By: Ty Phillips/Editor

People become victims everyday. From sexual abuse to domestic violence, there are always people who are living their worst day. 

     The knowledge that people have been through horrible experiences makes people morbidly curious. ‘What did they go through?’; ‘What were they thinking?’; ‘How were they treated?’ With social media people hear something terrible and have question after question. 

     It often seems as if people are forgetting that the “stories” they are listening to came from real people. Recently, I saw students from Central Visual and Performing Arts High School talk about their experience surviving a school shooting in 2022. Over 20 people have come forward to talk about how terrifying it was and how scared they were. 

     To my absolute shock, all I saw in the comments were people asking for part two, making insensitive comments and not many people giving any sympathy. Most of the comments were filled with reaction pics and “Oooooh when we gonna get the rest of the story?” as if what they were listening to was fictional and there for their entertainment. 

     With the Epstein files I am seeing this more and more–people feel like they should be able to know who the people are, how old they were when it happened and everything they went through. People are treating the victims like a show.

     It seems as if people are quickly forgetting that what they find ‘entertaining’ is what others are having nightmares from. Amanda Knox talks about this in her article, “True crime fails when it treats trauma as entertainment. But there’s a better way.” She discusses how society finds brutal murders and true crime to be the peak of their interest without taking into account that it actually happened to someone. 

     While morbid curiosity is normal and important, there becomes a point where it becomes insensitive and rude. Sharing photos of crime scenes and un-blurring photos of the children in the Epstein files is not acceptable or normal. Treating victims with the respect they deserve is happening less and less; They are becoming spectacles for people to talk about.
    Many articles are being written, and there are photos shown of things that victims had to go through, yet it seems as if people are not focusing on the victims themselves but the circumstances and the monstrosities they went through.

     Documentaries are often made about what victims went through. A newer one is Piper Rockelle and what she went through with childhood exploitation and how terribly her mother treated her. While it was airing, people on her TikTok had very little empathy, leaving comments like, ‘Yes, but did she have to do…..” or “Do you guys think she acts like this because her mom made her?” When Rockelle would come on social media and talk about how the documentary–which was made without her consent–affected her, people told her to move on and to just answer their questions. 

     Social media and TV are heavily adding to people’s greed to know what people have been through, desensitizing them to the fact that they have no right to know how people have lived. 

     The Epstein files have left people with many questions. Something I am seeing often asked is why are victims being unblurred, but the perpetrators are being hidden? This leads to more questions about the victims, trying to find them and trying to see if there was anyone who loosely looked like them hanging around celebrities. 

     People are reading what victims had to go through and being disgusted, yet they continue to share it and investigate more. Even when victims of Epstein and similar events come out and ask people to be kinder, not to talk about them like they are a spectacle and give them the respect they deserve, people continue on to act as they did previously. 

     Morbid curiosity is fine, but think about what if one day your family had a horrid murder or attack, and before people ask how you are feeling or what they can do to help, they are sharing all of your private information for everyone to know without asking you for as little as an okay. How would that make you feel? Be considerate and respectful when listening and learning about what people have gone through. `