Following #JillMeagher: Collective meaning-making in response to crime events via social media

Introduction: The murder of Jill Meagher by Adrian Bayley

On Friday 21 September 2012, Jill Meagher was recorded by CCTV cameras at around 5pm as she walked out of the ABC studios in Southbank, Melbourne with a female co-worker. Two and a half hours later, Adrian Bayley was recorded by cameras as he entered the Quiet Man Hotel in Flemington, Melbourne with his then girlfriend. Each party would make their way to several different venues throughout the evening, before both ending up along Sydney Road in Brunswick (a suburb in Melbourne) at around 1.30am on Saturday morning; Meagher as she left Bar Etiquette and Bayley as he was reportedly kicked out of a taxi for being too drunk (R v Bayley, 2013). Declining to share a taxi with a male co-worker as she ‘lived only five minutes’ walk away’, Meagher proceeded to walk along Sydney Road whilst phoning her brother in Western Australia to speak about their father’s declining health. At 1.35am, the call was disconnected due to bad reception. Three minutes later, Meagher and Bayley were recorded, again by CCTV footage, as they walked past the Duchess Boutique bridal store at 517 Sydney Road. While they did not walk together, there was some engagement in communication, with Bayley later confirming that he had approached Meagher regarding her upset appearance (R v Bayley, 2013). Bayley, in a blue hooded jumper, exited the view of this CCTV camera first. Meagher, appearing to hesitate, closely followed. In this moment, Bayley became the last known person to speak with Meagher.

While much is now known regarding the events of the night that Jill Meagher was sexually assaulted and murdered by Adrian Bayley, at the time details were scant, as her disappearance escalated into local, national and international news. Meagher’s husband, Tom, initially roamed the streets of Brunswick looking for her when she did not return home and reported her missing to Victoria Police at around 6.00am on Saturday 22 September. The search for Jill Meagher subsequently began. On Sunday 23 September, police placed ‘missing’ posters around Brunswick appealing to the public for any information that might help in the investigation. By 12.30pm on Sunday, the public appeal went digital with a Facebook group titled ‘Help Us Find Jill Meagher’ accumulating 90,000 followers in just four days, while the hashtags #jillmeagher and #meagher were two of the highest trending topics on Twitter across Australia (Ainsworth and Casey, 2012; Milivojevic and McGovern, 2014). On Tuesday 25 September, Victoria Police released CCTV footage depicting Meagher and other pedestrians, including ‘the man in the blue hoodie’ who was singled out as the main person of interest. This footage was subsequently posted and re-shared on social media, and has now been viewed by millions of people across Australia and internationally (Little, 2015). By Thursday 27 September, police would identify and arrest 41-year-old Adrian Ernest Bayley who led them to a site in the far North-West of Melbourne where he had buried Meagher’s body. By Friday 28 September, Bayley appeared before court charged with Meagher’s rape and murder. Finally, on Sunday 30 September, as many as 30,000 Melburnians marched along Sydney Road Brunswick to honour Jill’s memory and to protest violence against women.

The case of Jill Meagher stands out as one of the first crime events with such a large Australian uptake via social media, and one that has continued to capture public interest and collective memory. From the initial report of the suspected crime and throughout the progress of the police investigation, citizens shared personal fears and accounts of ‘near misses’ that they had experienced on the streets of Melbourne; they contributed information and speculation throughout the trial and conviction of the perpetrator; and they engaged in calls for reform to criminal justice policy areas such as parole, violence against women, and CCTV (see Atmore, 2012; Bartels, 2013; Little, 2014; Milivojevic and McGovern, 2014; Thompson and Louise, 2015). Indeed, there is a notable digital turn in criminological theory and research, which seeks in part to understand the nature of citizen participation via social media in response to crime events and justice processes (see for example, Ellis and McGovern, 2016; Fileborn, 2014; Milivojevic and McGovern, 2014; Powell, 2015; Stratton et al., 2017; Thompson et al., 2016). This is indicative of an emerging sub-field which some have identified as a ‘digital criminology’ (Stratton et al., 2017).

