Crime legends in a new medium
| Author | Pamela Donovan |
| DOI | 10.1177/136248060200600204 |
| Published date | 01 May 2002 |
| Date | 01 May 2002 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Theoretical Criminology
© 2002 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
1362–4806(200205)6:2
Vol. 6(2): 189–215; 021214
Crime legends in a new
medium:
Fact, fiction and loss of authority
PA M E L A D O N O VA N
Medical and Health Research Association of
New York City and National Development and
Research Institutes
Abstract
This article explores the persistence of the ‘crime legend’ genre. A
case study approach was used, and three crime legends with a
considerable history of public debunking were chosen: the market
in snuff films; the theft of vital organs for black-market transplant;
and the abduction of children from theme park restrooms. Current
versions circulating in Internet newsgroups were collected,
discussions in Internet newsgroups were examined, and participants
were interviewed. Most ‘believers’ engaged in conditional or
instrumental forms of belief, finding them useful as truths regardless
of their basis in conventional evidence. This situation suggests that
rumors and legends can be sustained in the absence of fervent or
strictly literal believers. The study also revealed that specific legends
are deployed to adapt to generalized fear, resulting from a sense of
‘ontological insecurity.’ Following Giddens’ formulation, this
insecurity is intertwined with distrust stemming from uncertain
relationships between the individual and the state.
Key Words
belief • crime • Internet research • rumor • urban legends
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Theoretical Criminology 6(2)
Introduction
This project explores the contemporary resonance and persistence of the
‘crime legend.’ Crime legends can be seen as a subcategory of what have
come to be known as ‘urban legends’ in the terminology of contemporary
folklorist J.H. Brunvand (1984). These are apocryphal tales, more exactly
about modernity than about urbanism alone. Because they are largely
‘false’ in an empirical sense—lacking documentation, evidence and direct
testimony—they resemble myth or folklore.1 Yet because they make
informal claims to be news, are contemporary, and generally do not involve
supernatural themes or heroic historical figures, they operate somewhat
distinctively. This distinctiveness can be seen most vividly when they are
investigated as social practices rather than just symbolically laden texts.
Crime legends are more than reflections of diffuse anxieties about risk
and fear. They serve several interlocutory purposes: warning, revelation of
the raconteur’s fear and revulsion; the solicitation of the same in hearers;
and a frontal assault on skepticism itself. Crime legends, as social practices,
have both aggressive and solidaristic features. They are aggressive in the
sense that believers wish to disrupt the hearers’ sense of safety or con-
fidence in the protection currently provided by both ‘official guardians’
(state powers), and ‘official’ sources of warning about crime threats (mass
media). Yet they are also solidaristic in the sense that the crime legend is
offered by individuals as a warning and a gesture of protection; an attempt
to mend a collective bond. As such, the struggle over whether to believe or
disbelieve is consistently displaced from the realm of the empirical quest to
the realm of the moral obligation.
Crime legends express a sense of chaos and an absence of socially
sustained protection, along with a decidedly modern and entitled sense of
order, affluence, and leisure. These discordant conditions provide a stark
contrast with those expressed in traditional folklore, where personal
security expectations are low, and where both supernatural and earthly
powers are capricious in their distribution of fortune, victimization, and
pain (Darnton, 1984: 38, 55–7).
I used a case study approach for a larger study of crime legends, choosing
three popular crime legends with a considerable history of public debunk-
ing. These cases were: the market in snuff films; the theft of vital organs for
black-market transplant; and the disguise-abduction of children from
theme park and shopping mall restrooms. While these crime legends may
be concretely implausible and may, as debunkers suggest, promote social
paranoia and feed a variety of moral panics, they also express fears of a
kind of postmodern social drift. This sense of drift centers around loss of
authority in a double sense: civil society is depicted as having lost all power
to protect, that is, its informal guardianship powers; and, at the same time,
the world is seen as one in which information about danger and safety can
no longer be reliably evaluated or deemed authoritative. Crime legends
Donovan—Crime legends in a new medium
191
thus reflect a ‘default’ state of Leviathan rule and a deep commitment to
uncertainty.
