Ghouls Took Photos Of Dying Suicide Girl

A coroner has blasted members of the public who took mobile phone photos of a dying teenage girl after she jumped from a multi-storey car park.

West Dorset coroner Michael Johnston said that the ghoulish bystanders made him “worried about humanity”.
…

Mr Johnston praised the actions of passers-by who tried to help Robyn, but he said some had acted “in a shabby way” by taking photographs as she lay dying.

“You can only presume something like this has never happened to them, but it does make you worried about humanity,” he said.

He added: “This was a child’s life and you were taking photos on your mobile phones.

“I’m sorry, but I think that is horrid and the people who did that ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

Well, quite. And I agree that anyone who stands around laughing and taking photos while someone lies dying is a sick fuck. I suppose the issue is the laughing part – it displays a lack of any kind of empathy, and makes you worry about the state of humanity. But then, another issue is the citizen journalism aspect. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether you laugh, cry or dance a fucking jig as you press the shutter: if the footage is relevant and important enough then it will enter the canon, and your lack of morality as cameraperson will be swept under the carpet.

Anyway. This is what I think about this particular instance.

1. It’s massively difficult to prove anyone did take photos, no matter what the coroner says. It’s not even necessary to prove it; all that’s required is a rumour, and then you’ve got a story. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I can’t see that any images have leaked. I can certainly imagine it happening – but I can imagine lots of things happening, like snuff movies, that haven’t. I also know that “Sickos takes photos of dying girl!” generates more page-turns – and even more click-throughs – than “Girl commits suicide: how did we all fail her?”

2. If the footage does exist – if there’s even a possibility – then you can bet your arse that several papers are falling over themselves trying to find it. They’ll blur it out on page one. “Sickos take photos of dying girl!” will be the headline. “Turn to Page 5 for more.”

Introduction: click here

Mini-reviews of The Third Person, Cry for Help and The Cutting Crew: click here

Review of Still Bleeding: click here

Review of The 50/50 Killer: click here

“The worst thing in the world”, guest-blog by me: click here

Phew! Again, thank you Elizabeth. The site as a whole is well-worth checking out, and Elizabeth is also an ace twitterer who goes by the name of @APMonkey.

* And if you’re thinking that a guest-blog by me somewhere else is a little perverse, given how rarely I update this place, then I’m sure I’ve only confirmed what you already suspected…

First off, I went to the Theakstons Harrogate Crime Festival a couple of weeks back and had an excellent time. I was on a panel, and everything, and felt very much like a grown up. As well as catching up with people, I also did an interview with Un:Bound. I say ‘interview’, because it was basically just me and Sean Cregan / John Rickards, both slightly pissed, chatting with the wonderful Adele who runs the site. Anyway, it was great fun to do, nice and relaxed – and a pleasure to be featured. You can read the interview here, listen here, and just check out the site in general here.

And if that wasn’t enough me-related goodness, you can practically overdose at Musings of an All Purpose Monkey, where Elizabeth has very kindly dedicated a whole week to me, starting with an intro today. I literally have nothing else to say about this, as it’s so obviously, unbelievably awesome. Huge thanks to Elizabeth for doing it, and – as with Un:Bound – check out the rest of the site while you’re over.

Which reminds me – I really need to give the links column on the right an overhaul…

“(Violence) corrupts people because if they see it they get used to it and, sadly, they expect it.”

Ruth Rendell talks about TV violence here

Here’s the thing: as a crime writer, if you’ve got anything about you at all, you think about the relationship between fictional violence and real world violence.

You might think about it quite a lot (as I do – it’s pathetic, honestly), or you might have thought about it once – twice even – and worked out very quickly where you stand on the issue. You might have split the argument up and considered the issue of violence against women – to pluck a media-friendly star from the void – and then looked at the apparent gender of the name written down the spine to decide whether the author must have been being visceral for entertainment or out of a deep sense of empathy with the victims. And so, tediously, on. Christ! I nearly forgot. You might even have looked beyond the field to deal with other forms of art. Music, for example, or film.

