Taylor Hawes | Identifying the faces of crime

Earlier this summer and earlier this month, two pretty girls were acquitted of accusations of very ugly crimes. If you haven’t heard anything about the murder trials of Casey Anthony and Amanda Knox, you must not have read or watched the news at all for the past year. We’ve all heard about these famous cases ad nauseam, thanks to the incredibly heavy media saturation both of these trials have enjoyed here and abroad. We all know that Anthony was accused of murdering her toddler in cold blood and was found not guilty — to the astonishment and often outrage of the American public. And a few weeks ago, Amanda Knox was released from an Italian prison, her 2009 conviction for the murder of her roommate having been reversed by an Italian appellate court.

These cases have been the stuff dreams are made of for American media, and the public has responded predictably — soaking up every detail available, anxiously awaiting verdicts and forming firm and definite opinions of guilt or innocence. Nearly everyone you talk to will have an opinion of whether or not these two women are guilty, but the greater question to ask here is: why do we care?

Certainly, these cases are sensational and riveting in that macabre way that is both repulsive and fascinating all at once. For whatever reason, people love to hear about horrific crimes, the bloodier the better. But, sadly, there are horrific crimes being committed everywhere, all the time. In Philadelphia, we don’t have to look very far to satisfy our media bloodlust — there have been nearly 300 homicides in this city in 2011; that’s nearly a killing a day. Nearby Montgomery County is currently processing the trial of a man accused of killing and sexually assaulting his 9-year-old neighbor. This past summer in South Jersey, five juveniles were allegedly kidnapped, physically assaulted and terrorized by several men.

All of these cases were very tragic and very frightening. They’ve achieved infamy in their respective communities, but none of them have enjoyed the media circus that has encapsulated the Anthony and Knox affairs for so long. So what was it about these two cases in particular that had the power to enthrall the entire world for months and months?

These two trials in particular had a common characteristic that the aforementioned all lack — the defendants were two seemingly normal, attractive, all-American-looking young women. For a number of reasons, these women’s physical appearance and their connection to violent crime has managed to completely engross the media and the American public as a whole.

Pretty women who are accused perpetrators of violent crime almost always receive more than their fair share of media attention. Why? For one thing, there is an unspoken expectation of the average violent offender: he is middle-aged, of lower socioeconomic standing, often a minority and, most importantly, he is a he. Women are not expected to commit violent crime, due to expectations that reach back to both to a pre-feminist era and basic biological limitations of the female body. For silly, outdated and illogical reasons, it often surprises people to think of a woman as a killer.

If women in general are thought of as being harmless, pretty women are doubly branded with this label. Attractiveness is often closely associated with innocence; it boggles the mind to view attractive people as criminals.

Closely related to the media’s love affair with the atypical offender is the so-called “missing pretty girl syndrome,” a phenomenon that criticizes the amount of media attention lavished on the missing person cases in which the victim is a young, attractive and usually white female. Media critics have argued that the TV news stations and newspapers pick and choose what tragedies to promote based upon unfair factors. Media proponents counter that they are only choosing the stories they think viewers will most relate to.

The media proponents make a good point: people are interested in what they understand. They can relate to a young single mother or an American study-abroad student, much more so than to a hardened killer, which makes the crimes that the former are accused of seem increasingly horrifying.

But we do ourselves a great disservice by encouraging media practices that contribute to this creation of the typical offender profile. Crime is a phenomenon that touches every walk of life. It doesn’t know gender or age or race or creed — and neither should our local news station.

Taylor Hawes is a College junior from Philadelphia. Her email address is tayhawes@sas.upenn.edu. Tattle-Taylor appears every other Friday.

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