And Another, And Another

The BBC has a story on their website about charges being filed against a young Florida man who has been accused of sexually assaulting and killing his stepsister during a family cruise vacation. The story is on the News homepage, one doesn't have to go to the "US & Canada" page to find it. In fact, it's more prominent on the News page.

On the one hand, I get it. The public likes these sorts of stories. They generate clicks, and thus, advertising revenue. But on the other hand, they don't seem to generate much else. The BBC, and other news organizations are willing to take on the stories of people who advocate for an end to violence against women, but tends to treat the individual stories about the violence as a form of salacious entertainment.

For my part, I am much more interested in the stepbrother. Or, I will be, once he's been found guilty. Because until then, it's not really worthwhile to ask him about the why of it all. And the why of it all is the important piece. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what causes violence against women, many of them woefully uninformed. But maybe that's to be expected in an environment where lurid stories are seen as newsworthy, but actionable, or perhaps simply explanatory information is too boring to post.

It's understood that people care about this. There's no shortage of anguished, or even outraged, essays about the subject on the internet. Families of the murdered can be heartbreakingly eloquent about the events that took their loved ones away from them. But if there's any broader response at all, it tends to be the same one that all crime that bothers people gets: Put more police officers on the streets, as if deputizing enough of the population will convince people to stay on the straight and narrow. But I'm not sure that any number of police officers would have been enough to stop a young man from murdering his stepsister and hiding her body under a bed.

Of course, part of the problem could be the blame game, and the need to expand the circle of responsibility beyond the perpetrator. That, along with familial loyalty, actively disincentivizes people from pointing out, or even seeing, potential warning signs. But that presumes that they actually know what to look for; and what to do if they saw it.

And that strikes me as the problem with crime news as a form of entertainment, something to be put in front of people around the world, to aid in their daily doomscroll. Crime has causes over and above the people who commit the individual crimes. It's unrealistic to presume that we could know them all, but I would be unsurprised to learn that there's more information out there than the general public has access to. And I fully expect that some amount of it could be very useful.

I live in the suburbs of Seattle. While there have been some really nice sunny stretches here and there, the Puget Sound region is still in the midst of the rainy season, which doesn't "officially" end until the beginning of July. Lots of people around here have at least a passing familiarity with Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the things that go along with it. Understanding how that fits into how crime manifests itself around here could be really helpful in curbing it; as much as it can be curbed in a reasonably dense urban/suburban area.

There's a distinct tendency to shy away from potential genetic causes of crime, and that makes perfect sense; the common reaction is to declare such people irredeemably broken from the start, and simply lock them away, so that everyone else need not be bothered with them. And that's another part of the problem. A person who confesses to wishing to harm themselves is seen as deserving of compassion and aid, while a person who confesses to wishing to harm another is simply a threat. But preventing harm is preventing harm... why does the source matter? And stigmatizing people who come forward to admit that they're having difficulties keeping themselves in check simply makes it less likely that people will come forward.

In the end, the fact that the sparse details of Anna Kepner's death are more interesting, and thus more useful to news organizations, than what steps might be taken to prevent the next death is simply another example of the perverse incentives that pervade human existence. Or maybe the issue is that they pervade human nature, as well.