“We brought Ana to live in a safe place, a quiet country village, a leafy suburb, where the only sounds in the morning are the doves cooing. No one could suspect the evil that lay in waiting for her. No one could anticipate the darkness that swirled in the souls of those that murdered and violated her… Life without Ana is no longer even an existence – it is a misery that we must endure for the rest of our lives.”

– Victim impact statement of Geraldine Kriegel, the mother of Anastasia Kriegel (Dwyer, 2019)

Introduction

There were 77 homicides in Ireland in 2018 (CSO 2019). Of these, none attracted as much public attention as the murder of Anastasia Kriegel on 14 May 2018. As of 2 December 2019, ‘Anastasia Kriegel’ has 465,000 hits on Google and is mentioned on Twitter around 10-20 times a day. Her name appears in 37,800 news articles – mostly Irish publications, but her case has also been picked up by British, French, and Russian news outlets. During the trial of Boy A and Boy B, her name was posted on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit tens of thousands of times – it is not possible to get exact figures on how many times specific names and phrases have been used on Twitter or Facebook, but the search results for her name on each respective site yield hundreds of pages of results.

The death of Ana Kriegel came to represent something more than a single tragic event. This is because “acts are not, they become. So So also, with crime. Crime does not exist. Crime is created. First there are acts. Then follows a long process of giving meaning to those acts” (Christie 1998, p.121).

The Death of Ana Kriegel, the ‘tragedy of our times.’ (Harvey, 2019)

To understand the public interest in the death of Anastasia Kriegel, we must first identify who she was and what exactly happened to her. Anastasia Kriegel was a 14-year-old girl from Leixlip, Co. Kildare. She is referred to as ‘Ana’ by the media and by her family. She had been adopted by her parents, Geraldine and Patric Kriegel, from Russia in 2006. She was their first child. She had some emotional problems, beginning in primary school, where she was badly bullied by her peers. Her resource teacher in sixth class told her parents that she was “terrified for her” to start secondary school, “because she was so innocent. She feared other students would take advantage of this” (Gallagher, 2019 A). When she did start secondary school, this premonition came true – the bullying not only continued, but actively got worse. She received death threats under her YouTube channel, was sent sexually suggestive messages by older teenagers she did not know, and mocked for her appearance and the fact that she had been adopted. Staff in Pieta House, where she initially received treatment for her emotional problems, had to call her father and get him to pick her up and take her home after every session, as the prospect of being bullied made her too scared to walk home alone. Her parents (whom her bullies referred to as her “fake mam and dad”(Gallagher, 2019 A) said that during this time she craved friendship but did not have many people her own age to spend time with – this is mentioned in nearly every article about Kriegel¹.

Her father said that “People didn’t understand her. She was unique and full of fun. She couldn’t hate anyone even though some of the people were bullying her. She was disappointed [with the bullies]” (Gallagher 2019). At the time of her murder, she was receiving counselling from Kildare Youth Services following an incident of self-harm. These details about Ana Kriegel’s life, although not relevant to her murder, were mentioned throughout her trial as her parents and the media attempted to humanise her and give her an identity beyond that of a victim. Kriegel had had a counselling appointment on the day of her murder, 14 May 2018. She had returned home around 4:00pm. 55 minutes later a 13-year-old boy she knew from school, Boy B, called to the door, and her father answered. The two children spoke in whispers for a moment. Boy B told Ana that his friend, Boy A, whom she had a crush on, wanted to meet her. Ana went upstairs to get a sweatshirt and then left her house with him. Her father said on watching her leave, that “[s]he was happy when she left. She gave me a big smile.” This was the last time either of her parents would see her alive. Boy B led her to St Catherine’s Park, where they met Boy A. Boy A had a bag with him (nicknamed the ‘murder kit’ by tabloids) that contained a mask, gloves, knee pads and shinguards – he wore these as he killed her. She fought back unsuccessfully. Boy A returned home “dirty, scruffy and dusty”, looking “pale and shaky” (Doyle, 2019 A). He told his parents that he had been beaten up by two older teenagers in the park.

