We need to stop missing the point

Could terrible crimes have been stopped by better policing, improved safeguarding and a willingness to act on good intelligence? But maybe start there rather than calling for new laws

Why do we, so often, completely miss the point? 

A man travels from Newcastle to South London where he attacks a woman and her children with a corrosive substance. We’re told by the man’s relative that he was “in a relationship” with the victim and that the man, and Afghan by birth, was granted asylum at least partly on the basis that he converted to Christianity (which we assume wouldn’t be popular back in the old country where apostasy carries the death penalty). We’re also told that the individual concerned had, prior to being granted asylum, a conviction for sexual assault.

According to the chair of the House of Commons ‘Women & Equalities Committee’, Caroline Noakes, the man’s asylum status is of no consequence but something called ‘microaggressions’ are really important:

“I think there’s a really important message here which is, with respect, the media are not interested in microaggressions, they want to hear about the most egregious offences. The stark reality is every day women will face misogyny and microaggressions. If you’re a woman of colour it will be worse, and we have to be better at understanding the culture that makes men think ‘that’s ok’. It’s not OK and you can see a pattern of behaviours that lead to really horrific crimes.”

Two teenagers brutally and horribly murder another teenager. Not in a fight or altercation but a planned and premeditated execution ‘cos it’s fun lol’. The victim is trans so, understandably the focus is on this aspect of the murder despite the police saying (and evidence in court supporting) that the murder wasn’t committed because the victim was trans but rather because of that child’s vulnerability. A good deal of the planning and premeditation for the murder was conducted online via WhatApp.

Today, following the conclusion of the trial and the naming of the murderers, the victims mother has taken to the air calling for the banning of children’s access to social media:

'We'd like a law introduced so that there are mobile phones that are only suitable for under-16s. So if you're over 16, you can have an adult phone, but then under the age of 16, you can have a children's phone, which will not have all of the social media apps that are out there now.

Also to have software that is automatically downloaded on the parents' phone which links to the children's phone, that can highlight key words.So if a child is searching the kind of words that Scarlett and Eddie were searching, it will then flag up on the parent's phone.'

I chose these two terrible crimes to illustrate how our reactions, even well meant reactions, so often miss the point. In the first case, Caroline Noakes chooses to move away from the evidence of the case and, prompted by Kirsty Wark the BBC interviewer, to talk instead about her personal experience of ‘microaggressions’. It is such a stretch going from often unintended remarks or behaviours that make a woman uncomfortable to a man travelling 300 miles to throw acid in someone’s face.

Brianna Ghey’s mother, very distraught, is looking to try and help here. Yet the focus is not on the issues around safeguarding pertinent to the case but rather on a difficult to define and hard to enforce idea of limiting children’s social media access. Yet there is nothing obvious about the case that points to social media as the cause but rather a string of safeguarding failures involving both the murderers and the victim. These sorts of murders are very unusual and, while there are plainly issues about children and access to pornography and violent imagery, these are broader societal issues not resolved by targeting social media.

It is commonplace for us to miss the point so as to sit firmly on a hobby horse of our own making. Social media is young, it is still a teenager. Our relationship with the apps and websites of social platforms are still evolving and the environment's novelty raises a sort of moral panic about what they are doing to individuals and wider society. Laws have been passed to ‘stamp out’ online harms that do nothing of the sort because the focus isn’t on any actual harm being done but on the sensibilities of lawmakers and the media elite. This is why, faced with an acid attack done for reasons we don’t know right now, the lazy response is to talk about misogyny, microaggressions, muslims or the immigration system. And it is why a terrible murder becomes a discussion about the “dark web” rather than a conversation about why some young people - thankfully very rarely - commit seemingly purposeless murders. 

When an unhinged Islamist extremist murdered the Southend MP, David Amess, the response of the media and MPs wasn’t to talk about why or how the killer was ‘radicalised’ or even how he, despite being known as an extremist, managed to commit the crime. Instead the discussion revolved around how MPs (and the media figures interviewing the MPs) suffer from terrible trolling via social media. The BBC, via their egregiously misinforming expert, Marianna Spring, tell us that trolling is never-ending and that something must be done. Leaving aside that the basis for this claim was a limited study of Ms Spring’s own account on ex-Twitter, the fact of online abuse in increasingly controlled by social media platforms using the capacity to mute, block, limit comments, report abuse and protect accounts. It isn’t perfect by any means but it is vastlly improved on the ‘wild west’ social media environment of a decade ago. What the legacy media and MPs want, however, is for social media to behave more like traditional news where they enjoy the opportunity to broadcast opinions and comments without having the possibility of any pushback.

There is a genuine problem with young people having access to problematic images, stories and video compared to previous generations of children. Pornographic images are commonplace and young people can, if they wish to, easily access these images. But the reality is that the gratuitous portrayal of sex and violence is normal in film and TV. And parents, I suspect, are far more tolerant of what they allow their teenage children to watch than maybe they should be. This isn’t about obscure sites accessed through the ‘dark web’ but mainstream Hollywood films, Netflix series and even BBC drama. Our tolerance of what most people 50 years ago would have described as pornography or excessive violence has increased in inverse proportion to the extension of opprobrium around sexism, homophobia and racism.

But even with this problem, there’s very little evidence linking social media to increases in crime or violence. Some studies show the reverse but this probably reflects lower crime rates in places with higher social media use not cause and effect. The recent increase in acid attacks in the UK also seems unrelated to increases in violence against women. Indeed the figures, while showing an increase, indicate that the victim of an acid attack is more likely to be male than female. The increase may reflect imported preferences (this may indeed be the case for attacks on women with acid since Pakistan and Afghanistan have seen similar increases mostly targeting women) but it is as likely to reflect the portability, availability and deniability of corrosive substances as well as the limiting of police powers to stop and search.

What is the point you ask? The point is that we need to look at actual events and at whether there are things that might have been done to prevent the terrible crimes, none of which have much to do with social media, sexist microaggressions or the ‘dark web’. Could the authorities responsible for safeguarding (schools, council, police) have responded differently to the clearly troubled girl who became a murderer? Should we have been less understanding of the acid thrower’s opportunistic conversion and should we be granting asylum to sex offenders? Should police and intelligence services have more power to deal with extremists before they go off to stab MPs in their constituency offices?

As always these questions can’t be easily answered. The Brianna Ghey case isn’t the first and won’t be the last case where troubled teenagers commit a murder but could we be more vigilant? Acid, like the knife, is a convenient and available weapon, we can’t ban its availability entirely but can we ask more questions or put in more controls? And are some people using the aggressive, hard-line versions of Islam as a means to valorise their inclination to violence and terror? Perhaps we need to have some hard thoughts about parenting - should young people have smartphones, why do we create little bedroom islands with TVs, computers and even a fridge? Maybe we should start to question the gratuity of sex and violence in mainstream film and TV?

It is too easy to find a bogeyman in social media or technology or to believe that bad things are never home grown, always the result of sinister outsiders bringing their bad ideas and terrible habits to our green and pleasant land. It is much harder to face up to the reality that not only do bad things happen but also that the chances of these bad things happening increases with lazy, inefficient and poorly-focused public services and administration. We don’t know if these terrible crimes would have been stopped by better policing, improved safeguarding and a willingness to act on good intelligence, but maybe we should start there rather than calling for new laws introducing mostly unenforceable bans to deal with mostly imaginary bugaboos.