Why does Jill Meagher’s death resonate so strongly with us?
It’s a jungle out there.
Every day countless people are murdered, raped, beaten, bullied, harassed and even tortured. Some of these stories capture our attention. Others are ignored. And some go viral, drawing our attention, involvement, and call for action.
A few cases illustrate this phenomenon. In 1964 Susan ‘Kitty’ Genovese was murdered in Brooklyn, New York, as multiple onlookers failed to answer her pleas for help. Her murder spurred the newspaper headline ‘Thirty-Seven Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police’, followed by an outcry from the community.
More recently Australians have been actively campaigning in social and public media to save the lives of fellow Aussies—and drug smugglers–Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
Vocal members of the media, including conservative commentator Andrew Bolt, have wondered why these people didn’t actively campaign to save the lives of the Bali bomb terrorists who killed scores of Australians, or even those about to be executed in the United States.
Bolt suggested our outrage came from the fact that these men were Australians being executed in a foreign country, not because people were genuinely opposed to the death penalty.
But Australians were equally outraged by the Melbourne murder of the young Irish woman, Jill Meagher, whose cruel death led to a public outpouring of grief and calls for the death penalty to return.
With all the attention these stories generate, there are still countless other tragic tales that are never heard or quickly forgotten.
I’ve heard many theories which try to explain why some stories seem to get under the skin of the public and produce a mass reaction.
At one psychology conference the explanation given was that people have an ‘absolute threshold’ for suffering. If we hear the story of one person suffering we can relate to it. When we learn of the suffering of whole communities and, indeed, nations, the additional suffering doesn’t increase our already limited threshold for empathy.
If anything, the additional faces dilute our compassion.
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This, of course, doesn’t explain why stories that involve the suffering of many individuals, such as the September 11 attacks, seem to have maximum impact on the public. Their suffering came together as one larger cause, which generated fear and uncertainty across the globe. Some argue that the physical appearance of the victims can make a difference. Jill Meagher had traditionally beautiful features and that ‘baby face’ that tends to generate our human bias to feel protective. |
September 11 attacks completely shifted the public’s fears about terrorism |
Maybe we’re kidding ourselves trying to understand what makes these stories so compelling. According to Black Swan Theory, we can’t really predict these epic shifts in public consciousness. They are genuine surprises as was the discovery that swans could be the colour black after only experiencing white swans for centuries.
Our predictions are, essentially, based on what we know about the past not the future. If we understood how they occurred then tomorrow I could tell you what the next public outcry would be.
But even in this world of uncertainty, surely we can rely on some plain old common sense and instinct. My father, Colin Duck, who worked in the media all his life, said ‘news is just like the information we pass on to each other’. That is, we are intrigued and talk about things that people can relate to or that affect them directly.
Of course, this may not be a comforting or satisfying end to the blog, which started out so grim. So, let me at least put your mind at ease about all this suffering. Many more people, thankfully, live relatively happy and peaceful lives and we don’t know their stories either.
Perhaps we aren’t all that intrigued by happy, normal lives?
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