Why an entire newsletter devoted to explaining crime?
An introduction to this newsletter
I'm Aaron Jacklin, and this is Explaining Crime, an independent newsletter that helps you explain crime to your audience.
To stop crime—and the suffering it causes—we need to understand it. Some people, by virtue of their experience, study, and jobs, understand aspects of it and need to explain it.
So who gets to explain crime? Who do we turn to for explanations of crime?
For many, police, prosecutors, and politicians are the default explainers. They’re part of the criminal justice system and they get their authority to define crime by virtue of their positions within the system. That’s why journalists quote them on crime so much. The people who “get” to do it most often also have a vested interest in explaining it in ways that support their agendas.
This newsletter isn’t written for them, though they’re welcome as all hell.
This newsletter is primarily for journalists, academics, and victim advocates, the people who work from outside the criminal justice system, but who must report on, study, and interact with it.
They need to explain crime to their various audiences, and their explanations compete with those put out by police, prosecutors, and politicians.
Let’s break down the name of this newsletter to better understand what I intend. And, let’s do it in reverse order because I think an understanding of the second part will make the first part easier to understand.
“Crime” is everywhere, and everyone’s an expert
Our culture is saturated in crime, from news and entertainment to true crime and mystery novels to gossip and rumour. The general level of understanding is low, yet everyone has opinions on crime and what to do about it.
Try thinking about it like this. Crime is two things. First, it’s an activity that happens out there. Crime’s an umbrella term for the full gamut of things we prohibit in law, from murder to vandalism. Second, it’s something we build in our minds based on a wide variety of sources, many of them flawed means of understanding like entertainment and political ideology.
These two conceptions of crime usually don’t match up.
Each of us has something slightly different in mind when we say or hear the word “crime,” so let’s start by defining the term as I use it in this newsletter.
Crime isn’t some monolithic thing that can be fought. He may be my favourite superhero, but Batman’s got it wrong. “Crime” is an abstraction that we’ve collectively made up. It’s what society says it is, usually as defined in law. That’s a basic principle of the sociological criminology that I was trained in.
Since crime is what society defines it as, what qualifies as crime can change over time.
Take human trafficking. It wasn’t prohibited in criminal law in Canada, where I live, until 2005, but that’s not because it didn’t happen.
When Timea Nagy was a young Hungarian woman, she was lured to Canada with promises of a job.
But as she relates in her memoir, Out of the Shadows (not an affiliate link), there was no job.
Instead, the people who brought her there took her passport and forced her into the sex trade. She eventually escaped and reluctantly told police what had happened to her. This was no small thing because the people who had controlled her reality had told her the police would arrest her for the “crimes” they forced her to commit.
It took some time, but police made an arrest.
This was February 2000, before Canada defined human trafficking in law. Without that definition, the police could only arrest one man for charges that didn’t match the enormity of what had been done to her:
“The charges included one count of ‘attempt to live on the avails of prostitution,’ one count of ‘keeping a common bawdy house,’ two counts of ‘exercising control,’ and three counts of sexual assault against me. Toney had assaulted me so many more times than the three for which he was being charged, but I couldn’t waste my energy caring about the details. The most important thing was that charges had been laid. I felt vindicated…”
Proving what had been done in court was a different story, as Nagy learned when the police detective she had worked with called her with the outcome of the trial in March 2004:
“Tony had been acquitted of all charges. There simply had not been enough hard evidence, as I would come to learn is so often the reality in sexual assault cases.”
Nagy also writes about the day she first learned about “human trafficking” as a crime, which would have been the following year:
“One day, a few of us were having lunch in the shelter kitchen and I picked up a newspaper that was on the table. There was a huge article on the front page about Canada’s new law against human trafficking. Human trafficking. What did that mean? I’d heard of drug trafficking, but not human trafficking.”
Nagy read on, about women who had lived lives like hers:
“I put the paper down; it suddenly felt too heavy for me to hold. It was as though I was reading my own story. Every detail—from the promises Natasa made me to the long days I worked with no food or rest—was accurate. I couldn’t ignore the realization that I had been trafficked. I was the victim of human trafficking.
“None of this had come up in Tony’s trial. It was entirely about trying to prove that he had sexually assaulted me, in a club that he owned where I was employed, and at a motel, where I was staying. How I came to be working at the club, let alone how I came to Canada, was never brought up.”
By any modern moral calculus, human trafficking was wrong before it was defined in law as a crime, but police couldn’t arrest traffickers for human trafficking because the law had no definition for it. It wasn’t until we defined human trafficking as a crime that it became a crime, despite being a horrific practice that destroyed lives.
(By the way, Nagy would go on to help victims of human trafficking in various ways.)
“Explaining”
Ros Atkins is a BBC journalist obsessed with explanations. He spent decades thinking about explanations, studying them, and testing his ideas about them in his work.
Last year, he published the fruits of this labour in a book called The Art of Explanation (also not an affiliate link).
“For me,” he writes, “a good explanation contains all the information the person or people I’m addressing need to know on the given subject.”
I like Atkins’ definition.
I tend to break information down into the Five Ws and H (who, what, when, where, why, and how), probably because of my background in journalism.
Until I came across Atkins’ definition, I thought of “explaining” as answering the “why?” of something.
But when you explain something, you don’t just fill in the “why” blank. You fill in as many of the other blanks as necessary.
(I’ll come back to Atkins’ work in other editions of this newsletter.)
“Explaining Crime”
So when I talk about explaining crime, I’m talking about efforts to help others understand crime, keeping in mind what I mean when I say crime (i.e. “what we define as crime”).
I think that involves providing “all the information” people need to understand crime, whether an individual crime or crime in general. I believe that means trying to answer one or more of the following basic questions:
What happened in this particular crime?
Why did this particular crime happen?
Why does crime happen?
How often does crime happen?
How do we prevent crime?
How do we define something as a crime?
What characteristics of an act makes it a crime?
How do we count crime?
Who is justice for?
What is justice?
If you’re trying to answer any of these questions, whether as an academic, a journalist, an advocate, or anyone else, you’re explaining crime in my book.
This is certainly not an exhaustive list, and I’m working on another piece to examine each question in some depth.
When you explain crime, you provide all the necessary information to understand crime, and necessarily, the criminal justice system. That’s no small task.
This newsletter is as much about the act of explaining crime as it is about actually explaining crime. That is, I don’t intend to focus on providing you with all that information.
For the academics and advocates, I intend to share content that will help you adopt a journalistic perspective when explaining crime to “the public.” For the advocates and reporters, I intend to share content that will help you understand crime and the criminal justice system from a scientific perspective. For the reporters and academics, I intend to share content that will help make your own content more trauma informed.
In short, I want to help you gain or hone the tools, skills, and knowledge necessary to find the specific information you need and and share it with your audience in effective, trauma-informed ways.
I’m not an expert in any of those fields, but I am a journalist with an M.A. in criminology who has just enough experience with victims and their families to have an idea of where to start.
So I’ll find the experts and share their knowledge and expertise with you.
Stay tuned.