Kriegel’s mother returned home from work shortly after 5:00pm, and upon learning from her father that she had left the house with Boy B she became immediately concerned – “Nobody calls for Ana,” she said – the media would later repeat these words to evoke feelings of pity and anger in the public. (The Times and MSN News would go on to use this quote as a clickbait headline for numerous pieces). She called and texted her daughter to no response. They went searching for her, driving through local estates and walking through the park to no avail. After four hours, they went to Leixlip Garda station, but by then Ana was dead. On Tuesday May 15th she was announced missing and the public search began – she was featured on RTE News that night for the first time.

Her body was found on 17 May 2019 in Glenwood House, a derelict former farmhouse, or as the tabloids described it, a “squalid hellhole” (Doyle 2019 B) just 3 kilometres from her home. Since the murder there have been numerous calls for the building to be demolished – Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has endorsed this campaign – “It’s very hard to pass that building without thinking about what happened there,” – a stance that was very popular among voters nationwide, not just in Kriegel’s constituency (O’Connell 2019). Her body was found naked apart from a pair of socks. She had sustained serious injuries and there were a number of large blood splatters on the floor and walls. She had been sexually assaulted. She died of blunt-force trauma to the head and neck, most likely caused by a heavy stick or concrete block. She was exactly 14 years, 2 months and 3 weeks old.

Two 13-year-old boys, described on social media thousands of times as “evil bastards” and “evil monsters,” had left her body here. In Glenwood House, she was sexually assaulted by Boy A and forensic evidence linked him to most of her injuries. On the 23rd of May they were both arrested and charged with her murder. This made the headlines on every news programme on television and radio that day and was on the cover of every Irish newspaper the next morning. Her case was immediately newsworthy for a number of reasons.

The Grief Roadshow: Public Identification with Anastasia Kriegel

The media is vulnerable to distortion and selectivity, for everyday events cannot simply be mirrored by news outlets. There are so many events that could be reported that journalists must be selective (Williams and Dickinson, 1993 p.212). Lester (1980, p.984) has argued that selection is determined by a “template [of] official and unofficial values, norms and beliefs.”, including beliefs about commercial viability. Similarly, not all current events are picked up for discussion by social media. Virality is “often fuelled by emotional reaction rather than thoughtful response,” partly because “social media works by levelling and ripping bits of life from their contexts as a form of entertainment or news – the more outrageous, the better” (Oliver 2017).

The specific facts of Kriegel’s case satisfies a number of media criteria. One, it concerns a crime against a child. Crimes against children are always reviled by society, as they are perceived as the quintessential victims – structurally and physically powerless and dependent (Walklate 1989 p. 68). Stories involving children always have a degree of resonance with the experiences of parents and guardians responsible for child care (Hay 1995). Despite this, not all cases of child murder capture media attention with force or longevity – Ana Kriegel is unfortunately not the first or the last young homicide victim in Ireland, but she is certainly the most well-known.

Two, the victim is especially sympathetic, for reasons other than her young age. Kriegel is what Christie (1986, p. 18) calls the ‘ideal victim,’ the type of person who is most readily given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim. It is only those cases featuring a particular type of victim that will attract sustained media attention and collective public outcry, Greer (2004 p. 114) points out. Anastasia Kreigel was the ‘ideal’ victim – a sympathetic, bullied young girl from a ‘good’ (read: middle class, nuclear, white) family. She was very much still a child – she is always spoken about in terms of her youth, never a young woman, always a
‘schoolgirl’. Coded language like this is used to render subjects like Kriegel more sympathetic still, writes Green (2008 p. 175) – victims like her are often described in infantilising terms, often with a nickname – in her case, it was the public adoption of her family’s name for her, Ana. Her youth was not the only thing that made her vulnerable – her emotional problems and reliance on professional supports rendered her a sympathetic and sad figure. She was immune from victim blaming as she had no real pre-existing relationship with either of the boys and thus could not have possibly provoked them into violence. Kriegel neatly represented the type of child we all want to protect from harm. Greer (2004 p. 114) writes that:

“Those cases [of child sexual murder] that journalists feel do not communicate the binaries of ‘innocence’ and ‘guilt’, ‘purity’ and ‘evil’ with sufficient force and clarity – even in the absence of a known offender – may scarcely feature in media discourse. Those child sexual murders that do, however, have the capacity to invoke in media, public and politicians alike an intensity of reaction unrivalled by most other crime types. High profile and highly mediatised crimes of this nature provide a focal point around which people can unite to express collective feelings of empathy and suffering, sadness and hatred. In so doing, they present opportunities to establish a sense of membership and belonging – underpinned by the affirmation of virtuous and deviant identities – through the collective mourning of the ‘idealised victim’ and denunciation of the ‘absolute other.”

