Peelo 2006

Crime, Media, Culture
http://cmc.sagepub.com Framing homicide narratives in newspapers: Mediated witness and the construction of virtual victimhood
Moira Peelo Crime Media Culture 2006; 2; 159 DOI: 10.1177/1741659006065404 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cmc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/2/159
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Framing homicide narratives in newspapers: Mediated witness and the construction of virtual victimhood
MOIRA PEELO, University of Lancaster, UK Abstract
This article identies ways in which newspapers invite readers to identify with victims and victimhood as a route to engaging them in human interest stories. Within this framing of homicide for readers as mediated witness, some of the authorial techniques are explored whereby newspapers engage readers in a stylized dialogue that contributes to the construction of public narratives about homicide. It is argued that researchers, as well as working at a macro level, need to research at the micro level of textual analysis when researching media (including visual media) in order to understand the framing that contributes to public narratives; hence there is analysis of techniques of (a) defamiliarization and (b) objectication of homicide victims. These are some of the means by which the reader is placed as witness, both apparently experiencing crime for personal consumption yet, publicly, allowed to recover (unlike real victims of major crime). The recognition of a need for micro-level analysis raises questions about the functions of public narratives, particularly in expressing, exploring and containing public or social emotion, in an era in which public responses to crime have been placed at the top of a highly politicized crime agenda.
Key words
emotionality; homicide; mediated witness; narratives; social commentary; victimhood
INTRODUCTION
This article explores some of the ways in which sensational newspaper reporting contributes to the construction of public narratives about homicide. It is argued that to make sense of the construction and role of public narratives, researchers need to explore the nature of the readernewspaper dialogue at a micro level. Most particularly, mediated witness is presented as one means by which the newspaper reader is invited to take sides
CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2006 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 2(2): 159175 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659006065404]
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CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)
not just about the human interest story surrounding the brutal events themselves, but in the social commentary which attaches to such killing. Mediated witness is presented as a stylized dialogue made up of a collection of authorial techniques that attempt to align the reader emotionally with victimhood; this virtual victimhood is distinguished here from the real experience of families, friends and acquaintances of actual victims. The examples of defamiliarization and the process of objectifying victims of homicide are used to illustrate how mediated witness both allows readers to consume crime yet, as a part of society, distance ourselves from the actuality of events. Newspapers express emotions surrounding major events and, it is argued, that what have been identied as mega cases of homicide (Soothill et al., 2002) can bring to the surface social divisions and tensions that are difcult for a society to manage. Mega media stories on homicide are unusual cases which particularly offend society; some are repeatedly reported, transforming them into a point of reference which can help us to interpret later killings (p. 420). Mega cases are often framed to appear most supportive of those immediately hurt by killing. Yet, this alignment is really a point of entry to a social commentary by which newspapers and their readers can restore a sense of control by conrming a viewpoint of society and its ills, and neutralize anguish by objectifying victims of homicide who have become, therein, public property. It is precisely for these two reasons that the gulf between virtual victimhood and the actual experience of victimhood needs to be emphasized. This social commentary echoes Katzs (1987: 67) thesis that reading crime stories is a form of moral workout in which readers work out individual perspectives on moral questions of a quite general yet eminently personal relevance. At one level, mega killings can be seen as an example of a moral panic. In particular, the three core ingredients that Cohen (2002: x) outlines: a suitable enemy (murderers), a suitable victim and agreement that the homicide is part of a wider social malaise (see later in this article, the example of the Philip Lawrence case) about which action should be taken. Here it is argued that this gives us only a partial explanation and that, while relevant, much is missed by settling too rapidly for the concept of moral panic alone to explain all examples of newspaperreader emotionality and intense media activity. Recently Innes (2004: 17) has commented that the analytic purchase of the concept has been loosened by its loose application in many situations. In relation to public narratives, Peelo (2005: 335) has argued that these are both contested and based on cumulative knowledge over time, unlike the short-term frenzy of moral panics. To understand, for example, virtual victimhood and the objectication of homicide cases, additional (and more specic) analysis is needed to understand how the reporting of serious crime is constructed in newspapers over time. Mega murders would undoubtedly gure as what Innes (2004) describes as signal crime. They would be one of the few major crimes repeatedly and widely covered that Innes refers to: The manufacture of a signal crime via mass mediated communication involves a crime incident being constructed by journalists through their use of particular representational and rhetorical techniques, and interpreted by audiences, as an index of the state of society and social order. (pp. 1617)
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THE CONSTRUCTION OF VIRTUAL VICTIMHOOD
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What is argued here, however, is that while representational and rhetorical techniques are an essential part of deconstructing public narratives around major homicides, there is a dynamic process at work: after the experience of consumption via virtual victimhood, the process moves to one of distancing via objectication and restoration of ones view of society within a contested narrative. The concept of signal crimes illustrates the ways in which the emotionality surrounding crime debates has moved up criminologys agenda. Traditionally, concerns about social emotions have been raised in relation to the role of the media in promoting fear of and about crime (Reiner, 2002: 399402; Ditton et al., 2004). The range of other possible emotions in addition to fear and anxiety that surround crime have become, of themselves, a focus for criminology. So, for example, Presdee (2000, 2005) explores the pleasure associated with transgression as part of a wider approach to cultural criminology. Emotional experience is not just a personal response but one that has the potential for collectivity, hence the symbolism of crime reporting in society is closely linked to emotionality. Katz (1987), in his empirical study of newsworthiness in the USA in the 1970s and early 1980s, touches on the ways in which crime reporting contributes to a sense of emotional consensus: The reading of crime is a collective, ritual experience. Read daily by a large portion of the population, crime news generates emotional experiences in individual readers, experiences which each reader can assume are shared by many others. Although each may read in isolation, phenomenologically the experience may be a collective, emotional effervescence of moral indignation. (p. 64) Transcending these debates about the types of emotion surrounding crime is a concern as to whether or not media representation of crime is an active ingredient in the criminal justice process. The study from which this article is drawn was not based on expectations of simple cause-and-effect relationships, with an assumption that reporting leads to a specic social outcome. But I do argue that media representation can actively contribute to a societys construction of crime and therefore requires examination; mega killings, in particular, occupy a powerful, symbolic place in our collective, cultural history. Even if it is not possible to assess the impact of reporting on each individual reader, newspapers are, nonetheless, powerful voices contributing to the public narratives within which societies make sense of crime. This article is based on an expectation that researchers wish to deconstruct this process at a micro as well as a macro level.
MEDIATED WITNESS: DIALOGUE, REPRESENTATION AND OBJECTIFICATION

