Blame frenzy is over the top

Media coverage of the tragic death of Henderson toddler Aisling Symes highlighted an interesting sociological phenomenon. Aisling, you'll recall, disappeared and was found several days later in a nearby stormwater drain, where she had apparently drowned.

During the search for the little girl, police raised the possibility that she had been abducted. Inevitably, the story created huge public interest, even generating a distasteful media sideshow when a high-profile television psychic got involved. But what interested me was the reaction when Aisling's body was found.

The New Zealand Herald quoted indignant neighbours as saying they couldn't understand how the police could not have found her body when it was right under their noses.

I had to listen to a more thorough account of what happened on Radio New Zealand's Morning Report to realise that the drain had in fact been checked not once but several times and that there was a very good explanation for why Aisling wasn't found earlier.

I watched TV3's coverage of the story that night and was appalled. Once again the focus was on the supposed police failure. The tone was nitpicking and nauseatingly self-righteous.

In The Dominion Post, the critical scrutiny was not on the police but on the Waitakere City Council. The paper revealed there had been complaints to the council about the manhole cover on the drain but nothing had been done to fix it.

The media coverage highlighted a common kneejerk reaction that happens whenever something goes wrong or a tragedy occurs. Our immediate reaction as a society is to demand retribution. We assume someone must be to blame. Public outrage is the defining sentiment of our time.

We seem incapable of accepting, as our forebears accepted, that terrible things happen through accident or unfortunate circumstances and in many cases there's not much that could have been done to avoid them.

In the case of Aisling Symes it appears to have been a ghastly combination of circumstances: a parent's momentary inattention, an active and inquisitive child, a manhole cover that had evidently popped out – as often happens – because of pressure in the drain created by heavy rain.

Toddlers drown all too often. What was different in this case was that in the time that elapsed before Aisling's body was found, the mystery of her disappearance, heightened by speculation about foul play, meant that the story dominated the news agenda and became a national talking point.

By the time she was found, public interest had reached fever pitch and we needed a scapegoat. It was almost as if the public, having made an emotional investment in the case, demanded a payback.

In this case it appears that the primary blame ended up falling on the council. So we can expect the usual official inquiries, followed by ritual breast-beating and mea culpas. We insist on it.

Committees will have been formed and checklists drawn up. But the checklist hasn't been invented that can neutralise every risk and anticipate every human failing, and it's idle – in fact dishonest – to pretend that it's possible.

We're caught up in a quixotic quest for the perfect society in which all hazards are eliminated. This coincides with a widespread conviction, encouraged by decades of mollycoddling nanny state government, that no-one should be held responsible for their own fate.

Burgeoning bureaucracies such as OSH are devoted to making us all safe. But you can't legislate for all human imperfection and there's only so far you can go to protect people against themselves. We end up chasing our tails.

Another sociological phenomenon, closely related to the urge to find someone to blame for everything that goes wrong, is our propensity as a society to feel aggrieved.

We live in a highly fractious society in which people seem programmed to take offence and to find fault with everyone and everything.

The absurd overreaction to the schoolboy antics of five Auckland Grammar pupils who kissed a swastika and gave a Nazi salute was a perfect example.

The price we demanded for this silly but essentially innocent teenage prank was that the perpetrators be humiliated in front of the entire country.

In a recent speech to the Police Association I commented that the police, because they're at the sharp end of so many of society's problems, are a natural lightning rod for criticism.

So are the media, although paradoxically the media simultaneously feed the cult of grievance and victimisation.

In our querulous culture, everyone's a victim – even the bad guys. If the police obtain a conviction, it's now almost a reflex action for someone to insist that they got the wrong guy. And even if it's generally accepted that they did get the right guy, and he's duly dealt with, it's then the judiciary's turn to get it in the neck from a strident lobby group that complains the sentence wasn't severe enough.

That, in turn, invariably sets off yet another lobby group – the one that says criminals aren't to blame for their own bad behaviour and we're being beastly and inhuman by putting them in jail.

It's become almost an automatic ritual, after every sentencing for a violent offence, for the victims or their surviving relatives to front up to the television cameras with their arms around each other outside court and tearfully protest that justice hasn't been done. It's all part of what the English writer Theodore Dalrymple describes as emotional incontinence – the bizarre compulsion to indulge in maudlin public displays of sentiment.

Earlier generations put tragedies and misfortunes behind them and tried to move on. But encouraged by a media that feasts on rage and grief, we perversely wallow in them and draw them out so that our suffering is prolonged.

Perhaps we all need to get out more.

- © Fairfax NZ News