It’s 10 am on a Sunday, and you have to face reality. The pile of dishes you have accumulated over the past week is glaring at you accusingly, and survival of the fittest means there can only be one winner. It’s either you or the dishes. So you put on the bright yellow, elbow-length gloves, press play on your favorite true crime podcast, and start scrubbing.Â
You scrub and “Today, we’re discussing the Dunmore murders…” scrub until your distorted reflection appears through the glass, “…dragged her mutilated body…” warped by soap and water. Then, the dishes – God, why does cooking use so many of them? Did you really need two pans, three bowls, and a half-broken spatula to make a mediocre “Low-key, I know he’s a murderer and all, but he’s so hot…” omelette? You weren’t even hungry. You were just bored. “You can get 20% off using the code SEXYBUTCHER…” Now, here you are, stuck elbow deep in nasty egg “….a rough childhood, with abusive parents..” water.
True Crime has become one of the most popular genres of content in recent years. Whether delivered through 30-second TikTok clips split into 18 parts, long-form podcasts, or high-production Netflix documentaries, true crime has established itself as a primary contender in the entertainment industry. The term “crime” itself is expansive, encompassing everything from white-collar fraud and cybercrime to violent, inconceivable acts of murder. At its core, a crime is an act that causes harm—there is an offence, and there is a victim. This is where the ethical tension emerges: when real harm becomes entertainment, what is the limit?
In essence, true crime packs and wraps real human suffering into neat, episodic, bingeable content. Truthfully, it is a commodification of violence and death. When you transform real-life experiences into entertainment, it becomes rendered fictional. Intellectually, we understand that these events happened—that real people were harmed—but emotionally, they begin to resemble a novel. The victims become characters, their lives become plotlines, and the dramatic reveal at the end becomes a plot-twist. When you’re munching on popcor,n watching explicit crime scenes of mutilated corpses flash across the screen, are you really aware that this is real? Is it normal to view extreme violence with a sense of detachment and vague morbid curiosity?
One thing the human brain will do is adapt. When we are subjected to horrific, monstrous scenes repeatedly, evolution dictates that our bodies cannot afford to have the same reaction every time. Therefore, your brain simply compartmentalizes. Everything is either stripped back and de-assembled, or just simply shoved to the deepest corner of your mind like a pile of dishes you can ignore for the meantime, but will eventually catch up to you.
A central issue within true-crime culture is its fixation on perpetrators. We analyse every aspect of the perpetrator’s life, starting with their rough childhood, continuing along the course of their difficult and unfortunate lives, and following them well after they have been imprisoned. The justification is that if we analyse human behaviour, we can predict it. The preparator becomes this complex, multifaceted person whose every action can be explained by the tough hand life dealt them. However, the victims are reduced to superficial background characters. They become an extension of the preparator’s story. They are no longer a separate entity, but are a part of the convoluted story of the person who harmed them. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy. These men have become household names. How many books, movies, and TV shows have been produced about these men? How many have you consumed? This is true-crime; you know the names of these men, you’ve watched re-enactments of their lives, heard their tragic backstories again and again, but if we were asked to name a single victim of theirs, how many of us could? What happened to their families? Their parents and siblings? The daughter they loved and cherished becomes victim 14 on a Wikipedia page. It also becomes unavoidable. For surviving families, this exploitation is unavoidable. Details they may have spent years trying to forget resurface endlessly, monetised through YouTube ads, sponsorships, and brand deals embedded between graphic descriptions of violence.
True crime is not inherently unethical, nor is curiosity about crime itself immoral. Curiosity is what keeps us evolving. However, the current true crime ecosystem often prioritises engagement over empathy, perpetrators over victims, and profit over responsibility. When real trauma is reduced to background noise for mundane tasks, we must question what is being lost in the process. Ethical true crime demands intentionality: centring victims, respecting families, avoiding sensationalism, and recognising that these are not stories created for our consumption, but lives permanently altered by violence. If true crime is to justify its place in popular culture, it must do more than entertain—it must remember, humanise, and hold itself accountable.