The grief and the grifters

In the wake of such horror, we naturally look for something – anything – that might make things make any kind of sense. What could possibly motivate such an attack? How could it have happened? What could we do to make sure it never happens again?

Such answers never come quickly, and sometimes never come at all. Even in an era where information travels across the world at the speed of light across fibre-optic cables, uncovering answers in the first place can still be a slow process. 

It is taking the FBI, with near-unlimited resources, weeks to dig out basic information about the attempted assassination of the US president. Similarly, it might take UK police – who will surely be given everything they need from the Home Office for this case – slow weeks and months to build their case as to what motivated someone to commit this act of horror.

The media does not know much more than what it has reported on the Southport attacks, namely that a 17-year-old boy has been arrested in connection to the attack and that police are investigating his mental health as a possible factor in the assault.

That is all the media can report, for two reasons. The first is that there are protections for offenders and alleged offenders below the age of 18, which generally preclude the naming of suspects who are children at the time of their alleged crime. These can be lifted after a conviction, as they were for the killers of Brianna Ghey – but before that point, children cannot be named.

Beyond that, for any serious crime, the UK has strict laws around what is known as “contempt of court”. In the interests of making sure that a suspect can have a fair trial, what the media can report once a suspect has been charged is heavily restricted to a small list of facts – and no other details can be included in reports. These rules now extend to when a suspect is likely to be charged in the near future. 

Breaching contempt of court rules can result in unlimited fines against a publication and jail time for the journalist concerned – but even more seriously than this, they can be used to collapse the prosecution of a suspect. If the contempt was egregious enough and can be argued to have undermined a trial, it can result in a ruling that a fair trial is impossible.

Anyone who breaches contempt of court rulings in these cases is not some hero acting in the interests of justice, then – they are creating the very real possibility that a trial for the crimes concerned will collapse. 

There is an argument to be had that such rules are outdated in the online era, and have the effect of undermining trust in the media and justice system alike, but just ignoring the rules rather than campaigning for them to be changed helps no-one.

In the wake of an attack as shocking and horrifying as that in Southport, we have the worst kind of information gulf. No-one knows very much, and there might never be answers that actually make sense of any of it. Police take longer than we might want to find anything out, and once they have much of it won’t be reportable.

The people happy to jump into that gulf are extremists and grifters. The former will use the absence of information to play on people’s prejudices – whether that is racism, anti-immigration sentiment, religious hatred, or some toxic cocktail of the three. The latter can be motivated by little more than a desire for attention, or for the money that comes along with clicks. 

Neither has anything to do with genuine sympathy for families going through the worst circumstances imaginable, let alone the process of judgment. We can leap on the problem being one of “misinformation”, but it is broader than that – it is extremists willing to exploit anything, however low, and a slice of the public so impatient for answers that it can end up treating real-life tragedy like a soap plotline, seeking out ‘spoilers’ to be one step ahead of everyone else.

There will surely – there must – be lessons to take from the events in Southport to try to make sure this does not happen to other families. It need not be near the top of the list, but looking at contempt of court and other rules that create this information vacuum should be somewhere on it.

But at its core, this is not a problem of social media, but simply a consequence of our expectations of the online world and the speed at which we want information. There will always be bottom-feeders willing to fill that vacuum.

Those people exist in the offline world as well as online ones – they should be made to feel consequences in both.