Reiner (2002: 405) has argued that news organizations use a variety of sources. This is illustrated time and again in homicide reporting, in which the voices of victims families, friends, and police are used frequently, and often these various voices are used to critical effect. Yet, even though writers such as Ericson et al. (1991) have developed a
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sophisticated framework within which to interpret and understand the inter-relations of reporting and authority, with all their layers of complexity, it is still possible for the emphasis in analyses to cast journalists as separate from readerships. It is this balance that Wykes (2001) redresses when she places journalists in their wider world, sharing social values with their readers. How then do we understand Reiners (2002) comment that news media reproduce order in the process of representing it (p. 406) if we cannot depend on a model of journalism which casts journalists as separate from the world and newspaper production simply as a channel for the views of the powerful? The resolving of this apparent paradox lies, in part, in the recognition by researchers of a need for a micro analysis of text that goes beyond the traditional counting of column inches or analysis of the story productionselection processes.
Stylized dialogue
Repetition is one of the key techniques that turns homicide stories into mega stories, both repetition around the time of the case and its trial and, in some cases, repetition over many years. Repetition is part of the stylized dialogue that constitutes readernewspaper reciprocity (made up of the convention, interdependence and repetition to which Wykes (2001: 223) refers) a reciprocity that lies in the actual medium of communication itself. In this article the mega cases I draw on for illustration are: the James Bulger killing, the Moors Murders, the Gloucestershire killings (for a description of the original 13 mega cases and how they were drawn up see Appendix), and I consider in more detail the newspaper response to the killing of Philip Lawrence. Some of these mega cases have become part of a general background knowledge of murder: they have achieved this status either by being repeatedly reactivated as part of the story of another killing, or because some new event has allowed repetition of a shocking homicide story (perhaps the death of someone related to the case). In these ways, they are sometimes used as a measure against which other cases are tacitly weighed, hence they can contribute to the knowledge that helps us interpret new stories. They are reviewed, mentioned and brought out again regularly. In this way, mega stories can remain an active ingredient in the construction of the public narratives by which society makes sense of major crime long after the events themselves. In addition to repetition, a set of techniques (here summarized as mediated witness) engage the reader in highly specic ways by inviting us to share closely in the story by identifying with the emotions of those who have been hurt by the killing. The dialogue between readers and newspapers is a curious one: it can be seen as both inuencing opinion and as struggling to reect readers viewpoints. Berger (1997) writes that narratives rely on their readers having stores of information that make it possible to understand what is going on (p. 12) and succinctly summarizes reader-response theorists or reception theorists as arguing that most texts require readers to ll in a lot of blank areas (p. 12). Readers are an active part of the equation and, while newspapers and their readerships may t each other only approximately, they nonetheless share and recognize aspects of each others viewpoints (even if one cannot be sure that they share that viewpoint in all its details).
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So, for example, in the general reporting of homicide (as opposed to the mega cases), different newspapers select different killings to report (although their criteria for selection remain similar), engaging in a subtly different set of dialogues with their own readerships. Yet, while newspapers are anticipating subtly different stores of information and reception-contexts to each other, these separate readershipnewspaper dialogues share family relationships across papers and similarities of distortion in the representation of homicide, albeit illustrated by different cases (see Peelo et al., 2004). The family relationship that is distinct in terms of device even where choice of story, language and presentation is quite different is that the narrative engages the reader in relation to close witness of victimhood. Hence, in this article I argue that mega cases have not only the potential to form a part of the store of knowledge that we bring to understanding homicide, but their narrative style is part of the history that has sensitized readers to respond and to ll in the blanks in distinct ways. To interact with readers requires newspapers to use shorthand symbols, making it easier for readers to know when to hiss and boo as the villain appears and when to identify with the good and worthy. Symbolically, all murders indeed all serious crimes have roles in the drama assigned to victims and to perpetrators; they are investigated and prosecuted by an additional cast of players. These roles can become easily recognized by depiction in stereotypical ways (see, for example, Peelo and Soothill (2000: 13940) for an example of how newspaper reporting allocates roles to the key players based on lifestyles during a murder trial). Mediated witness is the paradoxical phenomenon of virtual experience in which detail about a homicide is communicated in a way that engages us personally and emotionally on the side of those who are hurt. As witnesses to the drama, we are invited to focus our attention on and emotionally align ourselves with victims, co-victims and survivors of homicide.
Representation and mediated witness