Whatever – you’ve thought about it in some capacity or other. You’re writing and reading (or hearing, or watching) violence, after all, and violence is horrible. What justifies you in enjoying fake suffering that’s all too real for all too many? While you read about someone being crucified by a serial killer, after all, someone really is being.

1. Violence as Social Commentary

Except, for the most part, obviously people aren’t being crucified by serial killers. This is the first thing to note, even though it’s unfortunate and slightly embarrassing to need to. The crime genre goes through loops, and the serial killer sub-genre did very well after The Silence of the Lambs, bolstered by a big border-crossing from disenfranchised horror folk needing new shelves to live in. But in the era of The Wire and the crime-is-good-because-it’s-social-commentary arguments, it seems like many crime authors are leaping aboard a bandwagon ill-fitted to them.

Q: “Your book is about a child abused at a carnival who then goes on to murder people in the style of fairground rides while dressed as a clown. Why is it so violent?”

A: “Well … real-life violence is so horrible, and I felt a duty to real-life victims to represent that realistically…”

Sorry, but no. Just no. Your novel blatantly isn’t social commentary. You have a killer clown in it. That’s the first clue, okay? You’re not Dostoyevsky – we can all see that.

And people who don’t write about killer clowns: I’m sorry, but you’re probably not off the hook on this one. “Drugs lead to crime” and “Poverty leads to crime” might be social commentary in the most vague and ball-numbingly useless sense, but – brace yourselves – you’re most likely not saying anything important enough to justify any violence you’ve included on the journey. “Violence is bad”. Yeah, I knew that already. You know it too. And we both know you’re not including it to teach me anything, because that would be patronising. I know bad guys have reasons. I know they’re not ‘born bad’ in a Biblical sense, because that’s just fucking dumb.

This, incidentally, is one of the more interesting things about the crime genre, especially in terms of single books. At heart, it’s a very conservative narrative form. Evil occurs; evil is punished. Good guys and bad guys. And yet an intelligent (dare I say liberal) view of the world demands shades of grey, and levels of understanding, that don’t fit that form. We want the bad guy to explode in pain at the end, not get understanding, a suspended sentence and rehabilitation into the community. It’s a fundamental problem for the genre in terms of ‘satisfying narrative’ versus ‘social commentary’. Good And Evil as narrative necessities don’t fit a well-adjusted adult’s view of the real world.

But I digress. The thing is, you don’t need to justify fictional violence at all – any more than you need to justify a character’s hair colour – unless fictional violence has a negative effect on the real world.

2. Does fictional violence have a negative effect on the real world?

No.

I say that with the confidence of a young man not required to prove a negative – that an effect doesn’t exist. If there are studies that show watching, reading or listening to violent art makes people more violent, then present them. (Seriously – do. Comments are open). But I’ve not seen any. Some do seem to show a temporary effect in terms of increased aggression (not crime), but, overall, a causal link has not been established.

This, if we’re honest, is what you’d expect. And by that I literally mean you. You. Right there. Because, most likely, you’ve seen violent films, listened to violent music, read violent books, whatever, and yet – miraculously – have never felt in any major danger of offending as a result. Much as you don’t need books to tell you violence is bad, a book telling you violence is good is equally inconsequential.

You find this at the base of most of these arguments.

For example, this is something you will never hear anyone say:

“I can’t listen to some Jamaican dancehall music. It’s homophobic, and I’m too susceptible. I’m worried that if I listen to it I’ll be influenced to go out and beat up a gay person.”

Or, for that matter:

“Stop me watching this! Save yourselves!”

No, the argument is always from the other way round. It’s always predicated on the notion of some other – someone more susceptible (and therefore less intelligent and autonomous) than the commentator, and who, crucially, the commentator is already afraid of. Be it hoodies or ethnic minorities or right-wing Nazis, listening to Nick Griffin or Beenie Man, the argument is usually the same: well, you know, I can take it, but other people aren’t as smart as I am, and it will affect them. (Incidentally, the ‘them’ in this case is indistinguishable from the ‘them’ in lots of arguments you despise without thinking about it).