Digital communication and social media technologies have arguably transformed the capacity of individual citizens to engage with local crime events as they unfold, as well as actively participate in debates about criminal justice responses and policy reform (Powell, 2014). Such participation is enabled by the ‘many-to-many’ and ‘two-way’ networks of interaction typical of social or ‘new’ media, as opposed to the ‘few-to-many’ and one-way or hierarchical generation of content that defines traditional or ‘old media’ (Yar, 2012; see also Miller, 2011). International research has variously identified that participation via social media networks enables individuals to post eyewitness or ‘citizen journalist’ accounts of local crime events in real-time, such as during the London Riots (Procter et al., 2013) and the Boston Bombings (Sutton et al., 2014); engage in rumour, speculation, information-sharing and ‘digital vigilantism’ (Byrne, 2013); post and re-distribute official police and news media sources of information on crime and justice (Fox and Rose, 2014); distribute misinformation and hoax materials in relation to specific crimes and ongoing police investigations (Cassa et al., 2013); and extend the power of the State by actively contributing to lateral surveillance, as well as open source intelligence gathering by police (Trottier, 2012). Much criminological engagement with social media has focused on the potential for jurors’ use of social media to disrupt the administration of justice through the courts (Bartels and Lee, 2013); the use of social media by law enforcement agencies (Lee and McGovern, 2013); and recently, the potential of social media engagement to interject in the agenda-setting role and conventional crime narratives of mainstream media (Milivojevic and McGovern, 2014).

Rather than taking for granted that social media content represents either a reflection of public opinion, the sharing of information, or factual ‘news’ reporting on crime events, we instead position social media as enabling new techno-social practices of collective narration and meaning-making in response to crime events. Thus for the purposes of this article, we draw on the emerging analytical framework of Narrative Criminology (Presser, 2016; Presser and Sandberg, 2015) in order to understand citizen engagement and re-telling of Jill Meagher’s case as a process of collective storytelling about sexual violence, homicide and violence against women. An understanding of social media discourse as one of several mechanisms through which crime events are collectively rendered meaningful—that is the event’s meaning and implications are interpreted and communicated within the community more broadly—represents a potentially fruitful and currently under-examined avenue for criminological research in a digital society (see also Milivojevic and McGovern, 2014). The remainder of this article is structured as follows. Firstly, we will examine the literature regarding how traditional news media have reported on and constructed sexual assault and femicide. Next, we will provide a description of narrative criminology, and how it has and can be applied in a digital society. Then, we report on the methods undertaken in the current research. Finally, we will present the key findings and further develop our analytical discussion in the context of social media narratives as developing collective storytelling and meaning-making of criminal events.

News media constructions of sexual assault and femicide

While narrative criminology and social media engagement might be relatively new developments, feminist criminologists, and media, cultural studies and other scholars, have long analysed and identified some all too familiar patterns in traditional media reporting on sexual violence and sexual homicide (Greer, 2012; Hurst and White, 1994; Jewkes, 2015). The relationship between news media and crime has been explored extensively (Barak, 1994; Greer, 2007, 2012; Hogg and Brown, 1998; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994), with traditional news media outlets often being used to study how and which criminal events are considered ‘newsworthy’ (Greer, 2012; Jewkes, 2015). Such research has widely acknowledged the influence of media reports on public understandings of crime, in particular noting the ways in which responses to crime are often presented through ‘commonsense’ rhetoric which sensationalises the nature and extent of crime, promotes populist punitive responses, and resists ‘engagement with other, more systematic bodies of knowledge’ that may contradict (Hogg and Brown, 1998: 19). Particularly in regards to high-profile crime cases, media saturation of what is considered to be a ‘real’ crime can skew public considerations of risk in relation to the likelihood of future acts due to the usually atypical nature of these crimes (Cere et al., 2015). For example, one British study found that newspapers were more likely to report on sexual homicides than other, more statistically common homicides, in turn changing public understandings regarding the narrative of homicide (Peelo et al., 2004). Research has also indicated that coverage of certain crime types has a significant role in shaping state policy responses (Hurst and White, 1994; McCombs, 1997; Sayre et al., 2010; Surette 2007). Such impacts reassert the importance of exploring representations of sexual violence through both news and social media.

Not only is the selective coverage of sexual violence attributable to the measure of ‘newsworthiness’ as determined by reporters and media outlets (Armstrong et al., 2016; Naylor, 2001), sources available to news reporters also shape and perpetuate content. Of the few sexual crimes that are reported in the news, most are done so in the later phases of the criminal justice system (e.g. during the court trial or sentencing: Dowler, 2006). This can be problematic as it can misrepresent the likelihood of certain crimes occurring; for example, sexual assaults perpetrated by strangers are more likely to reach trial than those occurring between known persons (Taylor, 2007). In these cases, news media representations of sexual crime become a hybrid between traditional media reporting and legal narrative (Waterhouse-Watson, 2016). Restricted by what is perceived to be credible evidence (admissible in court) and desires to intrigue readers beyond the headlines in a competitive news media environment (Dor, 2003; Rowe, 2013), representations of sexual assault trial cases often present a story that is either sensationalist or unambiguous in the ‘truth’ of the event. News reporting is also influenced by the practices of defence attorneys throughout trials, which seek to destabilise the perceived legitimacy of the victim (Dowler, 2006; Young, 1998). Such crimes become a simplified case of guilt and innocence, in turn affecting how the public respond to and perceive sexual violence and its victims (Waterhouse-Watson, 2016: 5).

Altogether, such influences and news coverage practices contribute to the perpetuation of broad and ongoing myths about sexual and violent crime, as well as victims and their offenders. For example, the ‘real rape’ myth that perpetrators will be violent strangers and victims will have suffered obvious physical injuries is prevalent in media reports of rapes and sexual assaults (Boux and Daum, 2015; Franiuk et al., 2008). As admissible and recorded ‘real time’ evidence through smartphones grows, the perception that sexual crimes will always be obvious in the footage may also increase (Boux and Daum, 2015; Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2016). Victims that align with the ‘real rape’ myth are often portrayed as ‘ideal victims’; their virtuousness, vulnerability and inability to defend themselves are emphasised (Hollander and Rodgers, 2014; Larcombe, 2002). Alternatively, women who do not align with the dominant perception of rape are presented as hysterical, promiscuous, untrustworthy and largely responsible for what has occurred (Easteal et al., 2015; O’Hara, 2012). In both instances, victims are referenced and discursively understood through broader understandings of femininity. The practice of ignoring certain sexual crimes in news media also contributes implicitly to what kind of woman can be a victim (Gekoski et al., 2012). In particular, media fail to take into account the intersection of gender and race for black women’s lives (Jackson, 2013; Moody-Ramirez et al., 2015), or implicitly suggest how certain races cannot be wholly innocent as victims (Strega et al., 2014).

When narrating sexual assault, certain constructions of perpetrators and men are also evident. In cases that are consistent with the ‘real rape myth’, perpetrators are described as deviant and monstrous offenders who are deserving of harsh punitive action (O’Hara, 2012). Such crimes are reported as standalone or exceptional cases, and linked to the individual perpetrator rather than broader patriarchal issues (Harper and Hogue, 2014; Orritt and Harper, 2014). On the other hand, broader social attitudes towards sexual assault are often reconfirmed through desires to protect masculinity. A study of American news media, for instance, found that collective male groups were viewed more sympathetically regarding sexual assault charges due to the cultural significance of their associated educational and/or sporting institutions (Cobos, 2014). Similar coverage has occurred within an Australian context; Australian football is a highly popular national sport and professional players are often defended in news media coverage and guaranteed social immunity due to their embodiment as a culturally significant practice (Waterhouse-Watson, 2009, 2013). This coverage fails to account for the same institutions contributing to negative constructions of the female subject. Alleged perpetrators are addressed in a sympathetic light regarding what futures and freedoms they may ‘lose’ by facing punishment (Gutsche and Salkin, 2016). This representation has an impact on depictions of the victims and their advocates, diminishing empathy and elevating responsibility for the victims to think about the consequences of seeking justice (Harrington, 2016).

News media narratives of sexual and intimate partner homicide reproduce many of these abovementioned themes. Though there have been some minor advancements in discursive representations of intimate partner violence in news media analysis (Gillespie et al., 2013), research continues to illustrate how news media fails to link sexual homicide in the context of intimate partner violence, even when there is documented evidence regarding a history of violence (Gillespie et al., 2013; Richards et al., 2011). Of the intimate partner homicide cases that are covered, victim experiences are often ignored and reported without using domestic violence language (Bullock and Cubert, 2002). Intimate partner homicide is the leading type of homicide where the victim is female, and yet news media fails to ‘report on patterns or causes of violence in the broader context’ (Heeren and Messing, 2009: 208). Individualising the problem reduces perceptions of intimate partner homicide as a public concern, and instead alludes to the victim’s personal responsibility for their death. Indeed, language in news coverage of femicides often directly or indirectly blames the victim; narratives emphasise the choices victims made (including her relationships with other men), while also using language sympathetic to the perpetrator and suggestive of justification for his actions (Taylor, 2009).

Drawing these themes together, the relationship between news media representations of sexual assault and femicide is significant for this article. In both crimes, news media focuses on the atypical crime within its type, often individualising the crime, and blaming the victim (directly and indirectly), while either pathologising or excusing the perpetrator. Even when victims are constructed as innocent, their ideal status is influenced by race, relationship to the offender, physicality of the crime and profile of the offender. Additionally, there is a growing field of literature that suggests victims of sexual crimes are interested in redefining their understanding of achieving justice (e.g. through online forums of solidarity; Fileborn, 2014; Powell, 2015), however, news media narratives continue to perceive justice for sexual crimes through legal and punitive terms. This often linear and harmful construction of sexual crime may therefore be challenged and influenced by social media narratives, which draw on different sources including victims and victim advocates themselves. It is in this context that narrative criminology may assist in framing contemporary representations of such crimes.

Narrative criminology in digital society

Narrative criminology is an emerging sub-field within cultural criminology that more specifically seeks to understand how criminal narratives might inspire or even motivate harmful action, and—of particular relevance to this article—‘how they are used to make sense of harm’ (Presser and Sandberg, 2015: 1). The approach recognises that storytelling is itself socially situated and embedded within larger cultural discourses. In doing so, it also recognises the reflexive relationship between narrative and experience: ‘narratives produce experience even as experience produces narratives’ (Presser and Sandberg, 2015: 4). By studying how narratives are constructed and in many ways constrained by the field in which they are produced (Fleetwood, 2016), the multiplicity of making meaning becomes clearer; an offender may shift their narrative of violence, just as other subjects may shift their focus dependent upon technology, information, agency and structure (Brookman, 2015). It is through this lens that potentially contradictory responses to harm may be understood, for ‘narratives that legitimize the harm feature a protagonist morally licensed to do harm’ (Presser and Sandberg, 2015: 293). While news media has demonstrated itself as ‘developing a narrative derived from fictional crime stories’ through the use of language and terminology ‘directly drawn from fictional crime representations’ (Rowe, 2013: 30), narrative criminology may also illustrate how the criminal justice system itself adheres to narratives. Seeking to ‘impose a particular narrative’ onto victims, offenders and justice (Fleetwood, 2016: 24), these discursive actions demonstrate how ‘culture makes available’ only a finite number of ‘narrative formats’ (Fleetwood, 2016: 7).

To date, narrative criminology is an approach that has largely focused on the self-narratives of offenders (such as through criminal and life history interviewing), though there is an emerging focus on the collective and individual impacts of crime stories that affect policy, law, and practice, such as through the news media (Wright, 2016). Presser and Sandberg, who coined the approach, have also specifically suggested of social media that: ‘the velocity and spectacle of storytelling online may intensify the call of the stories that are told’ (Presser and Sandberg, 2014: 9). While the usual crime news story may ‘largely [be] a spectacle’, this rise of social media and crowd-sourced journalism can work towards producing moral panics as ‘enacted melodramas’, shifting the subject position from ‘empathizing viewer to an anxious actor’, where one can ‘enter the narrative and enact the role of the victim in a conscious way’ (Wright, 2015: 1252). In these instances, collective narratives of harm can be further amplified by the criminal act itself becoming a signal crime. A term developed by Innes, signal crimes describe how highly visible crimes are interpreted as ‘warning signals’ about the risk people might encounter in their lives (Innes, 2004: 336). Thus, signal crimes have the potential to change beliefs and behaviours due to this signalling of the ‘presence of potential risks that circulate in contemporary society’ (Innes, 2004: 351). Capitalising on the sustained interest in these signal crimes, agencies (such as police, news media and state governments) can in turn use the fear induced in order to lobby for policy responses as depoliticised solutions (Dowler et al., 2006).

Such desires to make sense of these ambient insecurities can lead to the emergence of multiple and alternative narrative responses. While news media and criminal justice sources may restrict themselves to normative modes of speech, counter-publics (and subsequently counter-narratives) arise and interact with these hegemonic narratives via social media. With the possibility of hosting ‘genuine debate and discussion about sexual violence’ that challenges individualised or poorly framed constructions of harm, such collective narratives can also arguably enable a critique of the ‘expression of entrenched prejudices’ against victims who meet ‘dubious criteria of ‘newsworthiness’ (Salter, 2013: 237). Using narrative criminology in this article enables an analysis of social media engagement with signal crimes and with news media constructions, ultimately examining how making meaning out of violent crime may be shifted by citizen engagement. By enabling sources to contribute from outside ‘legitimised’ voices within patriarchal structures, the sense-making and narrative of criminal events may be altered.

The current article subsequently seeks to draw on the case study of Jill Meagher and contribute to the following two questions: (i) what role does social media play in the collective narration of crime? And (ii) why might such narratives and collective meaning-making be important, not only in framing past crime events, but also in potentially shaping future behaviour and collective responses to future crime events? (e.g. ‘warning signals’, and ‘signal crimes’).

Methodology

Twitter was selected for this study because, unlike other social media such as Facebook, Twitter is public and the data are thus readily available for analysis by social researchers. Indeed, as an open network, comprising a sparse and non-reciprocal network of followers, Twitter has been likened by some scholars to a ‘digital public agora that promotes the free exchange of opinions and ideas’, becoming the ‘primary space for online citizens to publicly express their reaction to events of national significance’ (Williams and Burnap, 2015: 8). This is not to suggest that Twitter data is without its own limitations including, foremost, that in Australia there is a greater public uptake of Facebook as the preferred social media platform (Sensis, 2015). Nonetheless we suggest that Twitter, and indeed other public social media platforms, provide an important insight into narrative constructions of crime and justice events, while recognising their potential bias and partiality. Indeed, the potential influence of social media narratives is arguably amplified with the growing engagement of mainstream media with social platforms as a source both for generating news stories as well as representing ‘the community’ perspective on events as they unfold (Milivojevic and McGovern, 2014; Powell, 2014). There are also both access and ethical concerns in the collection of data that is not necessarily publicly available, but rather requires immersion in private or quasi-private networks—an issue that criminological researchers are still grappling with (see Milivojevic and McGovern, 2014 for a discussion). Although we have used Twitter data in large part for its public availability, as well as the implied consent that users provide to the re-purposing of their data in signing up to the terms of use of the platform, we have taken an ethical stance of not identifying individual usernames (‘handles’) throughout this article (though we do quote from tweets collected as part of our dataset). This practice of not identifying user handles goes some way to acknowledging that while some information may be publicly available, that does not mean that social researchers should unreflexively reproduce it for the purposes of their research where it is not vital to the purposes of the study itself (see e.g. Clark et al., 2015).

For this study, Twitter data was accessed via an archived data request through third-party provider and cloud-based analysis software DiscoverText. The time parameters for the data request were limited to the first seven days from midnight on 22 September 2012 (encompassing Jill’s disappearance) through to midnight on 1 October (three days after Adrian Bayley was arrested). Search terms comprised the top-trending hashtag and keyword of the case, namely #jillmeagher, as well as additional associated hashtags #justiceforjill, #ripjillmeagher, #adrianbayley and/or #adrianernestbayley. The hashtags were simultaneously entered into the search as keywords, meaning that partial matches (such as ‘meagher’ and ‘bayley’ for instance) were also captured.

Among the benefits of drawing on an archived dataset, as opposed to a live-capture methodology, is that the research team were able to retrospectively identify the most commonly used hashtags that came to represent public engagement with the crime event in question. Moreover, by focusing on the key hashtags (rather than, for example, an analysis of all Australian tweets in the nine-day period that referred to broader terms such as ‘Melbourne’, ‘missing woman’, ‘Brunswick’), potentially extraneous content is limited, reducing the dataset to a manageable size for qualitative analysis. Importantly, the marker and function of the hashtag also indicate that the user intends for their tweet to contribute to a broader conversation, allowing it to be readily searched for and engaged with by other users following the same event (see boyd et al., 2010).

The final study dataset analysed here comprised 20,246 tweets, of which 7108 (35%) are original tweets and 13,138 (65%) are re-tweets. Of the original tweets, 4798 were from unique users. DiscoverText was used to visualise daily spikes in the Twitter data, which were compared with a timeline of publicly available information about the case as reported in the mainstream media. This revealed key periods of public engagement via Twitter by users following the crime in real time (Stratton et al., 2017). Additionally, DiscoverText enables generation of an interactive word cloud (e.g. 150 most common keywords in the dataset) that facilitates exploration of sub-sets of tweets pertaining to those keywords. A word cloud generated using the 150 most common keywords among the 7108 original tweets in the dataset is reproduced in Figure 1.

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Figure 1.

Word cloud: 150 most common keywords.

The initial analysis was informed by a combination of the word cloud and the distribution of original tweets over time in relation to key moments in the crime as it unfolded. However, it was foremost based on the manual thematic coding of the original tweets. Qualitative thematic analysis is considered to be an effective way of capturing and describing important concepts within a dataset (Given, 2008). The first two authors read all original tweets, and subsequently categorised them according to emerging patterns, resulting in six overarching themes. Following thematic coding, analysis then focused on both the chronology of the themes across the tweets over time (as compared with the key moments in the crime), as well as the highest volume themes at key times. The result of this additional stage of the analysis was to further unpack the dominant story being produced and reproduced by users engaging with the crime event. In the following section the six overarching themes, as well as typical example tweets, are presented as narrative ‘moments’ in the case of Jill Meagher’s disappearance as it unfolded.

Key findings

#Missing: The call to action

The hashtag #JillMeagher began in the afternoon of Sunday 23 September 2012; there were just 27 original tweets on the first day of the public appeal for information about Jill Meagher’s disappearance and 257 tweets overall. The first few tweets using the hashtag #JillMeagher appeared from 3pm on Sunday 23 September. This was just two and a half hours after the Facebook page ‘Help Us Find Jill Meagher’ was created by her friends and family, and just prior to Victoria Police releasing an official statement at 3.15pm calling for anyone with information to contact Crime Stoppers (an Australian organisation that gathers anonymously reported information from community members in order to help police agencies solve crime). The story of a young woman who failed to return home in the early hours of Saturday morning slowly developed. The first few tweets were largely posts by users claiming an acquaintance with Jill and Tom, for example: ‘My mate Tomo’s wife has gone missing in Melbourne–all help appreciated’, with an image of the now iconic missing poster featuring a photograph of Jill. Another tweet says: ‘My friend’s wife Jill Meagher is missing, very worried–if you are in Melbourne please pass this around’, with a link to the Facebook group ‘Help Us Find Jill Meagher’.

An early feature in this story is posts by Jill’s colleagues at ABC Radio. A tweet by ABC radio host Raph Epstein was re-tweeted 98 times: ‘Please help find missing Jill Meagher, an integral part of 774 Melbourne–Victoria Police are appealing for public help’. With the average Twitter user having 208 followers, the post potentially reached over 20,000 users. Indeed, for the first two days of the public search, #Missing and #Help were the dominant messages, with users calling for action to spread the word in case someone held knowledge about the disappearance. In addition to other media personalities joining the call for action, Victoria Police tweeted links to their statement appealing for public help. Other tweets posted links to the first news media articles about the case. Thus, the initial call to action was largely set by family, friends, colleagues and co-workers in the media, as well as official sources such as police and news reports.

At approximately 4pm on Tuesday 25 September, the call to action escalated when Victoria Police released a statement and CCTV footage of Jill walking north along a popular street in Melbourne, as well as several minutes of footage showing a man in a blue hooded jumper. Police urged anyone with information to come forward. #CCTV trended on Twitter, with the vast majority of tweets featuring a call for anyone in the footage, or anyone who saw or knew people in the footage, to come forward. By Wednesday morning at 11.43am, Victoria Police released a further statement again urging other people in the CCTV footage to come forward to give details of what they may have seen on the night of Ms Meagher’s disappearance. The sense of urgency increased, as it was day five of the investigation and police stated that they were very concerned about Jill’s safety. It is at this point on 26 September that Twitter engagement started to intensify, as people re-posted and re-tweeted links to the footage, news reports and the police statement (see Figure 2). Tweets continued to call for people to come forward.

