When Victims Look like Criminals: Rehumanizing Victim Representation in Serial Killer Cases

Abstract

In 2018 the Bruce McArthur serial killer case became the largest forensic homicide investigation in Toronto, Canada’s history. Victims of serial killers tend to be portrayed negatively by newspapers because they often embody stigmatized identities. However, this research asks, How do newspapers frame victims who belong in between marginalized and liberated identities? Under the frameworks of post-gay and intersectionality theory, the identities of many of McArthur’s victims reflect an opportunity to analyze how serial killer victims are puzzlingly framed by newspapers. Through an analysis of 277 articles in three major Canadian newspapers, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post, findings show that the framing of victims through textual accounts as nonpartisan is discrepant with their negative visual representations. While newspapers tend to simply frame these victims as belonging to Toronto’s gay village without layering stigma around queerness onto them explicitly, most articles provide close-ups, passport photos, and occasionally mugshots of victims, ultimately portraying them in undesirable ways. This inconsistent framing between textual description and image selection highlights the important role photos, activists, and non-profits can play when featured or quoted in newspapers as they can humanize and dignify victims in the absence of family or friends to do so. This textual-visual discrepancy shows that deeply racialized queer injustices can exist in newspaper framing despite the absence of overtly prejudicial narratives.

The Legacy of Matthew Shepard: Queer Erasure and the Lives of Rural LGBTQ+ Young Adults

“…Instead, we focus on examining rural historical and archival records from a queer lens—e.g., centering and elevating queer experiences and queer responses—as a tool to resisting historical narratives that center cisheteronormativity. Future studies could replicate our approach using other regional and culturally specific events to re‐center LGBTQ+ perspectives on their impact, such as the murder of Brandon Teena, Fred “Frederica” C. Martinez Jr., or Gwen Amber Rose Araujo to further center marginalized people and avoid victim erasure that can occur in high profile violence, such as serial killers' names being widely known with minimal public knowledge and even stigmatization of the victims (Holmes, 2022). Archival queer historical analytic techniques could also be applied to other events or stories integral to queer lives (Scot, 2014), such as rural LGBTQ+ people's responses to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).…”