When It Comes to Crime, Is It Always Good to Talk?
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Social media and modern technology means everyone can have an audience
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What does this mean when it comes to telling a more painful part of your story, asks Jennifer Fleetwood, like being the victim of crime?
When it comes to crime, is it always good to talk? Aside from perhaps some of those involved in serious or organised crime, it seems like a lot of us are. In the 1990s, television shows like Oprah popularised an important idea from therapy: that it’s good to talk. It’s often said that humans are story-telling animals and that we make sense of the world through stories. Indeed, for people who are victims of crime, storytelling can be a powerful resource for making sense of painful experiences, and a way to reconstruct one’s identity as survivor. In therapy, where the goal is to promote healing, talk – and composing a personal narrative – can be a powerful tool for personal wellbeing.
There are countless examples of people talking publicly about an experience of crime. The Netflix series Baby Reindeer is a notable example. The dark comedy – boldly introduced in the opening scenes as ‘a true story’ – dramatises its author’s double victimisation: he was stalked by a woman and then raped by a writer/director. Although fictional names are used, the writer Richard Gadd plays the central character. In interviews, Gadd described performing his experiences as ‘like 1,000 therapy sessions’.
The idea that someone who’s suffered trauma, pain or injustice can achieve healing through telling their story in public is widely held in contemporary culture. While controversy surrounds the accuracy of Gadd’s account, he was nonetheless praised for bravely telling his story. It seems like we put a lot of stock in what stories can do: we intuit that it can foster empathy and understanding, healing or make some change in the world – in this case, recognise that men can also be vulnerable to sexual violence.
What’s behind the rise in people speaking about crime?
It might be easy to reach for individual explanations (are they “attention-seekers”?) but I’d argue that major social and technological shifts have led us here. The rise in popularity of talking therapies have transformed how we think about personal narratives, recognising their transformative potential for individuals and society. Secondly, social movements have employed personal storytelling as a tool for social change, especially for powerfully breaking silences by revealing hidden realities, such as the impact of sexual violence.
The advent of the internet and social media have undeniably been a boon for personal telling in general. Social media can allow people to find audiences for personal narratives that might previously have been considered shameful – for example, TikTok hosts thousands of self-made videos by people who have been in prison or other kinds of state supervision (such as tags).
There are more opportunities than ever to share stories publicly and it’s perhaps not surprising that this also includes crime. Changes in the criminal justice system have also given credibility and importance to victims. Since the 1980s, victims have had the right to speak directly to courts in the US, and since the 1990s in the UK, although only once the court has determined that the accused is guilty. Victim personal statements regularly make it into the press, whether as written testimony or as video testimony, as happened at length in the Larry Nasser case in the US. In the recent trial of nurse Lucy Letby, the court debated whether or how she could be compelled to read the victim impact statements of babies’ parents after she refused to attend court. The judge ruled that they would be delivered to her cell but she could not be compelled to attend her sentencing hearing. The Independent newspaper also published them in full ensuring they reached a far wider audience than the court.
As I show in What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime, telling a story about crime in public rarely offers a straight path from telling to healing. The book emerged from my curiosity about the vogue for speaking about crime in public and looks at prominent examples of people telling a personal story about crime in public. The book includes several examples, such as Shamima Begum’s Times interview, Howard Marks’ account of his drug trafficking career in Mr Nice, and Myra Hindley’s autobiographical writing. These stories all prompted me to reflect on the thorny relationship between storytelling and healing, or justice.
The BBC documentary The Real Mo Farah stands out as a rare example of a personal narrative told well, in that it offered him dignity and empathy. In the hour-long documentary Farah revealed that he was trafficked to the UK and experienced domestic servitude as a child. If you’ve not seen it (and you should!) it’s still available on the BBC iPlayer. Farah’s personal story was complicated by the fact that, as he was a child at the time and so there is much about his experience that he didn’t understand at the time and which remains opaque. He was only eight when his mother sent him to stay with family in Djibouti to escape the war in Somaliland. From Djibouti, he was trafficked to the UK under the name ‘Mo Farah’. Rather than try to ignore the troubling gaps and absences in his biography, the documentary recruits the audience into Farah’s journey of discovery, inviting us to join him in tracing his lost history and reclaiming his true story. It does seem that for Farah, sharing the story of his victimisation as a child has allowed him to reclaim an identity stolen from him when he was trafficking. But he seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Jennifer Fleetwood works at the University of Greenwich and is the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime