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Figure 2.

Distribution of original tweets as the crime events unfolded.

Discussion: Social media as collective story and meaning-making in response to crime

While this article did not focus on a detailed analysis of narratives produced by mainstream news media in relation to the death of Jill Meagher, there was little in these narratives that strayed from traditional tropes, as discussed earlier in this article. For example, the Herald Sun, a popular tabloid newspaper in Victoria, deployed victim-blaming discourse while Meagher was missing—‘[there are] better spots for a young woman to be walking alone after a night out drinking’ (Rule, 2012: 2)—and populist punitive narratives of justice after her death—‘Justice for Jill’ adorned the front page of their printed paper on Saturday 6 April 2013, the day after Bayley pleaded guilty to the rape and murder of Meagher (Anderson, 2013). The research in this article instead drew on citizen responses to the sexual homicide of Jill Meagher, in order to examine social media as a device for collective storytelling and meaning-making. In doing so, it identified some convergences with and divergences from traditional news media coverage, which continues to document sexual homicide narratives in limited ways rather than engaging in the many-to-many or two-way and fluid stories that Twitter allows for (Yar, 2012).

As demonstrated through the themes above, social media has enabled a new way for citizens to engage with public crime events. These new engagements have produced both amplified and protest responses to the more traditional narratives regarding sexual violence. The effects are therefore multiple, and contribute to a richer conversation concerning law and order. In particular, the first theme (a call to action) highlights how social media provided citizens with agency to actively participate in the justice process as the crime unfolded, while the last theme (a call for change) exemplifies social media’s role in digital activism. Through Twitter, citizens are arguably able to bypass mainstream media in order to challenge traditional narratives that have long pervaded news reports of sexual and violent crime against women. Social media provided citizens with a voice to change the public conversation, from one dominated by fear and victim-blaming, to one which recognised gender inequalities and a woman’s right to walk home alone at night without being raped and murdered. Social media arguably allowed new ways of making meaning from sexual violence, beyond the restricted and often individualised/‘exceptionalised’ framing in mainstream news media. It also enabled action beyond the digital space by driving a peaceful protest with at least 10,000 people in attendance. In this way, the collective sharing of Meagher’s death produced effects of enacted melodramas, with citizens identifying a role that they could actively play in response to violence in Brunswick (Wright, 2015). Indeed, other recent research has identified Twitter’s positive role in what has been termed ‘hashtag feminism’ or ‘feminist action that unfolds through Twitter hashtags’ (Clark, 2016: 1). For example, such activism has arguably helped to challenge victim-blaming attitudes towards women who stay with abusive partners (Clark, 2016), and to draw attention to violence faced by black transgender and cisgender women (Williams, 2016). Such studies have concluded that social media is a powerful and integral tool for activism regarding gendered violence, and in particular for resisting the dominant and frequently victim-blaming narratives of mainstream media responses to such crimes.

Conversely, it was also evident in our dataset that other themes among citizens’ responses to this crime were remarkably similar to traditional news representations of both victims and perpetrators of sexually violent crimes, as identified in the preceding literature review. For example, tweets describing Bayley as a monster or an animal are consistent with the way journalists have labelled rapists who fit the ‘real rape’ mould (O’Hara, 2012). Moreover, the theme regarding citizens’ lessons to curb their behaviour in order to prevent sexual homicide corresponds well with traditional media’s tendency to directly or indirectly blame victims in cases of violent and sexual crime (Dowler, 2006; Taylor, 2009). As noted by criminologists Sanja Milivojevic and Alyce McGovern (2014: 33), ‘the aftermath of Jill Meagher’s case reinforced dangerous stereotypes: that we are all potential victims, that random violence is around us and can erupt at any point, and that dangerous strangers are lurking in public spaces’. This continues to contribute to problematic and punitive criminal justice measures. Advocates of these responses use scare tactics, such as focusing on soaring crime rates and unsafe spaces, to increase fear of crime (Lee, 2007; Weatherburn, 2004). Such consistencies between social media engagement and mainstream media narratives may not necessarily be surprising, given that some research has indicated that exposure to rape myths in newspaper headlines can encourage rape-supportive attitudes (Franiuk et al., 2008). Yet, it may be fruitful for future research to examine the links between old and new medias in further detail. For example, to what extent does traditional media cater to the existing views of social media users, or do social media users internalise and reflect the views espoused by news media? What capacity is there for social media participation to challenge and disrupt mainstream news reporting?

