Note: This was a course assignment for Death and the Maiden
I will confess upfront that I am a devotee of crime shows. I watch NCIS, FBI, and the Law and Orders. I’ve also been known to binge watch Cold Case and other shows during the summer when there are no new episodes of my favorite shows. I listen to true crime podcasts when I’m driving. As a feminist, I was surprised by the suggestion that crime shows were misogonystic and took away women’s voices by portraying them as silent and that they portrayed a form of gendered violence meant to erase women (Dillman, 2014, pp. 1-3). While I did not formally tally deaths of men versus women on crime TV, I’ve never really noticed a bias towards dead women on the shows I watch as one week it’s a dead man, then a dead woman, then a kid, then a man again, etc. However, the truth is that fictional crime shows are more likely to portray women as victims, according to a study of fictional crime dramas from 2010 to 2013. The study also found that White women were at greater risk of being fictionally murdered on TV than Black women, White men, or Black men (Parrott & Parrott, 2015). While dead White women may sell TV shows, in the real world, White women are murdered significantly less often than other demographics. According to true crime statistics for 2020, Black men represent 47% of all murder victims followed by White men (29%), White women (11%), and Black women (8%) with other races representing the remaining 11% (Statista, 2020).
I concede the point that dead girls are over represented on crime shows and that there are crime shows, those that Bolin calls “Dead Girl Shows” that solely focus on the murder of a young pretty white girls (Bolin, 2018). However, I disagree with the Dillman’s sentiment that women are only portrayed as negligible objects that turn up dead (Dillman, 2014). There are a number of female crime shows, even in the early 2000’s, that had strong female characters. Lilly Rush from Cold Case is smart, funny, and intrepid. She is respected by her male peers and she is often the one who solves the crime. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which is one of the shows that Dillman studied, also has strong female characters in Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle who are both experts at what they do. Then there is the queen of female crime solvers: Olivia Benson. Benson has been a lead character in Law and Order: SVU for over 20 years and has risen through the ranks from rookie detective to Captain. Although Dillman concedes that there are competent female characters on crime shows, she contends that producers don’t link a strong woman to the larger picture of feminism . However, what she fails to point out is that crime shows in the early 2000s that depicted any kind of strong female character were ahead of reality as as women were rare in law enforcement in the early 2000s. In 2007, the percentage of women in local law enforcement ranged from less than 3% in small police departments to just over 15% in larger police departments (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010). Even today, women represent only 12% of law enforcement officers and just 3% of leadership (Corley, 2022).
Dillman also asserted that even though CSI (one of the shows she chose to analyze) showed the deaths of both men and women, the deaths of women were depicted differently than men as their deaths were about power relationships (Dillman, 2014). Dillman is correct that women being murdered is often about power and relationships, but this is not a creation of writers, but a mirror of reality. Although women are killed less frequently than men, when they are killed it is more likely to be by someone they are involved with as over half of female homicide victims in the US were killed by a current or former intimate partner (Centers for Diease Control and Prevention, 2021). Women are also targeted by involuntary celibates or Incels who misogynistically target women because of their own lack of relationships (BBC, 2018). As Bolin pointed out, the motivating force for both domestic abusers and mass killers, such as Elliot Rogers an Incel who murdered six women (BBC, 2018), is a belief that they are victims who have been wronged by others (Bolin, 2018).
One point that Dillman failed to mention is that, at least in the true crime genre, the stories profiled are most often those of pretty white women and girls like Natalie Holloway, Lacey Peterson, and Jon-Bonet Ramsey. In death, the dead white girl is the perfect victim, the “highest sacrifice” and the “virgin martyr (Bolin, 2018). There is even a name for the trend of news and true crime shows to disproportionality cover the stories of missing white women and girls: “Missing White Woman Syndrome (MWWS)” (Datz, 2021). Unfortunately, while the impact of showcasing dead white women on fictionalized crime stories may be minimal, MWWS has real world consequences as the less coverage that a missing person story has, the less likely it is that the person will be found. And although Dillman speculated the reason for more female victims on TV crime shows was because men liked to portray women as disposable, one lawyer has speculated that the root cause of MWWS is financial as coverage of missing white women brings more viewers and more profits (Miranda, 2021).
Unfortunately for women, the power differential between men and women still exists in death where women are victims, our bodies continuing to be exploited even after we are no longer breathing.
References
BBC. (2018, April 26). Elliot Rodger: How misogynist killer became ‘incel hero’. Retrieved from BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43892189
Bolin, A. (2018). Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession. New York: William Morrow.
Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2010, June). Women in Law Enforcement. Retrieved from Bureau of Justice Statistics: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/wle8708.pdf
Casey, K. (n.d.). Why we’re fascinated by crime. Retrieved from Boston Globe: https://apps.bostonglobe.com/true-crime/fascinated/
Centers for Diease Control and Prevention. (2021, November 2). Fast Facts: Preventing Intimate Partner Violence. Retrieved from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/fastfact.html#:~:text=IPV%20can%20also%20result%20in,or%20former%20male%20intimate%20partner.
Corley, C. (2022, July 31). Increasing women police recruits to 30% could help change departments’ culture. Retrieved from NPR: https://www.npr.org/2022/07/31/1111714807/increasing-women-police-recruits-to-30-could-help-change-departments-culture#:~:text=Women%20make%20up%20just%2012,and%203%25%20of%20police%20leadership.
Datz, L. (2021, September 23). The Real Causes of “Missing White Woman Syndrome”. Retrieved from Syracuse University: News: https://news.syr.edu/blog/2021/09/23/the-real-causes-of-missing-white-woman-syndrome/
Dillman, J. C. (2014). Women and Death in Film, Television, and News: Dead but Not Gone. New York: Springer.
Foltyn, J. L. (2008). Dead famous and dead sexy: Popular culture,. Mortality, 153-173.
Miranda, A. (2021, Noveber 29). Missing White Woman Syndrome. Retrieved from UMKC Women’s Center: https://info.umkc.edu/womenc/2021/11/29/missing-white-woman-syndrome/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CMissing%20White%20Woman%20Syndrome%3A%20a,involving%20missing%20people%20of%20color.%E2%80%9D
Parrott, S., & Parrott, C. T. (2015). U.S. Television’s “Mean World” for White Women: The Portrayal of Gender and Race on Fictional Crime Dramas. Sex Roles, 70-82.
Statista. (2020). Number of murder victims in the United States in 2020, by race/ethnicity and gender. Retrieved from Stastista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/
Tercier, J. (2013). Chapter 11: The Pornography of Death. In H. Maes, Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography (pp. 221-235). London: Palgrave Macmillan.