True Crime: Education or Exploitation?

By Jake Lankford. Written on April 24th, 2022.

True crime has been a popular form of entertainment in the past few years. From 2015’s MAKING A MURDERER on Netflix to the massively popular 2008 book THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE, to YouTube videos that gain tens of millions of views at a time, this is a popular genre among a lot of people. However, with the rise of this popularity also rose a heated debate about true crime:

Is it education on crime cases, or exploitation of horrifying events?

One one hand, there is the argument that true crime is a form of education on both infamous and more obscure crime cases, in a way that also can entertain. True crime can be considered “edutainment:” education that entertains. A major example of true crime’s edutainment is in how a lot of it is structured: like a thriller or mystery movie, series or novel. THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE, for example, reads very much like a thriller novel at portions and like a police procedural at others. The structuring of true crime allows it to have an entertaining side to it, while also laying bare the facts of a lot of the cases.

Another example of this edutainment is the rise of the gimmick: true crime, but with a twist. Enter YouTube, more specifically, YouTuber Bailey Sarian is perhaps the biggest example of true crime with a gimmick. In her “Murder, Mystery and Makeup” series, she applies her makeup while telling a true crime story. The juxtaposition of the disturbing true crime story and the imagery of Sarian applying her makeup is very much the gimmick of this series, a big reason why her channel has skyrocketed in popularity, and has also led to a rise in similar channels that approach true crime in this simular, casual manner.

True crime, whether it is consumed in the narrative non-fiction or gimmick-based manner, aims to educate and not shock its audience.

“Education certainly. I suppose exploitation of the victims or their families might occur. I feel like a person has to be negatively impacted for there to be exploitation,” Derek Norman, researcher at UT Martin, said.

And therein lies the second side of the true crime debate: does it exploit victims and families and can it revel too much in shock value?

In 1976, director Nagisa Ōshima released the now-cult classic art/erotica film, IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, a sexually-charged, slow-burn retelling of the 1936 murder of Kichizō Ishida by his lover/mistress Sada Abe, who strangled him and, in what has made the case so infamous at the time and in the modern day, chopped off his genitalia, tucked them in the pocket of her kimono and went about her day as if nothing had happened.

Now, go back to the strangest detail, the mutilation. Therein lies one instance of exploitation in true crime: the perceived revelling in shock value and all of the gory details. Instead of focusing on Abe and Ishida as people and what potentially led her to committing the shocking act, most retellings of this case choose to focus on what she did, and hammer in on the detail of the mutilation. Most, if not all, of the films that have been based on this case choose to zoom in on the gory detail of the mutilation and most documentarian retellings of this case actively disregard the edutainment nature of true crime and transform it into a shockfest.

While IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES is extremely well-made and is a fantastic film in its own right, its heavy emphasis on sexuality, the more salacious aspects of Ishida’s and Abe’s relationship and the queasy closeups of the final mutilation take it out of the realm of potentially educating, and firmly plant it in the realm of exploitation of a shocking case to get butts into theater seats.

Sada Abe’s crime isn’t the first, or only, true crime case to have been exploited for shock value, but it is certainly one of the biggest examples of it. Other examples of this include the Monster of Florence, Lorena Bobbitt and Carl Tanzler. A serial killer, another penis-removal case and a necrophile respectively, all of these cases are more known for their bizarre details, again, the result of them being exploited for shock value.

Shock value is not the only form of exploitation that surrounds true crime, there is also the exploitation of victims and families in the genre. In one of the most well-known instances of this, the podcast Serial, in particular, its first season on the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and the question of whether Adnan Syed, the man who was convicted of the crime, killed Lee. The first season of Serial treated the case like a real-time murder mystery series, but instead of presenting it in a neutral view, host Sarah Koening has been criticized for presenting Syed as a man wrongly convicted and has also been heavily criticized for treating the Lee murder, and the people in it, as characters in a story, rather than people. Just as a sidenote, the popularity of Serial led to Syed nearly getting a retrial, which the Lee family said “re-opened wounds that few can imagine.”

Treating victims and familes of cases like characters in a story is exploitation, plain and simple. There is a tightrope that needs to be walked with true crime: present the story in a way that engages audience members, but do not treat it like exploitative entertainment. Remember that these are real people and victims, and when true crime bloggers, writers and documentarians take sides or choose to zoom in on horrific details, it goes from educating, to exploitation.

“Aside from the from the amateur detective crowd, they (listeners of true crime) aren’t trying to piece together a solution. This is rubbernecking,” podcaster Daniel Green said.

It is important that as true crime gets more and more popular, to not exploit these tragic and horrific cases. A balance needs to be met with educating the audience and entertaining them, and not treating these cases like exploitative shock value or a car crash one rubbernecks at as they drive by. True crime can be extremely educational, but if care is not taken, it can easily fall into exploitation.