A difference between the realities of narrative and life needs to be acknowledged, for public discussion of homicide can sound strangely divorced from the serious and profound disruption caused. Reality is perhaps too nave a word to describe the gulf between virtual representations and the substantive materiality of life experience. Further, analysis of the reporting of mega cases is especially unsettling: not only does it remind us of unhappy events, but the history of reporting itself turns these cases into social property, leaving them shorn of the personal meaning arising from direct experience. It needs to be said when discussing homicide that illegal killing is an act of great violence and social disquiet. Killing is an event which disturbs greatly the families of victims, the families of killers and their surrounding society, and those professionals who work with homicide cases. Indeed, one of the distinctions between mega cases and most other homicides lies in the scale of social disturbance. Hence, in this article I distinguish between the nature of the actual, personal experience of losing a family member, friend or acquaintance through illegal killing and the representation of emotionality stirred in readerships by the techniques of mediated witness.
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Defamiliarization The devices of mediated witness stir us emotionally as readers

and as viewers and, thereby, cause us to feel more fully involved in the actual event (or events) than has been the case. The study by Peelo et al. (2004) like others, has shown that the prole of actual homicides is, in reality, quite different to those reported. What makes a mega killing especially newsworthy is the exceptional quality of its horror, its oddness. Yet, paradoxically, a part of what makes a murder into entertainment is the shock of ordinariness invaded by the brutal or the corrupt. Berger (1997: 41) refers to Victor Shlovskys (1989) notion of how art defamiliarizes what is known by presenting it back in unusual ways. Katz (1987) has described this phenomenon as one that helps to spur the readers outraged reaction because they can see the event as potentially within his or her own experience (p. 70). Getzel and Masters (1984) have discussed how one casualty of illegal killings for co-victims and survivors is a loss of trust in the world and assumptions or beliefs about how society operates. It is an echo of this loss of trust, at a different level, that also shocks the rest of society: killing is a threat to social agreements and understandings about how ordinary, everyday life functions. The known becomes strangely unknown via apparent moments of communication. The shock to society of a killing is greater according to its invasion into homely cosiness, and the greater the shock the harder it becomes to regroup our sense of social order. Mediated witness brings homicide closer to personal experience through the reporting of moments and objects of familiarity which, thereby, become grotesque by a process of defamiliarization, and this brings us closer to the chaos and disorder that we fear. For a period of time, what is safe and home is transmuted by shock into alien, strange and hostile otherness. One well-known moment of virtual witness shaped by defamiliarization is the touching trust shown in the video clip of James Bulger, raising his hand in the childs universal and commonplace expectation of care (the two-year-old James Bulger was abducted from a Liverpool shopping centre and later killed by two tenyear-old boys in 1993). Topping (1989) describes another such moment when as a police ofcer he was investigating the Moors Murders case. This was a series of child murders that took place in the 1960s, named after Saddleworth Moors where the children were buried by murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. When interviewing Brady, a moment of ordinary domesticity from his own life was reproduced in extraordinary circumstances. In 1963, Brady and Hindley hired a car from a particular Manchester garage: In the event her licence did not arrive in time and it was not until Saturday 23rd that they picked up the two-door white Anglia they had booked. (As she told me this I was startled by the memory of having a hired a white Anglia from Warrens Autos myself in the 1960s and of taking my young family on holiday in it.) (p. 90) Shocking events distort the ordinariness of lives and its meanings to people. Not only do mediating instruments bring horror nearer, but they interpret, contaminate and contribute to the construction of our experience hence mediation. They are not neutral, but contribute a part to our understanding. Defamiliarization is a strong technique through which the ordinary is reconstructed and presented back to us. So, Myra Hindley is photographed on the moors clutching what looks like a family pet. At rst, deceptively, it raises echoes of Sunday afternoons getting out of the city; as with Toppings
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family, cars made a Sunday trip possible. A Sunday ride out in the car is a family memory for many, but a second look shows us that this cosy, family knowledge is warped, has been turned into something mocking and terrible. It is in these small ways that crime threatens society as much as the larger ways. Similarly, the West case overturned familiar notions of family life, its safety and ordinariness. The Gloucestershire serial killings were named after the county in which they took place from 1967 onwards (although the bodies were not discovered until 1994). Fred West seemed to be accepted by neighbours as endlessly engaged in DIY work around the home a current sign of familial respectability. More recently, the case of family doctor, Harold Shipman, convicted in January 2000 of the murder of 15 of his patients has undermined safe notions about old-style family doctors working to provide personal care and involvement with families within a community. The cases that make it into the mega group contain ingredients that shock us all, somehow or in some way more than illegal killing alone would usually do. Exceptional crimes receive exceptional levels and styles of media attention. Outrage is a complex mixture: of the ordinariness of life invaded by brutal events; sometimes the worthiness of the life lost; and the perceived innocence or vulnerability of the victim(s). The ordinary, the worthy and the innocent may all combine in representing social responsibility, such as the role of protecting children or caring for the elderly. Katz (1987) refers to crime stories that appear to pose threats to the sacred centres of society as interesting because they trigger readers to dene moral perspectives on questions about elusive collective entities (p. 68). In identifying the characteristics of the victim, we learn not just about the seriousness of the killing but about the readership of a newspaper and what responsibilities they are assumed to recognize. In socially constructed victimhood, offences can be more abstract than physical damage alone, such as disturbing acknowledged understandings of family or of childhood.
Objectication In effect, different groups within society both share an understanding of killing and contain its horror by reconstructing it in the light of their view of social reality, particularly in response to mega cases. This route is not easily available to survivors of homicide for (as Spungen (1998) and Rock (1998), among others, have told us) their understanding of society is shaken and altered by the experience of bereavement through killing. Survivors of homicide may feel their lives have been changed forever, but the rest of society will move on, and probably quite swiftly. The objectication of homicide victims, even as heroes and angels, is a part of a social process of neutralizing anguish. This route to neutralizing anguish can never be open to co-victims and survivors of homicide. While families may engage in campaigns relating closely to their loss, newspaper reporting allows society to focus emotional energy on conrming the rightness of our existing viewpoint about the wider world. In this section, I will explore the comments arising from the reporting of Philip Lawrences death and how it gave rise to a wider social commentary beyond the murder itself. This case was chosen to be illustrative of the techniques used rather than to be seen as the denitive account. By their nature, mega cases tend to both summarize the elements that make a crime headline grabbing and yet each are fundamentally
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TABLE 1 Total number of entries (all years 197799)