The binary of good and evil was easily drawn in this case. The existence of an ideal victim like Kriegel implies the existence of an ideal offender – the two are interdependent, according to Christie (1986, p. 25) – “the more ideal a victim is, the more ideal becomes the offender. The more ideal the offender, the more ideal is the victim.” She was easily comparable to another ideal victim, James Bulger – not only because the facts of their deaths were similar (both lured away from parental supervision by two male children, both murdered and left in an abandoned place) but also because her case stirred up the same feelings of fear and panic in Leixlip in 2018 as Bulger’s had in Liverpool in 1993. The association of Kreigel with Bulger helped her case to go even more viral – Bulger’s case caused unprecedented moral panic in Western Europe and interest in his case has not waned with time – At the time of writing, the name ‘James Bulger’ has 3,860,000 hits on Google – despite the fact that he died 5 years before the search engine was invented. As with the Bulger case, Kriegel’s case “problematises deeply entrenched conceptions of innocence. [13-year olds] tend to feature in mediated crime reporting as idealised innocent victims in relation to which the deviancy of the ‘other’ is defined. Here such conventional assumptions become challenged and this gives the [Kriegel] case a much greater societal purchase, as we are effectively confronted by the implications of the realisation that those formerly conceived of as innocent victims might pose a profound threat in and of themselves” (Hay 1995, p. 200). This explains the public fury and incredulity at the respective events. In Liverpool in 1993 and again in Leixlip in 2018, communities were confronted with children acting ‘unnaturally’, and people found it difficult to accept or explain away. The initial response to the respective murders was one of shock that such a thing was even possible – so deeply entrenched are our ideas about childhood innocence. The relationship between adults and children, writes Storrs, (2006, p. 293) is usually a benevolent one, in which adult society and its institutions serve to discipline and protect rather than discipline and punish children. In order to flip this natural and longstanding social rule, perceptions of youth have to be further subverted – in order to punish children, adults needed to make them sound older, so they can justify to themselves their own feelings of anger and
hatred, which are not usually acceptably directed towards children. The Bulger killers, as well as the Kriegel killers are described as ‘youths’ and ‘sex-mad teens’ (Harvey 2019) and as inhuman ‘monsters’. By making the boys seem like animals, they are symbolically removed from childhood, as to acknowledge both their childhood innocence and their culpability in a decidedly unchildlike event is simply too difficult. They can be one or the other – child or killer, not both. This is due to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957)- this is the stress experienced by a person who holds two or more beliefs or ideas that are directly contradictory to each other. People will believe what is easiest for them to believe, to resolve this stress – understandably so, because otherwise, extreme discomfort and disgust is created by the original belief (that children are innocent and fundamentally good) clashing with new evidence (that children are capable of immoral acts).

The myth of inherent evil is attractive still for its drama and versatility – as Ryle (1983, p. 206) writes, “a myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.” Here, the press re-used the myth of evil to great effect – pictures of Bulger’s and Kriegel’s smiling faces were juxtaposed next to to one another in a number of articles published in The Sun, the Daily
Herald and the Daily Star.

King (1995 p. 167) points out that in modern society, it is unusual that the “age-old religious struggle between good and evil could still become a prevalent image for making sense of particularly disturbing events.” This image may have been unusual in 1993, but in 2019 it is in vogue – viral outrage is never ending and is more often than not dramatic and vitriolic in its nature. The very business model of these social media sites is to blame for how it accommodates and encourages factionalism and extremity – after all, Williams (2017) writes, “a business model that relies above all on getting and keeping the attention of the user has little time or use for neutrality, nuance or sophistication.” I now move to consider the role of social media in understanding and giving meaning to this specific crime.

