In the news

Clumsy and lazy talk by police and journalists but were not the 'innocent women' 'innocent' only in the context where the Yorkshire Ripper seeked to murder 'prostitutes' ?

I'd like to think so but I fear not. I remember reading a book when I was a teenager - so, admittedly, not all that recent - by a pathologist in which he said, quite casually and not at all as a kind of guilty confession, that he felt worse when the murder victim was a respectable woman or girl rather than a prostitute.
Nowadays he would probably be cautious enough to keep such thoughts to himself but I doubt they have disappeared. There are still underlying prejudices about the worth of victims, be it because of their sexual habits, their race, their gender, their class.