Ranking 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Case description Dunblane Primary School shootings Yorkshire Ripper Tottenham riots Lawrence, Stephen Moors murders and murderers Gloucestershire serial murders Bulger, James Black, Robert S. Hungerford massacre Lawrence, Philip Cricklewood and Muswell Hill murders Pearson, John Dando, Jill Shipman, Harold First year in The Times 1996 1977 1985 1993 1977 1994 1993 1982 1987 1995 1983 1981 1999 1997 Total no. of stories 511 370 311 264 259 247 210 167 155 125 87 73 61 50
exceptional in some way. However, it was 10th in the table of mega-cases in the period 197799 (see Soothill et al., 2002; see Table 1) and is thus without certain features of the most headline-grabbing cases. Unlike the mega cases already mentioned in this article, it is not a serial or a mass killing, nor is it about the killing of a child or children; all of these features causing exceptional social disturbance. Philip Lawrence was a headmaster who was stabbed to death by a 15-year-old boy, a member of a gang preparing to attack pupils at the school. The killing took place outside his school in Maida Vale, London, on 8 December 1995. After Philip Lawrences death there was much media debate around morality in contemporary society and a campaign was set up to ban knives. The killing while tragic of itself raised the spectre of an ordinary event made sinister: that of children coming out of school. The response of newspapers, in expressing social emotion about society and its values, expresses, reects and reinforces the public turmoil resulting from this horror. Reports moved rapidly through (a) reecting parents fears to (b) accounts of social disintegration, and then to (c) dening otherness and bad in the world at large. Hence, the tragedy of one persons brutal killing becomes strangely depersonalized and held to represent a mass of social discontent. The rst stage of reecting parents understandable fears quickly becomes evident. While Philip Lawrence is presented as a fatherly gure, taking responsibility for all of societys children, the readers of the Daily Mirror (Webster, 1995) were assumed to be on the side of good parents. This identication with good parents viewpoints (as opposed to the parents of gang members) was spelt out in one column, where drugs and gangs are seen as part of the larger social malaise: Like millions of other families, my children will be entering the secondary system in a few years. Drugs apparently now exist in some form in every upper school in the
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country, private or State, posh or poor. Gangs that hang around school gates dont just exist in London. (p. 9) The three British daily newspapers studied (The Times, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail) and their Sunday counterparts were clear that the killing represented all that is wrong in our society. Most particularly, Philip Lawrence was presented as holding the line against a violent and disintegrating society. Each readership is invited in, as a member of the group that is the last bastion of commonsense in an evil world. The tone varied, but each of the three newspapers represented this as more than the tragic, mindless loss of one outstanding man, but as a symbol for all that has gone wrong. The immediate issues were much discussed: of school and teacher safety, the activities of street gangs in London and all the problems surrounding young people carrying knives. As a social issue, then, it gave rise to a Mirror campaign against carrying knives and subsequent amnesty in major cities, allowing knives to be handed in at police stations. However, the social issues identied were much more wide ranging than being just about the immediate practicalities of knives, gangs and teacher safety, important though these are. Hence, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, each paper identied subtly different social dangers that have brought us to this point of apparent national fragmentation and disintegration, pointing out how we should identify other and badness and how to identify goodness. In so doing, the exploration of the shocking had, within it, both the seeds of restoring a sense of order for the explanations of badness conrm existing (and wide-ranging beliefs) about the ordering of society and the expression of a sense of despair at the extent of societys ills. A Mail on Sunday (1995) article illustrates the extent to which one death can symbolize social disintegration: It has become fun to mock anyone in authority, to sneer at teachers, disparage politicians, guffaw at the Royal Family and undermine the police. Alongside the collapse of family life in many of our inner city estates and the appalling rise of drug and merst cultures, we are raising a breed of youngsters who seem to know no rules . . . (p. 28) We were made aware, in the same article, that there are bad elements to blame in society beyond the killers themselves (in the form of assorted apologists) who do not recognize the danger and, rather than punish gangs, have wailed excuses on behalf of gangs. In a commentary piece, the author described many schools as being dominated by the righton educational fashions of the Sixties; schools where discipline amounts to little more than indulging the trouble-makers; schools dominated by politically-correct idealogues in the local education authority. However, the same writer assured us that the pernicious and permissive doctrines preached at so many training colleges are on their way out (Shakespeare, 1995: 20). The Times (1995) invited readers to identify with the questions of all decent people and called into the frame the decline of the stable nuclear family, of the old-fashioned neighbourhood and of the Churchs parochial structure. The same article explained that schools are not equal to the responsibility resulting from such shifts, comprehensive
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schools having apparently embraced a progressive ideology that marginalized discipline. We were assured, however, that this tide is turning as schools cease to be branch ofces of a town hall education system (p. 19). This essentially party political commentary went beyond education policy, and the leader of the Labour Party (then in opposition) was quoted as commenting on a lack of moral purpose and direction in the whole of national life (p. 1). It was a time in politics where probity in the lives of, particularly, Conservative politicians was under question. The Times, through the words of Rees-Mogg (1995), extended the accusatory frame still further: the moral relativism of Freddie Ayer [Frederick Ayer, erstwhile philosopher at Oxford University] is the dominant creed of the life peers, of the former vice-chancellors, the former ministers, the bishops, even many of the judges. For moral denition, he argued, one must look to the aristocracy, to those who were not so highly educated as to suppose that there is no such thing as sin or to get into one of the new universities of the 1960s (p.16). The list went on to include modern government, education and broadcasting. While all three newspapers might be described as reecting public fears and views, the Mirror most clearly gave its readers the possibility of channelling fear into social action through a