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Why are we so reluctant to believe that women can mean to kill? Based on case-studies from the US, UK and Australia, this book looks at the ways in which female killers are constructed in the media, in law and in feminist discourse almost invariably as victims rather than actors in the crimes they commit. Morrissey argues that by denying the possibility of female agency in crimes of torture, rape and murder, feminist theorists are, with the best of intentions, actually denying women the full freedom to be human. Case studies cover among others the battered wife, Pamela Sainsbury, who garrotted her husband as he slept, the serial killer, Aileen Wournos, who killed seven middle-aged men in Florida between 1989 and 1990, Tracey Wiggington, the so-called \"lesbian vampire killer\", and Karla Homolka who helped her husband kill two teenage girls in St. Catherines Ontario in 1993. 1. Traumatised Discourses: Narrations of Violent Female Subjectivities 2. Versions of the Self: Narrating the Subjectivities of Women Who Kill 3. Inconceivable Survivors: Battered Women Who Kill 4. Cultural Anxiety and Vampiric Voracity: Tracey Wigginton's 'Hunger' 5. Beyond Villainy: The 'Limit' Cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck Conclusion: An Odyssey around Violent Female Subjects Bibliography

We present and analyze a database of 1.13 million public Instagram posts during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which erupted in response to George Floyd’s public murder by police on May 25. Our aim is to understand the growing role of visual media, focusing on a) the emergent opinion leaders and b) the subsequent press concerns regarding frames of legitimacy. We perform a comprehensive view of the spatial (where) and temporal (when) dynamics, the visual and textual content (what), and the user communities (who) that drove the social movement on Instagram. Results reveal the emergence of non-institutional opinion leaders such as meme groups, independent journalists, and fashion magazines, which contrasts with the institutionally reinforcing nature of Twitter. Visual analysis of 1.69 million photos show symbols of injustice are the most viral coverage, and moreover, actual protest coverage is framed positively, in contrast with combatant frames traditionally found from legacy media. Together, these factors helped facilitate the online movement through three phases, culminating with online international solidarity in #BlackOutTuesday. Through this case study, we demonstrate the precarious nature of protest journalism, and how content creators, journalists, and everyday users co-evolved with social media to shape one of America’s largest-ever human rights movements.

Finding ways to improve police legitimacy and police-community relations has for long been an important social issue in the United States. It becomes particularly urgent following the murder of George Floyd on May 25 th , 2020. An emerging area that holds potential in remediating police-community relations pertains to the use of social media by police. Yet, this body of research stays highly exploratory (e.g., case studies based on a small sample of agencies) and different viewpoints exist regarding the objectives of police social media usage. The current study identified 115 large police departments in the U.S. and collected their tweets over a 4-month period between 4/1/2020 and 7/31/2020. We investigated how police agencies (both individually and as an aggregate) leveraged social media to respond to the nationwide protests directed at the police and community reactions to such responses. We found that police agencies tweeted more frequently in the immediate aftermath of the murder and posted an increased number of civil-unrest related tweets. The public showed a greater interest in engaging with law enforcement agencies (i.e., average favorite and retweet counts) following the murder. A great variability emerged across agencies in their responses on social media, suggesting that examining only a handful of agencies or a particular dimension of social media usage would limit our understanding of police behaviors and citizen interactions on social media. In conclusion, we suggested a few avenues for future research (and practices) on responsible and effective use of social media by police, while pointing out the challenges associated with such inquiries.

Social media has evolved into a central force in handling national and local crises. This prompts the question: Do all stakeholders in a local crisis grasp its significance when it predominantly unfolds in the digital realm of online social media? This article investigates this issue through a case study of the Roman Zadorov justice movement in Israel. Despite Zadorov’s wrongful imprisonment for Tair Rada’s murder, social media support grew, reshaping perceptions of Katsrin, the town where the murder took place. The four-fold analysis draws on social media content, youth interviews, municipal officials’ perspectives, and a population survey. It reveals how Tair Rada’s case became central to Katsrin’s image, fueled by social media’s influence. However, local officials failed to recognize social media’s crisis significance, highlighting a disconnect. The article concludes by exploring this dissonance, shedding light on crisis management challenges in the social media era and their impact on local governance.

