When Empathy Gets in the Way By L.S. Stratton
When Empathy Gets in the Way
By L.S. Stratton
I’d only been covering her case for three days, and I was already having nightmares. She was fifteen when she was murdered. According to her friends, she was well liked though not particularly outgoing. She’d given a shy smile at the camera in her high school photo. We ran the photo in our newspaper with the article that glossed over the details of her murder, of how her older, teenaged relative raped and strangled her. He was the same relative that she’d told others had “creeped her out,” that she’d expressed to her adopted grandmother she didn’t want to be left alone with him.
I saw her smile in my dreams one night, making me lurch awake at around 2 a.m.
Her case and other cases that I covered during my nearly two years as a crime reporter at a newspaper in a small county in Maryland helped me let go of one major misconception about reporting: it’s a journalist’s job to remain objective at all times.
“Just stick to the facts. Don’t editorialize. Keep your distance. You are not the story,” my professors at J-school had drilled into us.
I learned that even when I tried my best, it was impossible to completely distance myself from the stories I reported. I couldn’t help putting myself in the place of the murder victim’s sister sobbing on the witness stand. I couldn’t help diving into the mind of the accused sitting with his defense attorney in the courtroom. My dreams showed that even when I tried to keep an objective distance, it was all stored in my subconscious, waiting for me when I slept.
And even when I believed I’d succeeded at being the objective observer, simply writing what I gathered from police reports and interviews, I’d still get a call from a criminal’s furious wife saying she knew I was out to get her husband, or an accident victim asking me why I chose to report about the worst moment in their life. I used to give them the speech of “I stick to the facts. This isn’t personal. It’s just a job,” but I gave up after a while. I knew it would fall on deaf ears, and on some level, it wasn’t really true. By writing about their story, I became a part of their story—from their perspectives. I was a real person, not a byline. Just like they were real people, not just names on a police blotter. And their angry or tear-filled phone calls would always remind me of that.
As a thriller writer, I now use my pesky inability to silo my “reporter” self from my “real” self to my advantage. I use it to get into the minds of characters: the “good guys”, the “bad guys”, and everyone in between.
Because even though I clearly empathized with that innocent girl in the picture who was forced to suffer a horrible death, I also had to report and subsequently try to explain the rationale and backstory of the teenaged boy who murdered her.
I had to see past the bravado he displayed in the courtroom when he openly laughed during his bail hearing, and reckon with my own disgust. I had to read and report about how he had been neglected as a child, abandoned by his mother, and was believed to have suffered sexual abuse. Of how he was jealous of the victim and how she seemed to be thriving with friends and acceptance, but he wasn’t. I had to hear pleas from relatives who insisted the grandmother had only wanted to help and save both children from their tragic pasts, but ultimately, ended up doing neither for both. And finally, I had to report the story of his suicide by hanging in his jail cell after he was found guilty and received his life’s sentence.
I don’t dream about his victim anymore—or him. Her face is now a blurry memory. But I have taken lessons from my experience of reporting about them and others like them, especially lessons about myself. It’s impossible to truly be an objective observer when real people are involved, and that’s OK. Just use your empathy in the right way.
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L.S. Stratton is a NAACP Image Award-nominated author and former crime newspaper reporter who has written more than a dozen books under different pen names in just about every genre from thrillers to romance to historical fiction. She currently lives in Maryland with her husband, their daughter, and their tuxedo cat.
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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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