Rolling in the Deep: Crime elsewhere provides comfort, however bleak it is

While hosting a slot on Cape Talk’s afternoon drive show recently, writer and legendary broadcaster Mike Wills noted the growing popularity of true crime streaming series and podcasts across the world.

Wills had been prompted to probe specifically the phenomenon of the indisputably high numbers of women who form the core audience for the genre after reading bestselling author and journalist Nancy Jo Sales’s take on the issue in a column for The Guardian on 5 July.

Sales has a theory that the millions of women across the world who watch do so to flush out psychos and malevolent predators in a time of increased threat on social media and dating apps.

On Wills’s show, Professor Renata Schoeman, the head of healthcare leadership at the Stellenbosch Business School, said women binged on crime series often because we are able to associate and relate to the victims.

“You can get tips from these series, podcasts and books,” Schoeman said. “In that way women begin to safeguard themselves against larger societal issues in terms of a breakdown in trust.”

Wrote Sales: “Through consuming true crime content, studies say, women experience catharsis; they work out their fears about their own vulnerability and perhaps their rage about what has happened to other women as well. They see in true crime a source of education about how not to wind up a victim.”

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