Victimology

“Victimology” studies (1) the possible relationships between criminals and their victims, primarily as a tool to solve crimes, and (2) the effects of a crime on the victim.  In the wake of yesterday’s horrible Charleston massacre, we might want to consider a third way to define the term: media treatment of victims as compared to media treatment of perpetrators. 

The fact that the well-known cleric and South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney was among the victims of the Emanuel AME church shooting made a huge difference, I suspect, in how this tragic ‘breaking news’ has been covered.  Because there was a relatively, or at least regionally, well-known face and biography to attach to the carnage, news from the start was as focused on the dead as much as on the not-for-very-long-unapprehended shooting suspect.  Even as I write, the MSNBC Chris Hayes show starts out with profiles of the victims.  And not with the Reverend Pinckney, but with some of the lesser-known but in their own lights equally admirable victims.  

Thanks (!) to the media, the nine people shot dead in church have names, faces,and biographies now known throughout the country.  Their ages range from 27 to 87;  they are our friends, our grandmothers, our co-workers, our students, our pastors.  Their significance lies not in their relationship to their murderer (there was none, other than, evidently, the fact that they were Black and he was White) or in how they are affected by the crime (obviously impacted, as they are dead, but nothing further to investigate in this regard).  What is important is certainly that they were innocent victims, as innocent as the children mowed down at Sandy Hook, as the students attending class at Virginia Tech, as the moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado.  But what is also important is dealing with ‘victimology’ in a way that highlights victims per se, as real human beings with families and accomplishments and good works to their credit — whose deaths are losses not only to loved ones and friends but also to society as a whole.  Whose deaths matter in and of themselves, as opposed to simply adding to bad-guy kill counts.

I don’t remember anything, really, about the actual victims of the movie-theater shootings.  The media focused on the bizarre gunman and continues to do so.  Coverage of the Sandy Hook carnage tried to individualize the victims, but the fact that most were little children made that attempt fairly difficult. Twenty tiny dead bodies tend to blend into one heartbreaking amalgam of senseless pain; media coverage did tell the stories of the adults who perished, but the stories of their lives and heroic deaths were overwhelmed by the sheer horror of child slaughter. 

What is encouraging today, if anything can be, is that coverage of the latest ‘mass shooting’ episode has de-emphasized the ‘mass’ and emphasized the discrete, valuable, irreplaceable human lives that have been lost. Maybe one could even wish that reporting on victims as three-dimensional people, rather than as casualties or statistics, might nudge some legislators toward reconsidering common-sense gun regulation.

That’s probably too much to hope for.  But I do hope that this third way of dealing with ‘victimology’ becomes standard media practice -- that never has to be employed again.  

[Note:  I chose a photo of victim Susie Jackson, age 87, to headline this blog.  To me, her death was the most gut-wrenching . . . after living so long, and just coming back from visiting her great-grandchildren, and then attending a prayer meeting at her church home . . . ]