Survivors of Violent Crime and Interactions with the Media

Posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021

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Client	Victims and survivors of violent crime, journalists and reporters, and victim service providers
Professor(s)	Dr. Benjamin Roebuck, Diana McGlinchey
Program	Victimology
Students	Amy Boileau and Katherine Thompson

Project Description:

In the era of the 24-hour news cycle, the availability of media without boundaries, the impact of social media, and the rise of the true crime industry, it often feels like the media hyper-focuses on violent crimes. Although many of us indulge in some form of crime media consumption, we don’t often consider how it feels to be the subject matter of the reports.

Our project, Victims and Survivors of Violent Crime and Interactions with the Media, was inspired by responses from a larger study on Violence and Resilience. The study heard from 435 victims and survivors of violent crime, 88 of whom talked about their experiences with the media. These responses prompted further investigation into interactions between survivors of violent crime and the media, which is what inspired our research project.

We qualitatively analyzed the experiences of these participants and found that the majority of participants noted additional distress from their interactions with the media. This distress was largely caused by victims and survivors’ lack of knowledge of their rights when dealing with the media, reporters’ lack of respect and compassion for victims and survivors, loss of privacy, and misreported information.

As victimology graduates, we have learned that loss of control is often experienced among victims and survivors of crime, both during and following victimization. This notion was reinforced through our research, which found that victims and survivors felt a loss of control in their experiences with the media. For example, one participant stated “The media painted my dad as a violent, controlling man… They never stop and think about how these “stories” are impacting the family left behind. The victims who had no control over the situation and now have to suffer the residual negative impact…”.

Many participants noted that there is an increasing need for education among media personnel, specifically with regard to how their words and actions can affect victims and survivors. We aim to contribute to the literature through our research by:

a) Establishing a need for trauma-informed training and victim-oriented reporting among journalists to help minimize potential harms to victims and survivors in their interactions with the media.

b) Establishing a need for greater education about the media for victims and survivors, specifically to be delivered by victim service providers. This way, victims and survivors will be provided with the support and information necessary to make informed decisions when navigating their interactions with the media.

To construct our research project, we learned how to search journal databases to gather academic literature about victims and survivors and the media. Currently, we are drafting and revising our research paper in hopes of submitting our work to a peer-reviewed journal in the fall of 2021. We have multiple clients for our project: victims and survivors of violent crime; journalists and reporters; and victim service providers.

Thus far, our team has used critical thinking and teamwork skills to overcome challenges and meet the needs of our clients. While drafting our paper, we had to ensure that we were using a trauma-informed approach with regard to our terminology and maintaining the confidentiality of our participants. Our team was able to overcome this challenge by collaborating with one another and consulting our supervisors and other literature to use inclusive and non-objectifying language in our project.

Many participants noted negative experiences with the media in their responses, which posed a challenge to us as we did not want to discourage victims and survivors from interacting with the media, nor did we want to portray the media as solely negative to our clients. We overcame this by including the benefits of media coverage for victims and survivors as well as ways media personnel have assisted victims find their voice and regain control over their narrative.

We’re incredibly proud of the progress our team has made thus far and are excited to be sharing our research project. We look forward to finalizing our paper and publishing our findings later on this year.