the Caldwell family’s solicitor, Aamer Anwar, said: “The lord advocate confirmed that multiple women came forward who would have added to the evidence of rapes and attacks. There is no doubt on the basis of evidence available in 2008, had the police listened to the Crown Office, Packer may well have been serving a life sentence”.

Packer, who lodged an appeal against his conviction yesterday, is known to have carried out at least 19 other rapes and sexual assaults after he killed Caldwell.

Police Scotland has apologised for how the original inquiry was handled by Strathclyde police, which was amalgamated into the national force in 2013.

Police Scotland’s chief constable, Jo Farrell, reiterated the apology when she met Caldwell’s family on Wednesday, adding that she supported their calls for a public inquiry and pledged the force would “fully participate”.

“It is important that Emma’s family and the public get answers to the many questions they have,” Farrell said.

Independent inquiry into 2005 murder of Emma Caldwell announced.  By Libby Brooks. The Guardian, March 7, 2024. 

The killer of Emma Caldwell is to appeal against his conviction and the length of his sentence.

Iain Packer was given a life sentence and ordered to serve a minimum of 36 years in prison.

He was found guilty last week of 33 charges against a total of 22 women, including Emma's murder and 11 rapes.

The Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service have confirmed to BBC Scotland that Packer has now indicated a "intimation of intention to appeal".

The death of Ms Caldwell in April 2005 was one of Scotland's longest running unsolved murders.

The news of Packer's appeal came as Emma's mother Margaret Caldwell met Scotland's chief constable as the family continued their campaign for a public inquiry into the police investigation into her death.

Officers initially arrested four Turkish men in connection with the murder but they were released a year later when the case against them collapsed.

Emma's family believe that a "toxic culture of misogyny and corruption" within what was then Strathclyde Police meant that women and girls who came forward to speak up against Packer at the time were ignored and he was dismissed as a suspect.

They say this allowed Packer to continue raping other women after murdering Emma.

 Chief Constable Jo Farrell apologised to Mrs Caldwell and her family for the policing failures, and backed their call for a full inquiry.

She said: "It is important that Emma's family and the public get answers to the many questions they have.

"I therefore support the family's calls for a public inquiry. I absolutely commit that Police Scotland will fully participate in any further proceedings.

"We have reflected and learned from the initial investigation and subsequent re-investigation.

"Significant changes have been made to improve organisational culture and response, particularly in respect of investigative structures, victim care and processes to these types of crimes."

Margaret Caldwell met First Minister Humza Yousaf to discuss the case on Tuesday and will meet Scotland's top law officer, Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, on Thursday.

Mr Yousaf has previously indicated that he would be open to a public inquiry being held, with the Scottish government due to make a statement in the Holyrood chamber on Thursday afternoon.

Packer will not be released pending his appeal, which will take place at a later date.

 

Emma Caldwell killer Iain Packer to appeal against conviction.   BBC News, March 6, 2024. 

A man has been found guilty of the 2005 murder of Emma Caldwell after a trial that raised significant questions about the police investigation of the killing and the key suspect over almost 20 years, as well as attitudes to reports of violence against sex workers.

Iain Packer, 51, was sentenced to at least 36 years in prison for Caldwell’s murder and was found guilty of 32 other charges against a total of 22 women that amounted to a horrifying course of unchecked physical and sexual violence over two decades. The offences included 11 rapes and multiple sexual assaults.
 
Sentencing Packer to the second-longest term in Scottish legal history, the judge, Lord Beckett, said the killer was responsible for an “extreme campaign of sexual violence”, preying on the vulnerable and causing “extreme and enduring suffering for so many women and their families”.

Immediately after the verdicts, the Police Scotland assistant chief constable Bex Smith, who is the executive lead for major crime and public protection, apologised directly to Caldwell, her family and “many other victims”, saying they were all “let down by policing in 2005”.

Caldwell was living in a hostel in Glasgow when she disappeared in April 2005, aged 27. Her naked body was found five weeks later in Limefield Woods near Biggar, South Lanarkshire.

Her mother told the trial that Caldwell had started taking heroin to numb her grief over the death of her older sister. She had been making money through sex work at the time of her death. The court heard from a friend of Caldwell’s that Packer had become “obsessed” with her, following her and attempting to scare away her other clients.

Although a rape allegation was first made against Packer in 1990, the prosecutor advocate depute, Richard Goddard KC, told the jury that at that time police were “dismissive” of reports made by sex workers. He said it was a “tragedy” that sex workers felt forced to accept sexual assault as “part and parcel of their job”.

Another witness said Packer chose girls who were “young, vulnerable and on drugs”. Many of the women who gave witness statements were sex workers at the time and some have since died.

Packer – who denied all charges apart from one of a prior indecent assault against Caldwell, for which he admitted he was “ashamed” – gave evidence at the trial over three days, insisting he had not killed Caldwell and that the other women accusing him were either mistaken or liars.

He admitted taking sex workers to the woods where Caldwell’s body was found – but not to the same spot where she was found. Asked where he was on the night Caldwell disappeared, Packer told the court he could have been at work or walking his dogs.

The court had heard earlier from an expert that soil found in his van was a 97% match for earth at the spot where Caldwell was dumped.

Information about the police investigation that came to light during the trial raised significant questions about why it took so long to bring Packer to justice. He gave six statements to police between 2005 and 2007, but was not interviewed under caution as a suspect.

A decade later, concerns about the unsolved case were such that in 2015 the lord advocate ordered Police Scotland to re-investigate not only who killed Caldwell, but flaws in the original inquiry.

The original police investigation was focused on four Turkish men, who were charged with Caldwell’s murder in August 2007, but that case collapsed and the men were released.
 
Smith made it plain that Strathclyde police, the force that first investigated Caldwell’s murder before Scottish forces were merged into one force in 2013, had failed Packer’s victims.

“A significant number of women and girls who showed remarkable courage to speak up at that time also did not get the justice and support they needed and deserved from Strathclyde police,” she said.

“It is clear that further investigations should have been carried out into Emma’s murder following the initial inquiry in 2005. The lack of investigation until 2015 caused unnecessary distress to her family and all those women who had come forward to report sexual violence.”

Caldwell’s mother, Margaret, who has campaigned tenaciously for justice for her daughter, said she felt “betrayed” by the original police investigation and angry that it had taken so long for Packer to be brought to justice.

Her solicitor, Aamer Anwar, called for an inquiry into police failings, saying: “A toxic culture of misogyny and corruption meant the police failed so many women and girls who came forward to speak up against Packer.

“Instead of receiving justice and compassion, they were humiliated, dismissed and in some instances arrested, whilst the police gifted freedom to an evil predator to rape and rape again.”
 
Police face scrutiny after man found guilty of 2005 Emma Caldwell murder. By Libby Brooks.The Guardian, February 28, 2024.