"This is our life, we are not characters": Non fictional True crime as an industrial appropiation of victim stories for entertainment purposes

• In Event: Contemporary Challenges in Victimization and Justice Responses

Abstract

Who owns victims stories? What civic or moral control do victims have over narratives of violence, pain and loss personally suffered? To what extent does the modern info-tainment craze concerning non fictional True crime might become True crime re-victimization? Such being the case, the plundering of victim stories for the purposes of mass entertainment productions can be seen as a direct interfering in the post-traumatic coping, just when the victim struggles to regain control of her broken narratives.

This study is not intended to encourage any form of victimological censorship, nor to block creative and production rights We are fully aware that these series can eventually favour victims interests (as the reopening of cold cases), remove judicial errors or to operate as a powerful resource of primary victimological prevention. But there remains the problem of true crime impacting on victims and survivors who openly reject the public re-enactment of a story strongly stylized for entertainment purposes; who resist the media appropriation of their identities and self-accounts only to become a viralized object of fun&speculation.
Even beyond the vigilantism of websleuths or the right of the inmates to integration, at stake by the revival of a case after years in prison, there rest victimologycal concerns enough. This research is inspired by the pains of P. Ramírez, a brave Spanish co-victim, mother of a murdered child (2018), who has raised before Parliament her demand for dignity and private aftermath against a company determined to reenact her trauma by means of a true crime production. Is there no place or norm for victims alike to preserve themselves and their own narratives from being crushed by such a powerfull and inhuman ludosphere?.

Author

• Myriam Herrera Moreno, Faculty of Law, University of Sevilla