save our schools campaign and promoted the Bin a Knife amnesty for those possessing knives. However, badness is conceptualized as a foreign import as well as a practical problem in our midst: at the time of the murder they quoted an American describing the violence in American schools as a microcosm of our own sick society (Hall, 1995: 6). In America, we were told, murder and mayhem have been on the timetable for years (Hall, 1995: 6). Even though the Mirrors social analysis kept most closely to the facts of the case (out-of-control youth, carrying knives), their concern about foreign imports was clear. Hence, gang culture in London was linked to organized crime through Chinese Triads (likened to the Sicilian Maa and Japanese Yakuza) (Antonowicz, 1995: 6). The politicians of the time linked in again and again to the case, as discussions of knife amnesties, appropriate punishments, effectiveness of the justice system and teachers safety were discussed. But as part of the wider social malaise argument, the Mirror (1996) explicitly linked the case to current politicians activities: It is all very well for John Major to praise Mrs Lawrence when she condemns the me culture. But will John Major act to curb this culture that promotes so much sleaze and greed? (p. 6). So the tragic death of one individual has evolved from social outrage to being a symbol in which the actuality of death is eclipsed by the range of current and past political ills which it is held to represent.
CONCLUSION
Newspapers develop the victim role in major crimes by inviting us to witness and take part on the side of those closely affected by a killing the reader is invited to focus on the side of the offended against and is encouraged to feel hurt; this invitation is embedded at a micro level in the authorial techniques of the crime-reporting genre. But
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individually and as members of the larger society, our sense of outrage is necessarily different to those who have actually been bereaved. One of the consequences of mediated witness is that mega killings enter cultural and social awareness, in part due to the nature of coverage and mediation. One further consequence of this collection of techniques is the construction of a contested framework (public narrative) within which the struggle for control of the crime agenda takes place. Public narrative is both a historical artefact and a heuristic device that helps to explore particular issues. It refers to a slower, cumulative process over a longer time period than is the case with moral panics. Some mega cases will be returned to many times, but over a time span more drawn out and episodic than one would expect with a classic moral panic (the Moors Murders and the killing of James Bulger are two examples of this drawn out time span). Likewise, while signal crime encapsulates the moments of shock and social reection, the public narratives surrounding mega homicides encompass the entire process through to distancing and restoring a sense of social order via a framework of contested social perspectives. The nature of the public memory is different to that of the private one, for the public one allows restoration of some sense of order. Entry into long-term cultural and social consciousness lies in part in the amount of coverage and shock factor of the crime, but also, in part, in the nature and style of that coverage. As a consumer item, a mega killing is a matter of vicarious experience, and its exploitation is essential in the genre of infotainment (see Jewkes, 2004: 26; and Peelo, 2005: 26); the authorial techniques of mediated witness contribute to its eventual iconic status. Repeated telling, as with fairy tales, helps pin a historical mega killing in the public memory. Micro-level analysis is, then, an essential ingredient in helping to unravel how signal crimes transmute into longer term social consciousness. The rich layers of varied response under the heading victimhood hold much of importance for criminologists, not least because making decisions about victims their worthiness or otherwise has traditionally been a central part of how society estimates the degree of badness in serious crime. In the case of homicide, there are many questions to be answered about how this sits alongside the long tradition of entertainment in the reporting of exceptional cases. As consumers of media crime, we are as bystanders. One of the chief emotional distinctions between virtual and actual victimhood is that virtual experience allows us still to be entertained by crime, which must seem grotesque to those bereaved by homicide. Major crime touches us all as members of the community yet provides us, as individuals, with a source of entertainment, thrills and fear. Whatever moral high ground is claimed, one must never forget that newspapers need readers and violent crime has long helped to sell papers. The translation of public emotional responses into something must be done is, at one level, an expiation of mediated witness no longer bystanders, we take action to ensure that we will not be caught out the same way again. While families, friends and survivors of real homicide victims may engage in campaigning activities, this cannot take away their experience of the crime itself. Hence, our apparent unanimity and empathy with survivors of major crime is illusory. Similarly, Breithaupt (2003) has charted the media construction of trauma, which he separates out from the actual suffering of people affected (in his example, it is in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11). The attacks on the World Trade Center, in
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particular, appeared on television as an attack on America, in the traditional way of oldstyle wars: by air. Hence, unlike most mega killings, America could watch and view itself under attack; by comparison, the artefacts of murder are usually seen retrospectively. Nonetheless, there are links between the two, especially in the way Breithaupt shows us how the media channel not only the experience of crime, but notions of healing and recovery. The style of channelling public response is one that also tells us how we might move away from the event, and this is clearly evident in the highly politicized social commentary surrounding Philip Lawrences death. In addition to the long-standing role of violent crime as a source of entertainment, some argue that crime itself has become increasingly politicized in recent years. Downes and Morgan (2002) have charted the move to political centre-stage of all matters related to law and order, particularly since 1979. There has also been a shift in emphasis in the public framing of crime: where Katz (1987: 71) comments that the moral symbolism of reading crime news was linked to its emphasis on the criminal, Garland (2001) argues that victimhood is central to the new politicization of crime control. It is not, then, surprising that newspapers both echo and shape this aspect of the public narrative regardless of the experience of actual victims. Indeed, Garland argues: The symbolic gure of the victim has taken on a life of its own, and plays a role in political debate and policy argument that is often quite detached from the claims of the organized victims movement, or the aggregated opinions