Jenny’s Pennies

The immensely tragic and terrible murder of a 10 year old girl is all over the news here. Understandably people are scared, angry and sad. But besides the empathy and solidarity with the girl’s family and friends, there is also a darker side to it, fueled by sometimes speculative and vulturelike media reporting. People talk about torture, death penalty and mob justice. Karin Thunberg, reporter at Svenska Dagbladet had to close the comments section of her blog because it totally got out of hand. She has written a very good column that you can read here, where she says:

We can’t begin to look at every stranger, especially if it happens to be a man, as a potential criminal.
What happened to Engla lies beyond what we, at least as outsiders, can feel or understand. For real.

But we win nothing if we start to see the exceptions as the normal. In the society where everybody is scared of each other and expects hell to lie behind the next turn, there it becomes even more dangerous to live.

For all of us.

Now media researcher and professor Stig Hedenius, has proposed that media should be less cautious about publishing names of criminals and of suspects in crime investigations (see also SvD here).
He argues that by publishing names of suspects, we can avoid tragedies such as this one. That if people had known the name of the 42 year old who has admitted to murdering Engla (and also to another murder years ago), then Engla could have been alive today.
That is of course a purely theoretical argument which relies on a lot of “ifs”.

The media and the public should not be a substitute for courts and the rule of law. I agree there are a lot of problems with our criminal justice system, but the solution must never be to dismantle the legal rights of the individual (yes, even if that individual is a murderer and pedophile of the most heinous and awful kind) and to let the profit driven media and revenge hungry public act as the prosecutor and the judge. There are other ways to make our criminal justice system better.

We already know that the media is driven by selling papers (or getting viewers) and making money, and that their track record of respect for truth and decency is less than perfect. A few weeks ago, we had another tragic murder case, where two little girls were killed and their mother seriously injured. Before long, media had pointed out the father/husband as the perpetrator. But oups, turns out he was innocent, and the suspect is now a German woman. And when foreign minister Anna Lindh was murdered in 2003, a man called “the 35 year old” was pointed out as the killer. No name was published in that case, but enough details to identify him anyway if you cared to. He was innocent too. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time should not get you plastered all over placards and front pages. That isn’t something we as citizens should have to live in fear of.

I’m not saying that names and pictures of suspects should never be published. If the police investigation is seriously stuck and a name/picture publishing would move it forward, then yes, it can be okay. But only in close cooperation with the police, and not without serious consideration of the consequences. Unfortunately, I don’t trust the media to make that call. Today one one tabloid screams “How he became a murderer”. As if they have the answers to that.

And they see their circulation go up when tragedies happen. Grieving mothers, monstrous killers, those thing sell. What is really public interest here? Do we need close ups of crying neighbours, do we need nosy interviews with people who went to school with the suspect 30 years ago? In whose interest are those things published? Not in the victims’ and not in the public’s anyway.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Crime, Media, Sexual assault, Sweden, Violence against women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.