In my last article “So Serial” I touched upon the rising popularity that true crime reporting has achieved in regards to podcasts, however, this is part of a much larger fascination we haven’t seen the likes of since the “crimes of the century” in the early 1900s USA. And, of course, I am no exception.
However my forays into researching the most popular true crime stories have bought me into contact with many articles warning of the voyeuristic nature of this new craze. At first I simply dismissed these as people that always want to rain on your free Adnan and Avery parade, but the more they cropped up the more I began to suspect I was going to have to take them seriously.
Was I really delighting in other’s misfortune? More importantly, was I encouraging everyone else to do so in my stunningly crafted (my mum’s words, not mine) articles for Her Campus?
My first reaction, as I previously mentioned, was dismissive, my interest in true crime was more about exposing injustice and corruption, helping to right the wrongs done to potentially innocent people. I was a warrior for justice, fuelled by podcasts and righteous indignation. It was at that point that I remembered I was literally taking a module called “Crime and Punishment in the USA, 1865-1941”. That definitely didn’t include fighting the good fight. In fact I was actively enjoying reading about the more unusual or ambitious crimes. Voyeur it would appear.
But before I defined myself by this label, I thought it was a good idea to check the definition just in case I could escape my voyeuristic fate. Initially, voyeurism meant to derive sexual pleasure from watching others perform intimate or private acts, think peepholes in bathrooms. This obviously doesn’t fit with this scenario, but it does have a second meaning which is virtually the same but less sexy. The crux of the word is intruding, for whatever reason, on something that should be private. At this I let out a sigh of relief. Crime, and the justice system, is not private and more crucially shouldn’t be private to prevent miscarriages of justice.
A quick chat with my friendly neighbourhood lawyer-man confirmed this; criminal justice controls society, it’s the price we pay for the safety it provides, but it needs to be public to make sure its working. That’s why we’re so interested when it goes wrong, our protection has failed us. The idea that a person like us could be convicted for a crime they didn’t commit is terrifying, especially when you consider the potentially devastating consequences of life imprisonment or, if you live in America, the death penalty.
I received a similar answer when I spoke to a psychologist. She said that people are interested in people, because you are always going to be interested in things that relate to you or could affect you. She also brought up another interesting point; people are interested in understanding crime because they want to make sense of something that appears to be random or inexplicable. Especially because random crime is scary. She gave the example of the numerous American school shootings; children and teachers die due to no fault of their own. It was just their bad luck that the shooter chose their school, that they didn’t stay off sick that day, that their classroom was the first they attacked. You, as a normal person just like those dead children and teachers, want, need to at least attempt to understand why this happened, because if it is truly random your anxiety levels would go through the roof. You need to be able to do something to make yourself feel safe, whether that’s living in a town that’s already had a school shooting in an attempt to beat the odds or choosing somewhere with above average mental health care that might catch a potential shooter before they shoot. However you deal with the knowledge that all of us are potential victims of a crime, reading about it is definitely one way people try to protect themselves from it. Know thy enemy and all of that.
This, in turn, brings up a necessary distinction between people who have been falsely convicted and people that have done something terrible. Following cases like that of Steven Avery and Adnan Syed, where the level of their guilt or innocence is hard to pin down has a clear advantage that it could lead to a change in the legal system and the righting of a miscarriage of justice. I am sure we would all like to think that if we were falsely imprisoned someone would make a series so popular it would spark a petition that got all the way to the President of the United States (it’s just a shame he couldn’t do anything about it). But our interest in cases where the person convicted was clearly guilty is less easy to justify. Yes, there is the anxiety control element and the attempt to arm yourself against others like them, but what about famous criminals like Bonnie and Clyde? They robbed banks, only bankers needed to fear them, yet we all have probably heard or read something about them. Or Jack the Ripper? As far as we know, he only attacked prostitutes so only they needed to fear him. Or Al Capone, Fritzl, Fred and Rosemary West, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady? Why do we keep going back to them? And have we unwittingly created a culture of criminal celebrity? The jury’s out.