How will these resources help you?

Historically, many schools have opted to teach about the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and many/most of these have centred their studies around a pursuit of the unknown Jack the Ripper. Questions like ‘who was Jack the Ripper?’ or ‘what can sources tell us about Jack the Ripper?’ have put the mysterious murderer at the heart of their pupils’ thinking. In recent years this approach has been criticised as it often seems to fetishize the murders, reducing the victims to dehumanised footnotes in the hunt for the killer. When examined through this lens, the deeply flawed evidence base requires historical expertise for pupils not to paint the women in simplistic tropes. Perhaps worst of all, by only introducing the women as victims, these approaches can cause pupils to wonder what they had done to ‘deserve’ their fate. These resources have been useful for me in looking to explore this frequently taught topic from a different angle.