of surveyed victims (p. 11). Exploitation and ownership of victimhood, within this framework, are far removed from the experience of actual victims. Rather, we turn away from the pain of the bereaved and focus instead on conicting claims as to how society should be run. Karstedt (2002) has raised the question as to whether or not emotions should be the basis for moral principles. Here, I argue further, that our social commentary is shaped by virtual emotions arising out of a manufactured victimhood. How, then, do criminologists balance the symbolism of public narratives about violent crime against the consumption of crime as entertainment, in a time when engagement with the emotionality surrounding crime is a route to political one-upmanship? One of the potential consequences for those immediately affected by illegal killing in their own lives is to distance them further from the rest of society at precisely the moment we seem to be communicating most clearly about their experience. Spungen (1998: 10) offers the concept of the second wound, whereby survivors are victimized after the homicide itself. She includes media intrusions along with those of the defendant, the police, the justice system, would-be helpers and family and friends as sources of this subsequent victimization. She recognizes, however, that while the media can hurt, so can they help: public media can help solve crimes and celebrity can allow co-victims to speak out on social, family and criminal justice issues and achieve positive effects. However, Spungen questions if the price can be too high for the individuals concerned (p. 225). For supporters of co-victims, she stresses the need for all to understand that the media have different processes and agendas to those of the victims. Public consumption of crime, through media representation, is now framed within a period that has politicized criminological problems. Crime is a site of contest between competing groups with competing world views concerning how society should be run
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and control of crime agendas is about social and political power. Working only within existing theoretical frameworks, such as moral panics, can mean settling for a partial explanation of the rich range of public and private emotions surrounding crime and victimhood emotional phenomena that contribute to the construction of the highly politicized public narratives surrounding homicide. The complex uses and abuses of the emotionality surrounding crime have become, thereby, a matter of even greater importance to criminology, requiring a level of micro analysis from researchers to deconstruct the precise ways in which emotionality is framed publicly.
Note
I wish to thank Keith Soothill, in particular, for commenting on earlier drafts of this article and also other team members: Brian Francis, Jayn Pearson and Elizabeth Ackerley, whose support is much appreciated. Thanks also to the ESRC who funded the research project (Homicide and the Media, R000 22 3061).
References
Antonowicz, Anton (1995) Terror Triads Target Schools, 11 December, p. 6. Berger, A.A. (1997) Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and Everyday Life. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Breithaupt, F. (2003) Rituals of Trauma: How the Media Fabricated September 11, in S. Chermak, F.Y. Bailey and M. Brown (eds) Media Representations of September 11, pp. 6781. Westport, CT: Praeger. Cohen, S. (2002) Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Routledge. Daily Mirror (1996) Listen to the Voice of Courage, 21 October, p. 6. Ditton, J., D. Chadee, S. Farrall, E. Gilchrist and J. Bannister (2004) From Imitation to Intimidation: A Note on the Curious and Changing Relationship between the Media, Crime and Fear of Crime, British Journal of Criminology 44(4): 595610. Downes, D. and R. Morgan (2002) The Skeletons in the Cupboard: The Politics of Law and Order at the Turn of the Millenium, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, pp. 286321. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ericson, R.V., P.M. Baranek and J.B. Chan (1991) Representing Order: Crime, Law and Justice in the News Media. Buckingham: Open University Press. Innes, M. (2004) Crime as a Signal, Crime as a Memory, Journal for Crime, Conict and the Media 1(2): 1522. Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Getzel, G.S. and R. Masters (1984) Serving Families Who Survive Homicide Victims, The Journal of Contemporary Social Work (March): 13844. Hall, Allan (1995) Murder on the Curriculum, Daily Mirror, p. 6. Jewkes, Y. (2004) Media and Crime. London: SAGE Publications. Karstedt, S. (2002) Emotions and Criminal Justice, Theoretical Criminology 6(3): 299317. Katz, J. (1987) What Makes Crime News?, Media, Culture and Society 9: 4775. Mail on Sunday (1995) A Hero Whose Death Must Not Be in Vain, 10 December, p. 28. Peelo, M. (2005) Crime and the Media: Public Narratives and Private Consumption, in: M. Peelo and K. Soothill (eds) Questioning Crime and Criminology, pp. 2036. Cullompton: Willan.
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Peelo, M. and K. Soothill (2000) The Place of Public Narratives in Reproducing Social Order, Theoretical Criminology 4(2): 13148. Peelo, M., B. Francis, K. Soothill, J. Pearson and E. Ackerley (2004) Newspaper Reporting and the Public Construction of Homicide, British Journal of Criminology 44(2): 25675. Presdee, M. (2000) Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime. London: Routledge. Presdee, M. (2005) Burning Issues: Fire, Carnival and Crime, in M. Peelo and K. Soothill (eds) Questioning Crime and Criminology, pp. 6982. Cullompton: Willan. Rees-Mogg, William (1995) The Headmasters Lesson For Us All, 11 December, p. 16. Reiner, R. (2002) Media Made Criminality: The Representation of Crime in the Mass Media, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, pp. 376416. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rock, P. (1998) After Homicide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, Stephan (1995) How the Courts are Failing Teachers, Daily Mail, 12 December: 28. Shlovsky, V. (1989) Art as Technique, in R.C. Davis and R. Schleifer (eds) Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (3rd edn.), pp. 26071. New York: Longman. Soothill, K., M. Peelo, B. Francis, J. Pearson and E. Ackerley (2002) Homicide and the Media: Identifying Top Cases in The Times, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 41(5): 40121. Soothill, K., M. Peelo, J. Pearson and B. Francis (2004) The Reporting Trajectories of Top Homicide Cases in the Media: A Case Study of The Times, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 43(1): 114. Spungen, D. (1998) Homicide: The Hidden Victims. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. The Times (1995) Role of Honour, 12 December, p. 19. Topping, P. (1989) An Autobiography. London: Angus & Robertson. Webster, Fiona (1995) Dignity of Little Boy Who Rose Above Evil, Daily Mirror, 13 December, p. 9. Wykes, M. (2001) News, Crime and Culture. London: Pluto Press.
MOIRA PEELO, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Department of Applied Social Science, University of Lancaster, UK. Email: m.peelo@lancaster.ac.uk.
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Appendix
QUALIFYING AS A MEGA CASE

