Copycat shootings?
In today's Independent Johann Hari raises the question "Did the media help to pull the trigger?" in relation to the current spate of shootings by Raoul Moat in Northumbria, following closely upon the random killings by Derrick Bird in Cumbria. That intense media coverage of such events may lead others to carry out similar actions (the so-called 'copycat' or 'contagion' theory) has always been a matter for controversy within media studies, though such organizations as the British Board of Film Classification, Ofcom and the BBC err on the side of caution, ruling, for example, that no portrayal of a crime or of a suicide should be portrayed in such detail as to make it readily imitable.
Hari's article draws heavily on the work of prominent, but controversial, US forensic psychiatrist, Dr Park Dietz, seen below on Charlie Brooker's newswipe urging the media to limit their coverage of such killing sprees.
According to Hari's article Dietz's research has established that "saturation-level news coverage of mass murder causes, on average, one more mass murder in the next two weeks", a finding into which Moat's current killing spree fits quite punctually.
Hari refers also to an episode of Casualty which prominently showed a character taking an overdose. In the following week the overdosing rate in Britain rose by 17 per cent, according to Hari's article. In Bridgend in 2008 a wave of suicides amongst young people provoked concern that users were using social networking sites to encourage and glamorize suicide, but it's notable that the police also urged the press to show restraint in their coverage.
However, the supposed copycat effect remains contested. Dietz suggested in 1996 that shootings in Tasmania were triggered by global media coverage of the then recent Dunblane, UK, shootings. Guy Cumberbatch of Aston University responded that such a suggestion was "uninformed and disgraceful" and that "There is no place for this kind of psychiatry". (See "Dunblane 'copycat' theory divides experts".)
Dr Cecil E Greek in his Florida State University Criminology course quotes a number of studies which have reported that there is little or no evidence for the copycat effect.
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