"NURSE STRANGLED" screamed the Express headline above a full-page cover picture of a pretty woman with rouge lipstick matching her hair, halffrowning, half-pouting, sitting in the passenger seat of a car. A selfie profile pic gleaned from Facebook. The fact that the woman was found dead in a car made it a strange choice of image to use.
Identified only as "nurse," the headline stripped Jayanti Dubay-Ramrattan of identity and personhood. As well as being a murder victim, the headline endeavoured to make her a news commodity too. Sell, sell, sell. It was an unflinching, unmissable front page. For the victim's family, with no say in the editorial decision, it must have been difficult to stomach. "BUTCHERED" ran Newsday's one-word summation of the same article. Inappropriate not just because it dehumanised the 32-year-old mom from Barrackpore–butchery is what happens to dead animals–but because it was factually incorrect. She was beaten and strangled, not cut up.
One assumes the headline writers weighed up the pros and cons of "butchered" vs "strangled" before making the call. On the same cover a second headline about another murder declared, "Student, 21, foetus killed in beating." Grammatically incorrect but impressively managing to cram the words foetus, student and killed into one garbled word spew.
Not wanting to be left out of the murder thesaurus game, the Guardian, a few days later, used "MOM SLAIN OUTSIDE DAYCARE." The word "slain" evoking images of King Arthur's knights of the round table or a dragon run through with a sword. The mother from Couva had in fact been shot.
On C News Live, meanwhile, the student/foetus/ killing story was read out deadpan by the news reporter who described how, "Her slightly decomposed body was found and her six-month-old foetus still in the birth canal."
I wonder who wrote that one and whether the writer will ever have cause to write "birth canal," again in his/her journalistic career. Perhaps he or she will get a job at Midwifery Today magazine.
I wonder if the family of Loumeelia Goumel needed the whole country to know that the 21-year-old's body had "spontaneously aborted" her baby while traumatised? I wonder if we, the readers, could have been spared that level of detail. Detail which, I think, ought only to be the business of detectives, morticians, coroners, a judge and jury and of course the family–if they decide they want to know.
It seems strange that such graphic, awful imagery would be put out in the public domain. Stranger still that the public would consume it. But they do. I'm not trying to unduly knock headline writers, it's not easy finding different ways to say murder. And I'm not knocking crime reporters, it's not a job I would relish doing. Detaching oneself emotionally and writing clinically about murder is a difficult skill. The other day I overheard a crime reporter ring somebody up, presumably a police source, and casually and politely asked, if he/she had heard anything about the toddler who had choked to death eating jello. But the media must take their share of the responsibility for the country's reaction to crime. Media have the power to create hysteria or calm. To invoke respect for the dead or cheapen a life.
When the six-year-old girl, Keyana Cumberbatch, was killed we did not need to know that she had been sexually assaulted after her death or that, as the pathologist put it, "'The trauma to her skull was so extensive that all the tissue which connect bones of the skull were open. Her skull actually was cracked in half." Tuesday's murder of a woman in Couva did not need to carry the detail of her being bound, gagged and her throat slit. It serves no purpose except fuelling a taste for morbidity and even bloodlust in a society where killing fills our popular culture, from CSI to Game of Thrones to The Killing to Saw to City of God. Normalising violence, popularising it, is not okay.
Arguably it serves as incitement or encouragement for potential murderers or rapists to act on their impulses. We know what sells: Sex and violence, rape and murder. If the public can get both at the same time, a package deal, even better. But the media must recognise the boundary between murder as entertainment (TV shows) and murder in real life. Juries need horrific details, readers don't. Occasionally, when a case is so bad, there is no getting away from it. Like the murdered toddler Jamie Bulger in 1993. In one of the most infamous cases in British history the two-year-old was led away from a shopping centre in Liverpool by two ten-year-old boys.
Taken for over two miles past countless eyewitnesses, who assumed them to be siblings, until they reached a railway track where they bludgeoned the boy to death with fists, kicks, bricks and an iron bar before partially burying his body which was later sliced in half by a train.
That was a momentous event. But not every murder makes the news in Britain as it seems to here. In fact, very few do. Only the exceptional cases and those where the police and family have agreed that publicising the case will help the investigation. More often than not families want to grieve in private. Lawyers send letters to all media organisations requesting privacy. Breaching these requests, in the current UK media climate, would be unthinkable.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that another criticism of the gory murder coverage by the media in T&T would be this: There is simply too much of it.
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