Gawker recently reported that C.J., the young boy accused of murdering his whole family on Staten Island, had been acquitted posthumously, but not in time to stop a media frenzy surrounding this boy’s “life of rage” etc. Now, of course, everyone wants to know why everyone was so quick to blame the son, even though he’d had his throat cut like his two siblings. One of the comments struck me as particularly concise and perspicacious:
It is S.O.P. to blame the closest male when there is a murder suicide. You can always tell who did the killing in one of these cases. If the news says “Monster kills family and takes coward’s way out” it was the dude, if they say “couple killed in apparent murder-suicide” it was the woman.
This implicit bias (or differential emphasis, if you prefer) made me think of a story I read on Friday in the Danish centre-right newspaper Berlingske Tidende which reported that one in six young women have some kind of weapon in their handbag when they go out at night in Copenhagen. The story was picked up by Politiken and all the other major newspapers and completely dominated the evening news on television. Now, It’s not long since politicians in Denmark instigated a new policy regarding the possession of weapons on the streets of Copenhagen. Provoked by an alleged increase in gang violence, special control zones were set up, where anyone was subject to random search by the police, who, if they found a weapon on you, were entitled to send you to prison on the spot for up to one year, no questions asked. The press coverage of these new measures tended, as it so often does, to focus on the danger to ordinary Danish citizens posed by “unassimilated” young immigrants, who were cited as the prime reason for the recent upsurge in gang violence in the Copenhagen metropolitan area.
This new system of control zones has largely been a failure. By all accounts, there are still just as many knives, guns, and other weapons circulating in the Copenhagen nightlife as before, since the ones with the weapons also knew where the control zones were and thus simply avoided them from then on. I suppose you could see it another way, namely that the fact that these dangerous elements are now avoiding the spots designated as requiring special police control is a positive development, but the fact of the matter is that violent crime has simply been pushed to the outskirts of these zones.
All in all, the debate surrounding the increasing number of people armed with knives, etc. in the Copenhagen nightlife, was about how dangerous this was for ordinary unsuspecting citizens and how it should be criminalised and strictly enforced. All of which is fair enough: it is a dangerous and lamentable trend. But at no point in all of the coverage of the 1-in-6-women-are-armed story did anyone (that I could see) draw any parallels between this story and the recent crackdown on weapons in Copenhagen. Not even to suggest, say, that one reason for this is that women are afraid of the number of knives and guns that these gang-members are bringing into the night. Nor was there ever any mention of the fact that any women found carrying a Taser or a knife could go to prison for up to a year.
I’m not saying that’s even the point. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the dangerous elements that the new law was meant to prevent are not these same girls who feel they need to protect themselves when they go out. All I’m saying is that there are some fundamental assumptions at work here that affect the way these two armed groups are perceived and represented, when these two things are by no means unrelated.
0 comments:
Post a Comment