In some sense this world-view reflects (or perhaps exaggerates) institu-
tional trends. Specifically, the decline of an optimistic modern period in
which western governments (1) saw the preservation of safety and order
as a directive and a responsibility fundamental to the state’s legitimacy and
(2) engaged in discursive practices promoting general public trust in an
ultimately positive outcome with respect to the former. Speaking about
shifts in the USA (Currie, 1985: 13; Bayley and Shearing, 1996: 586–7),
Australia (O’Malley, 1992: 264–5) and the United Kingdom (Garland,
1996; Stanko, 1997), several criminologists have pointed to this shift in the
state’s role vis-a-vis crime. The state has sought to disinvest in the preven-
tion of crime and focus mainly upon apprehension and incarceration of
offenders.2 Thus the prominent theme, in this study of modern folktales, of
a remote, inconsistent, and uncaring net of guardianship against crime is
not without real-world correlates.
How and why do crime legends persist as a mainly extra-institutional
form, maintaining a degree of independence in a mass media saturated
world? Here the work of Shibutani (1966), who understands the role of
rumor as a collective transaction and a problem-solving activity in ambigu-
ous situations, is key.3 The fact that the current study concerns, by contrast
to Shibutani’s study, a non-crisis situation, and therefore reflects everyday
concerns, complicates the role of problem-solving and ambiguity in inter-
esting ways. Here I argue that to some degree ambiguity is imputed by
interlocutors themselves, rather than being situational.
Sources of data
My larger study, upon which this article is based, involved the analysis of
primary sources: discussions of crime legends in public Internet newsgroup
discussions in the years 1995 to 1999 inclusive. Keyword and related
Boolean search technology enabled a search of more than 40,000 news-
groups at once.4 Not surprisingly, a large portion of these discussions was
found in the skeptical/debunking newsgroup, alt.folklore.urban. Other
newsgroups identified by the search included ones devoted to parenting,
feminism, and movies.5
The demographic composition of Internet users during this time (the
years 1995 to 1999) was tilted toward the more privileged segments of
society. In 1995, 24 million people in the United States used the Internet;
one-fourth of them made more than $80,000 per year and 64 percent had
a college degree. By contrast, in the general population, only 10 percent
had an income above $80,000 and only 28 percent a college degree
(Nielsen Media Research, reported in Miller, 1995). According to a 1999
survey, Internet use has been moving toward gender balance. The fact that
folklore easily flourishes in this environment should give pause to those
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Theoretical Criminology 6(2)
who associate ‘rumor-mongering’ exclusively with marginal or subaltern
populations, whether out of romantic or disdaining impulses.
As a follower of urban legends both on and off the Internet for some
time, I was intrigued by two broader cultural reactions to the rise of urban
legend debunking literature (epitomized by books for a popular audience
written by J.H. Brunvand) and the work of the on-line debunking com-
munity, including Barbara and David Mikkelson’s Urban Legend Reference
Pages and the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban.6 The first reaction was the
attribution of naivete to these skeptics by ‘defenders’ of these rumors.
Believers often accused them of ignoring the world’s cruelty. The second
reaction was the easy accommodation to the seemingly inherently skeptical
concept of the ‘urban legend.’ Far from discouraging belief in such tales or
promoting a more critical mindset, the urban legend as a cultural category
was easily adapted to promulgation practices. ‘This is true,’ many email
scare warnings now say. ‘This is not an urban legend.’ So I became interested
in how belief actually operated in and around these legends, and in how
the legends themselves seemed to be necessary and closely guarded, or
defended, resources. There is, simply put, more to it than simply believing
or not believing a legend.
Research on rumor
One of the persistent qualities that researchers of rumor have found is its
role in the reduction of anxiety through the reshaping of information into
acceptable forms (Rosnow and Fine, 1976: 62). This quality in part
explains why word-of-mouth and informally circulated genres persist as
sources of meaning in a world which not only has high levels of cognitive-
information inputs but also high diversity in the character of those inputs.
Von Roretz (1915: 28) observed early in the line of rumor research that
promulgators can avoid responsibility for what they are expressing by
treating the information as factual news. Rosnow and Fine’s work began to
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