The article demonstrates how social media activism polarizes and clusters into distinct deliberative and participatory arenas, using the case study of online activism for justice for Roman Zadorov in Israel. Zadorov was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Still, an overwhelming majority of Israelis think he is innocent, with the social media obstruction-of-justice campaign in his support having raised overwhelming exposure and engagement. Theorists distinguish between participatory and deliberative public processes. Supporters of participatory processes advocate for the participation of multiple stakeholders in addressing public concerns. Supporters of deliberative processes advocate for a thorough evaluation of arguments for and against any course of action before decision-making. This study demonstrates how people congregate online and polarize into deliberative and participatory clusters. The “deliberative” cluster is characteristic of groups led by admins who advocate reaching the truth through exposing relevant information and conducting fact-based deliberation. The “participatory” cluster is characteristic of groups led by admins who believe that their activities should aim exclusively at generating more attention and engagement with the general public.

This mixed-methods study examines social media use among public mass shooters in the United States as an extension of a comprehensive database of 170 mass shooters from 1966 to 2021. Here, we report findings from a systematic content analysis of public data and detailed timelines that were constructed for 44 mass shooters’ social media habits and changes to those habits during the period of time leading up to their shooting. The paper also presents as a case study, a sentiment analysis, and term-linkage network for one perpetrator’s total 3,000 tweets. Several themes were found in the data—there were shooters who changed their posting habits and in some cases, stopped using social media entirely in the lead up to their crime; shooters who used hate speech and were “radicalized” to violence online; shooters with a demonstrable interest in violence, who referenced past mass shooters in their own communications; shooters who exhibited signs of mental illness and suicidality; shooters who were already known to authorities; and shooters who like those described above, actively posted while shooting, presumably to boost their own celebrity status. The findings from this study provide insight into commonalities among mass shooters in terms of their social media usage, which could lead to new pathways for prevention and intervention.

Mass media has become an important agent of socialization by reproducing dominant and other social norms, beliefs, discourses, ideologies, and values. Although the media can be considered as an educator, most of the transmission of norms, beliefs, ideologies, discourses, and values occur in an unconscious manner. In essence, the media will select and process facts for the public. Because they do this so systematically, they can affect the way their audience is influenced by the delivered information. Thus, the portrayal of crime in the news media has played a crucial role in creating public awareness and planting seeds of concern regarding crimes in Malaysia. How crime is presented in the media and how the media capitalizes on crime news can affect how society perceives crime. The presentation of crime news in the media is the result of a complex process of news gathering and news production. Hence, it is crucial to understand how crime news is produced and presented, and the impact this type of news has on society. It will in turn help to shape public opinion and public policy, which could consequently become a national concern. This paper presents an analysis of the hidden messages that the media is forwarding to society and the priorities given in constructing crime news in the local media. This study has analyzed news texts to understand how different types of crimes are covered and reported. An analysis of news narratives is also presented to understand how crimes are constructed and portrayed by the Malaysian media.

Television programs continue to be mass media, in that they reach billions of people every day, but the mass here has changed, in that audience fragmentation now means that these billions of watchers are consuming hundreds or thousands of different shows, more easily available now than ever before via cable channels and streaming services. Here, I offer up a case study of the program Poker Face (2023-), created by Rian Johnson, the celebrated writer and director of Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022). [...]it nods toward Jim Rockford (James Garner) in The Rockford Files (1974-1980), with its easygoing main character whose primary goal is working enough to have the money for leisure time.

The article deals with the visual and linguistic representation of alleged perpetrators through personalization in news reporting from The Telegraph ’s online media platform. The analysis shows how visual message, along with verbal labelling in the text, represent different groups of alleged perpetrators as more or less ‘dangerous’ in news reports. Agency is analyzed through a focus on the lens range and its influence on perceived social distance, the angle of the shot and its role in the understanding of social relations, as well as the direction of an alleged perpetrator’s gaze in images as a way of social interaction with the viewer. The photos of alleged perpetrators appear in The Telegraph with the aim of informing the public about the danger these individuals pose, as well as legitimizing the actions of law enforcement institutions. It appears that verbal and visual identification of these individuals is done with the intention of ‘excluding’ the most dangerous social actors, such as ‘murderers’, from ingroups.

While today s Indonesian democratic government remains committed to the New Order orthodoxy about the mass killings of 1965, new counter-narratives challenging official history are emerging in the new media. Applying mixed-methods and multi-sited ethnography, this study aims to extend our collaborative understanding of the most recent developments in this situation by identifying multiple online interpersonal stories, deliberations, and debates related to the case as well as offline field studies in Java and Bali. Practically and theoretically, we ask how the tragedy of the 1965 killings is contested in the new media and how social memory plays out in this contestation. The study finds that new media potentially act as emancipatory sites channeling and liberating the voices of those that the nation has stigmatized as 'objectively guilty'. We argue that the arena of contestation is threefold: individual, public vs. state narrative, and theoretical. As such, the transborder space of the new media strongly mediates corrective new voices to fill missing gaps in the convoluted history of this central event of modern Indonesian history.