Week 4: Victims and Villains - ACR204 Study Notes
Introduction to Crime, Media, and Justice: Victims and Villains
Course Context: This material is from Week 4 of the course ACR 204, Crime, Media and Justice. The focus shifts from the general process of creating news stories to the specific characters that populate those narratives.
The News Editor’s Perspective: To understand modern crime media, one must adopt the perspective of a "ruthless news editor." News is a business designed to capture attention ("grab eyeballs") to sell advertising or, in the case of state-funded media like the ABC and SBS, to justify taxpayer funding.
The Importance of Characters: Every compelling crime story requires specific character types. While the crime itself must often be violent, grotesque, or visually arresting, the narrative relies on two principal archetypes: Victims and Villains.
Content Warning: Note that the following discussions involve high-profile cases of sexual assault and homicide.
The Westworld Analogy: Fictional Archetypes in Reality
Fictional Parallel: The TV show Westworld (and role-playing games like Grand Theft Auto or Dungeons and Dragons) illustrates how certain characters are mobilized to capture attention.
Non-Player Characters (NPCs): In gaming and fiction, NPCs often serve as hooks for the player. These sympathetic characters share specific traits to maximize motivation:
The lost or sick child.
The elderly person in need of medicine.
A sexually attractive person being terrorized.
Archetypal Villains: Parallel to sympathetic victims, fiction uses specific criminal archetypes to arouse fear and disgust:
The articulate, malevolent British villain (e.g., Anthony Hopkins as a Hannibal Lecter type).
Suspect racial or ethnic minorities.
Individuals with physical deformities, facial scarring, or tattoos (e.g., classic Bond villains).
The "privileged white boy" or "frat boy" archetype, often used in sex offense narratives.
The Theory of the Ideal Victim (Niels Christie)
Niels Christie (1980s): A criminologist who identified consistencies in how victims are presented in crime media. His theory of the "Ideal Victim" describes the person most likely to be ascribed the label of "victim" and receive public sympathy.
Key Characteristics of the Ideal Victim:
Weakness: Relative to the offender, the victim should be weak (female, ill, disabled, or at the extremes of age—very young children or the very frail elderly).
Virtue: The victim must be engaged in respectable, legal, or virtuous activity at the time of the crime (e.g., returning from a charity event).
Stranger Danger: The crime should be a random act committed by an offender unknown to the victim.
Resistance: The victim must struggle unsuccessfully against the offender (they should put up a fight, but not actually win).
Power Balance: The victim must be powerful enough to bring the crime to police attention but not so powerful as to appear threatening themselves.
Example Comparison:
Scenario A: An elderly woman returning from a charity drive is robbed by "methed-up drug addicts." This is a highly newsworthy "ideal victim" story.
Scenario B: The same woman is robbed while returning from her illegal brothel with cash from trafficked sex workers. Her involvement in illegal activity dilutes her status as an "ideal victim" and reduces media interest.
Case Study: Madeleine McCann
Overview: A young English girl who went missing in Portugal in . Decades later, she remains a massive global news story.
Attributes of an Ideal Victim:
Age: She was only years old (extreme of age).
Blamelessness: She was sleeping in a holiday house.
Demographics: She was white, blonde, and highly photogenic.
Parents: Her parents were married, professional, articulate, and photogenic. Their "performance" of grief was deemed appropriate by media standards (unlike Lindy Chamberlain, who was wrongly suspected because she did not appear "sufficiently distressed").
Media Exploitation: News of the World offered a reward for her. The lecturer notes this was not out of altruism, but because she was "gold" for selling newspapers.
The Ideal Offender and the Great Filter
Mirror Image: The ideal offender is the inverse of the ideal victim:
Strong, powerful, and threatening.
Male in the prime of his physical life.
From a "suspect community" or stigmatized racial/ethnic minority.
Engaged in an immoral lifestyle and showing no remorse.
The Great Filter: This process determines which stories make the news. Stories involving ideal victims/offenders (violent street crimes) pass through the filter, while environmental crimes, cybercrimes, or white-collar crimes—which lack these character types—are often filtered out.
Discrepancies Between Media and Reality
Statistical Reality: In assault cases, the demographic most likely to be both victim and offender is young men aged . However, this is rarely reported because it lacks the "ideal victim" narrative power.
Victim-Offender Overlap: Media often presents a false dichotomy between victims and villains. In reality, one of the most powerful predictors of offending behavior is past experience of victimization (e.g., people in women's prisons often have serious histories of victimization).
The Case of Dylan Volo (Dondale Youth Detention Facility): A prolific offender (non-ideal victim) who was brutalized by guards. Despite his background, the severity of the footage (being stripped naked and assaulted by MMA-trained guards) prompted a Royal Commission ordered by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Historical Shifts in Media Reporting
19th Century: Crime was reported as background to broader social debates about poor living conditions and slum life (e.g., coverage in The Times). Social causes were highlighted by authors like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens.
Post-World War II/Tabloid Era: The move from broadsheets to tabloids simplified crime reporting. Editors focused on gore, sensation, and individualization rather than social causes. This era solidified the over-representation of ideal victims.
Undeserving Victims and the Hierarchy of Victimization
Undeserving Victims: Certain characteristics "poison" a story for news editors, placing these victims at the bottom of the hierarchy:
People with a history of offending.
Homeless individuals and drug users.
Sex workers (victim-blaming discourses often suggest they invite risk).
Prisoners (crimes in high-security facilities are often ignored by the public).
Ethnic minorities and men (especially in sexual assault reporting).
Hierarchy: The closer a victim is to the Madeleine McCann archetype, the higher they are in the hierarchy; the more they overlap with "baddie" traits, the lower they sit.
Secondary Victimization by the Media
Definition: When the media causes additional harm to victims or their families in the pursuit of a story.
Case Study: Chung So (Virginia Tech Shooter): His family released a dignified statement expressing grief, yet they were subjected to intense media harassment and public hate.
Case Study: Millie Dowler: A -year-old English girl murdered by a serial killer. News of the World hired hackers to access her personal voicemail messages while she was missing, giving her parents false hope that she was still alive. This scandal eventually led Rupert Murdoch to shut down the paper and fire all staff.
Signal Disorders and Signal Crimes
Signal Disorders: Environmental indicators of a lack of safety, such as broken windows, graffiti, abandoned cars, lack of lighting, or groups of young men loitering. These are behaviors or signs that are not necessarily criminal but change how safe a person feels.
Personal Anecdote: The lecturer describes the Tenderloin district in San Francisco as having extreme signal disorders (mass homelessness, public drug use), which made him feel less safe than when he was doing PhD fieldwork in Johannesburg shantytowns.
Signal Crimes: Significant criminal events that signal a shift in safety and perceived risk for the general public.
Examples in Melbourne: The rape and murder cases of Gill Ma and Euride Stickson.
Impact: Both victims were "ideal victims" (young, photogenic, blameless). Their deaths sparked mass candlelight vigils (e.g., Princess Park) and prompted tangible law changes, such as the tightening of parole laws in Victoria following the Gill Ma case (committed by Adrienne Bailey while on parole).
Summary of Main Points
Media filters crime through characters: Ideal Victims vs. Ideal Offenders.
This leads to a false societal impression of who is most at risk ( year-olds are the most likely victims/offenders, not the elderly).
Hierarchies of victimization determine who receives sympathy and who is ignored.
Signal crimes transcend simple media exploitation to affect public policy and collective feelings of safety.