Look. As a general rule of thumb: if you can cope with it without turning into a psycho, chances are pretty much everyone else can too. If a tiny minority can’t, it’s probably not the fault of the music (or whatever); the music is most likely an effect for that minority, rather than a cause. And if it turns out that a majority can’t listen to the music without going apeshit, well … we have bigger fucking problems, don’t we.

Is there a drip-drip effect, though? Are we gradually becoming desensitised?

3. The ‘Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs’

In 2009, two teenagers (Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuck) were found guilty of the murder of 21 people in June and July of 2007 in Ukraine. Most of the victims were bludgeoned to death, and some were tortured and mutilated before they were killed. The two defendants received life sentences; a third man was sentenced to nine years over connected charges of robbery. The judge in the case summed up the motive of the two killers as “morbid self-affirmation”. According to Wikipedia (yeah, I know, but good enough in this instance):

Detective Bogdan Vlasenko stated: “We think they were doing it as a hobby, to have a collection of memories when they get old.” (more)

I first became aware of them at the end of 2008 when I was finishing up Still Bleeding, which is a novel about online footage of death and murder and the people who are interested in that kind of material. While writing it, I did a certain amount of research on forums dedicated to this footage. None of them are illegal or remotely hard to find, and, due to various social and technological advances, they are horribly full of content: beheadings and executions; accidents caught on camera; crime scene photos; CCTV footage of killings. There is, in fact, pretty much everything you could ever ‘want’ to watch: tens of thousands of images and videos. And thousands of users looking at them, all with different motives for being there and viewing these things.

Some of those clips ended up ‘appearing’ in Still Bleeding. The book is partly about representations of death, in memory and on film, and so I thought about it and figured it was appropriate. There’s a blurred line between fiction and reality here, and I wanted to look at it. Here’s the thing: if you watch one of these videos online, it is real in one sense, but, at the same time, you are not watching an actual event. You’re watching zeroes and ones – data that’s been stored on a camera, translated by software, and recreated as a visual image. Sight is fairly primary, of course – we’re used to seeing things happen – and video is a technological illusion that plays on that.  But, actually, what you’re watching isn’t real at all. It’s no different from a person seeing something and describing it to you very vividly in words.

So: some ‘real’ footage of death appears in Still Bleeding – but as words describing it for your head, rather than zeroes and ones describing it for your flash-player. The point is that the reader, ultimately, isn’t too far removed from the characters in the book who are watching those clips, and perhaps no reader of crime fiction is. Like the people on those websites, they may be doing so for different reasons – to challenge themselves; to think about violence; for simple entertainment – but they’re still interested enough, in some capacity, to be there, experiencing that kind of thing. Do you want to see? is one of the ideas in the book. And, if so, why?

Okay.

One of the most infamous aspects of the Dnepropetrovsk murders was that two of the murders were recorded on a mobile-phone camera. Late in 2008, one of those films was shown in court and leaked on the internet. It’s about nine minutes long, and shows the torture and murder of a man at a rubbish tip, using a hammer and screwdriver. The translation of the audio is as follows, as stolen from a site I’m not going to link to. (Feel free to skip, obviously).

“Hold on, hold on. Be neater, fuck!”
Laughing
“Hold on, hold on, hold on, don’t hit him, don’t hit him. Watch him…” The rest of the sentence is indistinct, but he’s likely telling the guy to watch the blood as he’s zooming in.
The following audio is unclear.
[After the screwdriver stabbing]
“What? With what?” The cameraman responding to the boy who stabs the victim.
“What, he’s still alive?” says the guy stabbing the victim.
“He’s still moving his arms after I ripped up his intestines,” the cameraman says.
“He’s having a fucked up day.” The boy stands on the man’s stomach.
More muffled talk as he proceeds to stab him in the eyes with the screwdriver.
“Get over here fast. Kill him already.”
“What?”
“Kill him already.”
“I already put the hammer back. He’s already dead.”
“I poked out his eyes and he’s still not dead,” says the cameraman.
“Get the knife.”
Proceeds to bludgeon him with hammer then interrupts by saying something indistinct.
“More, more.”
“Hold on, hold on.”
They start walking back to the car.
More muffled talk from the blond killer.
“Wash your hands,” the cameraman says. He tells him to spray cleaning chemical on the hammer.
“I’ll hold it.”
Muffled talk from the guy washing the hammer.
More muffled talk from the guy washing his face and walking back from his car.
“I stuck the screwdriver in his brain” says the camera man.
Muffled talk from the guy washing his hands.
“I got him in the nose from his eye.”
“I don’t understand how he was alive? I felt his brain.”
“I was holding the screw driver like this…”
“Alright, let’s get a picture.”

