10 - Law and Order

Summary

Public opinion in Iran was not naïve about criminality. Robbery, mugging, the occasional random murder, and murder resulting from conflicts between people who knew each other were considered a danger and unfortunate fact of everyday life resulting from socio-economic conditions or weaknesses and faults in human character. However, from the early 1960s, the mass media in the West and Iran brought to readers and viewers reports about rapidly rising rates of murder and current crime horrors in the West, such as the Moors Murders carried out by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady who in and around Manchester sexually assaulted and killed five boys and girls, aged between ten and seventeen; Dean Corll, who raped, tortured, and murdered at least twenty-eight teenaged boys; and Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper who randomly shot forty-two people, killing eleven, from the twenty-eight-storey observation deck of Austin University’s Main Building. In the West, social commentators, journalists, politicians, and public opinion increasingly spoke of ‘crime waves’.