We’re pleased to announce that if you were about to make the insensitive and borderline deranged decision to dress up as Jeffrey Dahmer for Halloween, your plans may well be stopped in their tracks. eBay announced this week that they’ve banned all costumes of the serial killer as it violates their site’s policy and, really, other retailers should follow suit.
Understandably, lots of people take costume inspiration from Netflix and after Ryan Murphy’s drama Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was released on the site in September, eBay saw a surge in sales of costumes for people to dress like the 90s serial killer who died in prison in 1994.
As the skin-crawl inducing series depicts, Dahmer was found guilty of murdering and dismembering 17 men and boys from 1978 and as recently as 1991. And eBay’s policy bans ‘items closely associated with or that benefit violent felons, their acts or crime scenes within the past 100 years’ so, moderators have removed any Dahmer items from the site.
But really, it shouldn’t take a global retailer banning recreations of atrocities that took place in the last century to stop everyone from dressing up as a killer whose survivors and victim’s families are still alive and traumatised. Very obviously, this is too soon for fancy dress.
Tatiana Banks, the daughter of 19-year-old Errol Lindsey who was killed by Dahmer in 1991, previously told Insider that the Netflix series is giving her nightmares. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep,’ she said. ‘I see Jeffrey Dahmer in my sleep.’ Yet, some people are making the choice to walk around as him for Halloween…
Criticising the Netflix show, Tatiana’s aunt and sister of Lindsey, Rita Isbell said: ‘I feel like they should have reached out because it’s people who are actually still grieving from that situation. That chapter of my life was closed, and they reopened it, basically.’ We absolutely should not extend this reopening of trauma for the sake of a costume party.
Ultimately, the eBay ban won’t stop people dressing as Dahmer if they want to. Signature spectacles, a wig in his hairstyle, a short sleeve shirt — it doesn’t take much. But perhaps the will consider the effect this choice will have in re-traumatising victims’ families before clicking purchase on the costume.
Shirley Hughes, mother of Tony Hughes - who was killed by Dahmer in 1991, told TMZ ahead of eBay’s ban: ‘It hurts for Netflix and all the online stores to profit off [my] son's death, while none of the victims' families have seen a dime… If Netflix hadn't streamed the show, none of the families would be re-victimized ... and then there'd be no Dahmer costumes this year.’
Repeatedly, the defence for dressing up as a serial killer at Halloween is that ‘they’re scary’ and that’s ‘kinda the theme of Halloween’. But as one Twitter user put it: ‘Imagine your family member is brutally murdered, sexually assaulted, mutilated and then eaten and then someone thinks it’s a good idea to dress up as their killer for Halloween…Not a good look.’