• pigduck
• Sep 21,2007
• In: Nation Madness

Sensitivity & Respecting Victims & Families

How can I not comment? Well actually I very easily can but I feel some things need to be said.

The insensitivity of the press has irked me a great deal. First of all, you don’t publish a picture of a dead person. Never never never! Besides creeping the daylights out of us and maybe making us squirm in our seats, what will you achieve out of it? Sure, the body was not identified at the time but I don’t see you displaying pictures of other murdered unidentified corpses!

What more if it is a child! The press have failed in their duty. You are meant to inform professionally… not sensationally. Can’t you at least respect her? Just because she was unclaimed at the time does not mean we should not show responsibility … just because she is dead does not mean we should strip her of what dignity she had left by blowing up the photos and putting it on the front page. That is just plain rude. We know the suffering and pain she had to endure was unspeakable and unfathomable and can’t you respect her a bit more rather than being self-serving and caring only about readership and circulation?!

Blogs are no better but we cannot expect much from the common man but from the press and media?! You should be ashamed. But I don’t think you are… you are smug about it… proud that you were the first to publish her photo. It is appalling.

If you can respect a murderer’s identity then why are you showing such disrespect to this little girl?

Don’t even get me started on our police force and investigating offiicers who have displayed such blatant disrespect to the family by releasing information to the press before informing the rightful people of the results beforehand. Are you trying to gain your fifteen minutes of limelight… do you feel the press is more worthy to find out because they have cameras and notepads?

It is a compelling read I must admit… it is nothing more to me unfortunately… or to you for that matter… forget us, think of the parents …. besides being an issue of “national importance”, sit back for a minute, “law enforcers” and think, wouldn’t you like to be informed first of the results if it was your child that is dead? Wouldn’t you like to know and be prepared for what is to come after? I would. And please, the family has been in turmoil for a month, already having to deal with a missing sister, daughter, granddaughter and niece and you don’t even have the heart to tell them first of your findings?! Come on, you can do better than that! Instead they have to hear from the press *ahem* (the wolves cloaked in sheep clothing) and in the press it is nothing more than hearsay and speculation. Oh, how awful!

Of course, acceptance will be hard on the family if the case has ballooned to such ugly proportions. I would be in as much denial and disbelief too. Even worse I suppose is having to hear the police force, with all their insensitivity, tell the press that the family is  “not accepting” their investigations. Can you believe the pomposity of that?! Has your heart been hardened to the point of no return?!

Conspiracies and speculation flourish at times like this. We are a nation of rumour mongers. I am disappointed at how things have been handled. Saddened that this is what our country has degenerated into.

Sure, we will point our crooked fingers at the authorities, blaming them for our current level of “national security” - some of us may recollect on safer lives, when we were free to roam without feeling fearful of strangers… where everybody watched out for one another.

We scream for justice and for better enforcement… for the killer(s) to be brought forth and charged with the same fate they have served to the victim… all worthy and rightful cries.

Where is our sense of community though? Have we lost sight of humanity in its simplest forms? We need one another to survive. We shouldn’t turn our backs to one another and seek to maim and destroy just to gain our fair share of whatever cake is out there. We cannot draw lines and say, “this is my half, that is yours”… or be greedy. It isn’t just enforcement of the law… it is more than that. We have to care, love and nurture these traits. It starts at home… sad to say. But it does. How we bring our kids up, what values we want them to have and to carry on with is going to be what shapes society… I guess it is like weeds and flowers - what do we want to have in our garden?