Julia Shaw

We should be normalizing intervening.

Murder is a really interesting crime because most of the time it's perpetrated for reasons that we don't like as a society.

So as a person who talks a lot to the news and also to producers who are trying to make true crime shows who don't necessarily have a deep understanding of psychology, let's just say, and who come at you with myths where you go, oh, no, we're not going to talk about that.

We're not going to talk about whether or not the mom is to blame for this person killing somebody.

I hate that excuse.

That's one of my least favorite sort of the trauma narrative of all people who do terrible things must have had a terrible childhood I think is really problematic.

What really happens in murder most of the time, which is not what you see on TV because it's really boring, is it's a fight that gets out of control.

And if you look at the real reasons stated, it's things like this person owed me $4 and so I killed him.

This person stole my bike.

It's these really stupid reasons.

And it is just this bad decision in the moment, an overreaction to a fight, to an argument.

And it wasn't planned.

It's not some psychopath sharpening their knives, waiting for months to try and kill this person.

And we don't like that because there's something called the victimization gap, which is that the impact of this extreme situation on the perpetrator, there's a huge gap between that and the impact on the victim and their family.

So the victim loses the life, whereas the perpetrator, sure, they get imprisoned, but at best, right, if you will, in terms of justice, but they don't have the same kinds of consequences.

And we don't like that.

We like things that have extreme consequences and

to have extreme reasons.

And so that's why I think there's this real desire to show serial killers and to show people who are in fact planning murders for a really long time and then engage in them rather than this fight that goes out of control or someone drink driving or someone who is, I mean, unfortunately intimate partner homicide is also one of those situations that is common.

One of the top four reasons for murder as well.