I have seen that video. This article by Caitlin Moran sums up my reaction to the clip, and to others like it. I relate to feeling “very very high – in a bad way”. On a well-known site dedicated to this sort of material, one seasoned user referred to his blood-pressure shooting through the roof. Certain clips, amongst the thousands, become infamous and get nicknames, and this clip is one.

There is a vague point to all this, and it’s not to bum you out. Chances are, if you read that transcript, you thought: fucking hell, I can’t even imagine seeing that on film. And you’re quite right. It is horrific and vile, and every bit as awful as you imagine from the description. And that is kind of my point.

Here’s what I think. The idea of becoming desensitised to violence through art, whether that be film, writing or whatever, is bullshit. Or rather, it’s true  - but only in an absolutely trivial sense. I mean, it’s obvious that by watching ‘violence you know is fake’ you become desensitised to ‘violence you know is fake’, but that doesn’t matter at all. Who cares about that? The leap to the real world is what matters. And yet, as far as I can tell, you could watch as many people die in Hollywood films as you wanted – and you probably have watched a few – but something like the Dnepropetrovsk video will still make you go white. It’s entirely different. Because you’re normal, and because it’s real.

I don’t recommend you watch it to prove this to yourself. You don’t have to. Instead, think of all those slickly choreographed movie fistfights you’ve appreciated, and then contrast them with a real, messy, violent one you’ve seen in real life outside a bar. It’s not remotely the same. It’s not in the same ballpark. Real violence is hideous, ugly and not remotely glamorous or exciting, except in the most horrible way.

And this ultimately is what I think about the issue. If you can watch that kind of real-life violence, and especially if you can perpetrate it, then it’s not because you’re desensitised to fictional violence. It’s because you’ve become desensitised to real-life people. It’s a matter of empathy.

I’m not saying that, in itself, isn’t a problem. But it doesn’t come from watching, reading or listening to anything. It really doesn’t.

And you know the other reason it’s rubbish? It would be too fucking easy.

“You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things all a man’s endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach. The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent. This makes me ecstatic. I have reached a nirvana of negativity. I can look futility in the face and still see promise in the stars.”

Sixth Form profundity at best – but still: RIP.

“The public should be invited to reject the politics of fear, that sees life as a perpetual terror of what might happen and a perpetual investigation of what has.”

via Not every adult is a paedophile, a terrorist or a mass murderer | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian.

“But how useful is that profile, really? The police already had Calabro on their list of suspects: if you’re looking for the person who killed and mutilated someone on the roof, you don’t really need a profiler to tell you to check out the dishevelled, mentally ill guy living with his father on the fourth floor.”

from gladwell dot com – dangerous minds.

I saw Chris Carter talk (all too briefly, unfortunately) about serial killers at CrimeFest. He made the observation that it was almost impossible to predict in advance if someone would become a killer, and that analysis of their background was really only useful to explain their actions in hindsight. Not quite the same thing, I know, but it made me think of the article above. For the umpteenth time.

“It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.”

Burkas and Birkins by Lindy West – Film – The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper.

“We cannot feel anger at this man who was detained yesterday, for we no longer know who he is. He may be married. He may be a father. He may have a job. He may be kind and considerate. He may be rotten and deceitful. He may have shoplifted. He may have sold drugs. It does not matter, for we are not interested in him; we are interested in the little boy who terrified us with his malice all those years ago, and we do not want to let that shudder evaporate and lose its power.”

Jon Venables is no longer the guilty boy who killed James Bulger – Telegraph.