The Vicarious Thrill of Violence and Crime

Most of the individuals brought before the various criminal courts of different European countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were charged with some kind of property crime; such crime rarely involved violence.

Nevertheless, it was violence that often characterised crime and criminals in the popular mind, and it was violent crime that most worried people. Moreover, such crime provided particularly exciting stories and gave vicarious thrills to the readers of novels, newspapers and ‘penny dreadfuls', and, subsequently, to the audiences of films and television. Violent offences that were particularly horrendous and hence newsworthy prompted moral panics, notably when the victims were well-to-do or wealthy, or when they were vulnerable children, women or elderly people. The British press whipped up concerns over ‘garrotters' in the 1850s and 1860s, and over ‘muggers' a century later. Essentially these offenders were committing the same crime - street robbery - but the name suggested something alien and novel. The London garrotting panic of 1862 gained a singular boost from the fact that the first victim - or at least the first individual identified as such - was a member of parliament returning from a late-night parliamentary debate. Some of the garrottings mentioned in the press over the following months were not violent robberies at all, but this did not prevent them being portrayed as such.^{^[956]} The French press fostered similar alarm over the Parisian equivalent of garrotting - le coup du pere Francois - during the 1830s and 1840s, and also over the youth gangs, or apaches, at the close of the nineteenth century. The murder of a 9- year-old girl in Berlin in the summer of 1904 sparked another big-city panic but helped also to shape an understanding of the city through breathless press reporting of the different areas of danger, delight, poverty and social intermixing in the city.

A few years later a series of knife attacks on young women in Berlin prompted a press panic about a ‘ripper', but it also encouraged the police to establish a policy of working together with the press. The hope among the police hierarchy was that feeding newspapers with detail to pass on to the public would encourage both the collection of useful information and public confidence in the police management of criminal offending.^{^[957]} Other police institutions, most significantly the Metropolitan Police of London, took much longer to seek press assistance; rather they appear to have wished to remain aloof and, by so doing, to emphasise that they were experts with skills that should be acknowledged and respected.

Newspaper editors and owners had their own agendas. In the opening years of the twentieth century, for example, the Petit Parisien used the panic over apaches and the brutal sexual murder of ii-year-old Marthe Erbelding by Albert Soleilland to launch a referendum on the death penalty.^{^[958]} In this instance, and in most others, the impression offered, and sometimes directly stated by media outlets, was that violent criminality was getting worse. Academics might insist that violence and violent crime have decreased and, indeed, statistics have been deployed to demonstrate a decline in murder rates across Europe since the early modern period;^{^[959]} but within the media thrilling stories of criminal violence rarely came with any suggestion that they were exceptional and running against a trend of decreasing violence. Moreover, virtually no one, other than an academic of some kind, posed the question about what constituted criminal violence in any given society and how it might best be measured. At the end of the nineteenth century the criminologist Enrico Ferri compared the homicide figures of seventeen European countries to demonstrate that areas of southern Europe had far more people convicted of killing than northern Europe.

According to the figures deployed by Ferri there were 9.69 killings per 100,000 inhabitants in Italy, fewer than 2 per 100,000 in France and Germany, and even fewer in England and Scotland.^{^[960]} Yet even here the question was not posed as to whether the incidence of homicide ought to be taken as the measure of criminal violence. It is conceivable that societies with fewer homicides had more violent assaults than the more murderous societies. And if this was indeed the case, should that lead to them being considered more violent or less? Moreover, some forms of violent assault were condoned or tolerated by large numbers of people in the less murderous societies; the courts in England, for example, began to move more positively against wife beaters and against organised but unregulated pugilism during the nineteenth century. In such instances, however, juries could take a more sympathetic and supportive attitude towards the accused than judges and magistrates.^{^[961]} And just as popular attitudes might be rather different towards some acts of violence as compared with those managing the state and their officials, so rough and sometimes violent popular justice might be exacted on anyone who broke traditional mores, which may or may not have been defined as ‘crime' in legislation or penal codes. While, probably, they were decreasing in number, incidents of charivari in France, Katzenmusik in Germany, rough music in England, scampenate in Italy and their other European counterparts continued long after the early modern period. In Russia, village communities often took the law into their own hands in acts of samosud, literally judging for oneself; and samosud could be especially violent towards those stealing things of particular value, such as horses. Rural areas were increasingly the most common settings for such justice but similar demonstrations, sometimes resulting in physical violence, might also be found in urban districts, especially amongst recent migrants from rural areas. Newspapers in England made jibes about Irish migrants behaving in such fashion in their cities. The problem with assessing popular justice in rural areas is that little written evidence remains. Moreover complaints from the local population were rare since, while the state's law would have considered it as criminal violence, whatever the cause or provocation, the perpetrators did not. Popular justice was an element of the view of the world shared by many.^{^[962]}

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

The Vicarious Thrill of Violence and Crime

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