“She was so beautiful.”
(The Perfect/Beautiful victim complex).
—
She’s young, she’s kind, she’s optimistic. She’s wealthy, intelligent, soft-spoken. She’s thin, she’s delicate, she’s white. She’s wide eyed, she’s naive, she’s a tragedy. She’s always under the age of 25 and the epitome of femininity.
Most importantly, she’s dead.
—
Researchers describe the “Perfect Victim” as a social construct curated by the media. It’s an incredibly harmful ideology that contributes to victim-blaming. The harm is derived from how victims are treated when they don’t fit this mold.
You may recognize or have said phrases like:
“Why didn’t she leave?”
“What was she wearing?”
“She should’ve fought back.”
“If that were me, I would’ve…”
“She didn’t deserve that, she was so pretty.”
—
The Perfect/Beautiful victim can be dated back to the melodramas of the victorian era. Art has historically served to gather a sort of allure to suffering (of the artist or of the muse) with concepts like the “Tortured Artist” and “The Tortured Poet”.
In terms of true crime, the beautiful victim/perfect victim has always been used to dictate which cases should be sensationalized and classified as high profile. The media uses our societal value of beauty to their advantage; the more beautiful the victim, the more fascination and outrage from the public.
In contemporary times, this fetishization of suffering is seen in the rise of the waif aesthetic (a micro-art movement that contains imagery of fragility and innocence along with text containing tones of hopelessness and misery) as well as other subcultures that center around a romanticized victimhood.
Women can be soft and delicate, but they shouldn’t be punished for being abrasive, angry, and ugly in their suffering. Victimhood shouldn’t be dictated by the observer and definitely shouldn’t remove blame from the perpetrator by attaching it to the victim.
It’s damaging to expect topics as harrowing as rape, murder, prostitution, and suicide to be beautiful. It’s equally as damaging to expect the same of a victim.
Beautiful or ugly, dead or alive, everyone is worthy of respectful media coverage in the equalizer that is death.