The 13 mega-cases were identied according to their number of appearances in The Times Index (for fuller details see Soothill et al., 2002, 2004; see also Table 1). The cases either attracted more than 150 stories over the 23 years of the study or had at least 60 stories within any one year (or both).
BRIEF PEN-PORTRAITS OF THE 13 MEGA CASES

Black, Robert (victims: females, aged 11, 10 and 5) In July 1990 Black was caught abducting, sexually assaulting and endangering the life of a six-year-old girl. After being convicted and sentenced to life in August 1990, he was further convicted for the murders of three young girls. He has since been questioned about the disappearance of other children. Bulger, James (victim: male, aged 2; two offenders: males, both aged 10) On 12 February 1993 two-year-old James Bulger was abducted from Bootle
Shopping Centre and later killed by two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson.
Cricklewood and Muswell Hill murders (victims: males, aged 27, 25, 23, 23, 20 and 16; offender: Dennis Nilsen, aged 37) Dennis Nilsen was
convicted in October 1983 of six counts of murder and two of attempted murder. All the victims had been young men picked up by Nilsen on the street or from public houses frequented by homosexuals in central London.
Dando, Jill (victim: female, aged 37; offender: Barry George, aged 39) Barry George was sentenced to life imprisonment on 2 July 2001 for shooting dead
popular TV presenter Jill Dando in broad daylight on the doorstep of her London home.
Dunblane Primary School shootings (victims: females, aged 5 (11 cases) and aged 45; males, aged 5 (4 cases) and aged 6; offender: Thomas Hamilton, aged 43) On 13 March 1996, Thomas Hamilton walked into
Dunblane Primary School in Scotland and shot dead 16 pupils and one teacher. He also injured many others before shooting himself.
Gloucestershire serial murders (victims: females, aged 8, 15 (2 cases), 16, 17, 18 (2 cases) and 21 (2 cases); offenders: Rosemary and Fred
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West, aged 40 and 52 at time of arrest) Named after the county in which
Fred and Rosemary West murdered at least 10 young victims from 1967 onwards. Many victims were buried under their house. Fred West committed suicide in 1995, leaving Rosemary West to be given a life sentence in November of that year.
Hungerford massacre (victims: males, aged 26 (2 cases), 34, 41, 42, 51 (2 cases), 66, 67, 70, 84 and females, aged 22, 33, 62, 63, 66; offender: Michael Ryan, aged 27) On 19 August 1987 Michael Ryan went
through the streets of Hungerford in Berkshire with a semi-automatic rie shooting 16 people dead (14 at the scene and 2 others died later), including his own mother. He eventually shot himself.
Lawrence, Philip (victim: male, aged 48; offender: male, aged 15)
Headteacher, Philip Lawrence, was stabbed to death outside his school in Maida Vale, London on 8 December 1995. His attacker was a 15-year-old boy, a member of a gang preparing to attack pupils at Mr Lawrences school.
Lawrence, Stephen (victim: male, aged 18; offender: not known)

Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death by a racist gang in Eltham, south-east London in April 1993. This case raised many issues such as institutional racism within the police and calls for changes in the double-jeopardy rule.
Moors murderers (victim: female, aged 10 and males, aged 12 and 17; offenders: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley) This case is named after
Saddleworth Moor, near Manchester, where Myra Hindley and Ian Brady buried children they had murdered in the 1960s. Hindley and Brady were sentenced in 1966 for the killing of three children. They later confessed to killing two more children (Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett) but they have never been charged with these murders. This series of child murders is regularly written about in spite of the historical distance of these crimes.
Pearson, John (victim: male baby; accused: male paediatrician, aged 54, acquitted) Dr Leonard Arthur was charged on 5 February 1981 with murder
but was acquitted in court. The case provoked much moral debate about the issue of euthanasia.
Tottenham riots (victim: male, aged 40; accused: six suspects, aged 14 (two), 15, 18, 19, 26, acquitted) PC Keith Blakelock was killed during
rioting on the Broadwater Farm estate in North London in 1985. Winston Silcott was convicted for PC Blakelocks murder in 1987 but had his conviction overturned on appeal in 1991.
Yorkshire Ripper (victims: 13 females, aged between 16 and 47; offender: Peter Sutcliffe, aged 34 at time of arrest) Peter Sutcliffe (the
Yorkshire Ripper) was convicted of the murder of 13 women aged 1647. Despite a
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massive police operation to nd him, his career of murder lasted over ve years before he was arrested.
Shipman case This case is named after the murderer, Harold Shipman, a 54-yearold family doctor convicted in January 2000 of killing 15 patients (and suspected of killing many, many more) in and around Hyde in Cheshire. This case fell outside the study period of 197799 of the original ESRC project on which this study was based.

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Crime, Media, Culture

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

THE CONSTRUCTION OF VIRTUAL VICTIMHOOD

MEDIATED WITNESS: DIALOGUE, REPRESENTATION AND OBJECTIFICATION

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

THE CONSTRUCTION OF VIRTUAL VICTIMHOOD

Representation and mediated witness

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

Defamiliarization The devices of mediated witness stir us emotionally as readers

THE CONSTRUCTION OF VIRTUAL VICTIMHOOD

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

TABLE 1 Total number of entries (all years 197799)

THE CONSTRUCTION OF VIRTUAL VICTIMHOOD

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

THE CONSTRUCTION OF VIRTUAL VICTIMHOOD

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

THE CONSTRUCTION OF VIRTUAL VICTIMHOOD

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

THE CONSTRUCTION OF VIRTUAL VICTIMHOOD

QUALIFYING AS A MEGA CASE

BRIEF PEN-PORTRAITS OF THE 13 MEGA CASES

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2(2)

Lawrence, Stephen (victim: male, aged 18; offender: not known)

THE CONSTRUCTION OF VIRTUAL VICTIMHOOD

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