The most dominant theme in the current study, ‘the outpouring of grief’ (approximately 60% of all original tweets), also revealed how social media appeared to serve another purpose for its users. Indeed, when the number of tweets was charted by each theme and compared over time, it became clear that representations of grief overwhelmed the collective response to this crime (see Figure 3). As such, the nature of social media engagement with this crime event seems to have been less about practical intervention and action for Jill, and more about presenting and representing ourselves individually and collectively as shocked, saddened and grieving. Tweets appeared to be therapeutic in a sense, where individuals vented their emotions, enabling them to feel united in a shared grief. This diverges from the perceived role of more traditional news media coverage, which often uses instances of violent crime to present popular and punitive responses as ‘commonsense’ and to rouse public feelings of anger as opposed to grief (Hogg and Brown, 1998).

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Figure 3.

Key themes in tweets as the crime unfolded.

The finding that representations of collective grief outweighed other Twitter content in response to Jill Meagher’s murder is consistent with a research model suggesting that social media use is motivated by two main needs: (i) the need to belong, and (ii) the need for self-presentation (Nadkarni and Hofmann, 2012). Twitter users’ narratives of public unity following the discovery of Jill’s body also perhaps align with Peelo’s (2006) thesis that the media’s coverage of homicide often ends with strategies to neutralise sorrow, restore social order and allow the public to recover from their vicarious experience of the crime. In fact, Peelo (2006: 169) argues that ‘our apparent unanimity and empathy with survivors of major crime is illusory’; the crime touches us, yet the media is able to help us easily move on with our lives and maintain our views of the world, while victims’ friends and families, and surviving victims, have their world and perceptions of the world permanently damaged. The way that Twitter users could quickly find a silver lining and frame Jill Meagher’s case as an ultimately unifying experience echoes Peelo’s thoughts about public narratives of homicide and healing, but extends these ideas in a social media context.

‘Grief, of course, is routinely politicised’ (Terzis, 2015: 11), and indeed many commentators have highlighted the use, or rather misuse, of the public’s emotive response to Jill Meagher’s murder by local politicians who responded with a push for increased CCTV surveillance of public space in and around the city of Melbourne (see also Carr, 2016; Little, 2015; Milivojevic and McGovern, 2014; Thompson and Louise, 2014). There is arguably a tension inherent in greater citizen participation and engagement during and following crime events. On the one hand, there is a radical potential for disruption of traditional and conservative narratives of crime and justice; a resistance to ‘penal populism’ and in its place a new populism of equality and social justice in response to crime (see Quilter, 2015). On the other hand, social media simultaneously represents a powerful mechanism for the amplification of law and order discourses on crime and justice, and a ready tool for the further politicisation of crime and justice issues. The potential relationship between social media, citizen participation and the politics of crime and justice policy represents an important avenue for continued criminological research.

Concluding comments

Overall, the current findings have demonstrated that social media can enable a number of techno-social practices of collective narration and meaning-making in response to public crime events. Social media has the ability to include and promote under-represented voices and information, which can arguably shift narratives about crime and drive social action. However, it can also help to perpetuate traditional narratives of crime, and make meaning of crime events on a more self-seeking level. Thus, contrary to a techtopian view of social media as a radically democratising force that enables citizens to substantially disrupt traditional narratives of crime and justice, we conclude that a more cautious interpretation of the impact of social media is warranted.

By tying together the new and emerging fields of narrative (Presser and Sandberg, 2015) and digital criminologies (Stratton et al., 2017), the current research sheds light on social media discourse as a mechanism through which crime events are collectively narrated and rendered meaningful in an Australian context. Jill Meagher’s case itself is remarkable for its capture of Australian public interest and as a ‘signal crime’ that arguably remains forefront in our collective memory. As discussed above, traditional news coverage of crime has had significant impacts on state policy responses and public understandings of crime. The current study has made an important contribution towards an understanding of social media’s role in the public perception of and response to crime, in particular sexual violence and homicide. It is now vital for future research to continue this investigation with other case studies and crime types, and to examine the broader political implications (if any) that stem from citizen engagement with crime and justice via social media.