A single death is a tragedy, the saying goes, while a million deaths is just a statistic. But a handful of deaths that turn out to be murders, committed in serial fashion? Well, for many, that's entertainment. |
Since the advent of the printing press, people have nursed a morbid fascination for reading about humanity's capacity for evil. But in the past decade or so, true crime — that once relatively niche genre of storytelling that spins real accounts of wrongdoing into narrative gold — has become a cultural behemoth: Sales of true-crime books in the United States have skyrocketed. In the world of documentaries, true crime is now both the most in-demand and the fastest-growing genre. When I checked my podcast app late last week, four of the five top-charting shows were about murder. |
What emotional hunger is all this ravenous consumption of true crime satisfying? And in the satisfying, are we making our minds — and our politics — sick? |
Sarah Weinman, a true crime writer and editor, told Jane that she attributes much of the interest in the genre to psychological displacement: "Women" — far and away true crime's biggest consumers — are "subsuming their legitimate fears about sexual assault and, say, intimate partner violence or being harmed by people most close to them." |
Weinman believes this displacement can become a problem when legitimate fears of violence attach themselves to serial murder, an extraordinarily rare phenomenon. And as Emma Berquist, a writer who survived a stabbing, points out, the popularity of true crime can obscure the fact that violent crime has been declining for decades. "Being in that state of sort of hyper-awareness," Berquist told Phoebe, "I don't think it's healthy." |
Many critics of true crime also accuse its practitioners of acting as unwitting mouthpieces for America's criminal justice system, which imprisons more people than any other in the world, and Black Americans at nearly five times the rate of whites. |
But the genre has plenty of defenders, too. Rabia Chaudry, a lawyer whose podcast, "Undisclosed," seeks to exonerate people who were wrongfully convicted, believes true crime can be a powerful tool for reform. |
"I think true crime has been a net positive for future defendants or existing defendants because the system is getting a lot of pressure because of what is being exposed," she told Jane. "What are the laws that protect officers from accountability that basically make the entire system opaque? What are the laws behind cash bail that end up locking people over, like, 50 bucks?" |
And as for the notion that people should feel guilty for taking pleasure in the genre? "If you love it, you love it," Chaudry told Jane. "I mean, embrace it." |
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