Lucy Letby — monster in human form, or product of cultural values that empower rather than reject cruelty?

John Wight
4 min readAug 22, 2023

Women are hypocrites. Women are opportunists. Women are liars. They are abusers and bullies and manipulators. They are capable of cruelty, callousness, and evil. Just like men. Bari Weiss

In my lifetime, spanning 50 years plus at this writing, there have in Britain been multiple depraved individuals who’ve made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. However none of those, in my recollection, comes close to the atrocious crimes of former neonatal nurse and now serial baby killer, Lucy Letby.

Making her case all the more shocking is the fact that she looks just so, well, ‘normal’ and ‘unremarkable’ in appearance and demeanour. Just your average white middle class English woman, living in a typically average white middle class English home in an average white English middle class leafy suburb, and working in a profession — nursing — which the general public in Britain has always held in the highest esteem.

But herein perhaps lies the problem.

Has our understanding of ‘normal’ and ‘average’ been forged in the laboratory of white middle class Englishness, given that Britain is a society in which white traditional middle class cultural values predominate? And, if so, is this rendering of Lucy Letby so shallow because of the cultural conditioning that has taken place when it comes to what we expect when it comes to normality and also its antonym, abnormality, let alone depravity?

Text sent by Lucy Letby to fellow nurse after murdering one of her victims

Here, I merely pose the questions while not for a moment claiming to possess any of the answers. But there are indeed serious questions to be asked about what the Letby case says about us as a society and its unconscious biases.

Lucy Letby’s monstrous crimes were suspected long before she was arrested. They were suspected by none other than senior doctors working alongside her over the year in which she killed seven babies and harmed six others.

The fact that those concerns regarding her role in the aforementioned deaths and attacks were repeatedly rebuffed by managers and bosses at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northwest England, where she worked in neonatal, does much to understand the extent to which cultural, racial and class bias forms our understanding of the world.

If Lucy Letby had been black, if she had spoken with a working class accent, or even if she had been male rather than female, would those same bosses had responded differently to the concerns repeatedly raised over her role in those deaths and attacks?

These questions, uncomfortable though they may be, require that we confront the prevailing orthodoxy when it comes to our conceptions of human worth and its lack in a society in which diversity exists in form but not in substance.

Letby confounds our conception of what evil looks like. Instead, she appears and sounds like the very embodiment of Christian values of which the majority living across these islands have been inculcated with from childhood on. No store detective would ever have felt the need to follow Lucy Letby around in a supermarket. No police officer would have felt the need to pull her over in her car. Just as no hospital boss felt compelled to draw any connection with the sheer number of neonatal fatalities that occurred on her watch over that fateful year between 2015 and 2016.

Drilling down to the very heart of the matter, the dominant cultural values of which Lucy Letby is a product are the values of austerity, cruelty, inequality and social and economic injustice. Our politics are underpinned by same to the detriment of untold thousands of babies and children alike.

The infanticide for which she has rightly been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole mirrors the same offence that both Sunak and Starmer are more than willing to commit in the name of taking those ‘tough decisions’ they believe qualify them to lead the country.

Lucy Letby, seen in this light, is no aberration. Instead she is merely the most malign product.

End.

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John Wight
John Wight

Written by John Wight

Writing on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider taking out a subscription at https://medium.com/@johnwight1/membership

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