Mob Mentality: Understanding Social Media Anger

Social media immediately erupted upon learning of the arrest of two young boys in connection with the death of Kriegel. One popular Reddit comment from 25 May 2018 read “If [the boys] are guilty they might as well be put down tbh.” Another comment posted a few minutes later read “If it was my son I’d have him beat with sticks so he could feel the agony that poor girl felt.” In reply, another comment read “If I was either of their parents, I’d top myself. Worthless.” When the trial began the following summer, the hatred did not die down – in fact it grew worse. During this time, calls for violence against the two boys increased- this sent their families into hiding (Cotter 2019). A relative of Boy B was attacked in Dublin after he was identified as being related to the boy (MacNamee 2019).

On June 18, 2019, Boy A was convicted of the murder and sexual assault of Anastasia Kriegel. Boy B was convicted of murder. This made them the youngest convicted murderers in the history of the State (Gallagher 2019 B). Both boys were given lifelong anonymity orders – this infuriated commentators. One Tweet on the 5th November 2019 read “Lifelong immunity from public naming…feels like justice for that poor girl fell short.” The mother of James Bulger gave interviews to the Irish press where she called for the boys to be named (The Irish Sun led with the emotive headline “Mum of murdered tot Jamie Bulger has called for Ana Kriegel’s twisted teen killers to be named” (De Vaal, 2019)) and offered her sympathy and solidarity with Kriegel’s parents.

On 5 November 2019, Boy A was sentenced to a term of life in prison and will be eligible for review in 12 years. Boy B was sentenced to 15 years and will be eligible for review in 8 years. It is difficult to understate the scale of the response to the conviction and sentencing of the two boys – Ana Kriegel was trending on Twitter and Facebook for over a week afterwards, with her name mentioned tens of thousands of times. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar expressed sympathy for Ana’s parents in the Dail the day after the sentencing of the two boys, saying “I just can’t imagine what [Geraldine and Patric Kriegel] are going through and what they will go
through for the rest of their lives because of what happened to their beautiful daughter” (Young, 2019). Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, issued official advice to parents on how to discuss the case with their children, acknowledging how the crime and the trial “has caused much anger, upset, shock and distress” (O’Regan, 2019). The statement advised parents to reassure their children that their feelings of shock and violation were normal. Tusla offered counselling support to locals affected by the event, such was the scale of the event in the community. The Irish Times, Irish Examiner and Irish Independent all ran features with professional psychiatric advice about how to talk to young people about the trial (Murphy, 2019; Gilligan, 2019; Coleman 2019). TodayFM, KFM, Newstalk and WLR Fm all ran radio features on this same topic and a documentary called ‘The Ana Kriegel Murder: A Young Life Lost,’ was aired on Virgin Media One on 11 November 2019, featuring advice on how to talk about and understand the crime.

Immediately following their sentencing, the names of Boys A and B alongside their photographs were shared on Twitter – one Reddit user described the boy seen in the images as a “horrible little looking monster” and added “hope he rots in hell” (6 November 2019). Another user replied praised the leaking of the boys’ names: “I don’t see the point in giving predators anonymity in this country just so they can slither back into society after doing their time.” The images were quickly taken down and legal action was immediately taken against Facebook and Twitter, but this did nothing to calm the fury. Users felt convinced that they were acting in the public interest, protecting others from falling in to the same trap as Kriegel – clearly illogical given that the boys had been convicted and sentenced and thus had no opportunity to harm other members of the general public. Another Reddit user wrote “I know what Ana Kriegel looks like. I know intimate details of how she suffered and died. I know details of the boys and their personalities. Weeks and weeks of following a case with every detail, I think it’s a very natural feeling to want to put faces to the youngest convicted murders in the history of the state.” ‘Natural feeling’ or not, it was an illegal desire – it flagrantly disregarded the ruling of Mr Justice Paul McDermott, who presided over the case, and of the Children’s Act, 2001. Acting upon it did a great deal of harm, to the boys’ families in particular, who were targeted physically and through Facebook messages. Ultimately, in my view, it was futile – naming the boys will not bring Kriegel back, but it will bring them further infamy and will potentially put their families, who have committed no crime, in danger. However, moral panic is not always logical- as individuals hop on the “anger bandwagon” (Williams, 2018), judgment becomes clouded and retribution becomes the only goal.

One thing was clear, though, and that was that even if people were no longer sharing the images, the hatred that fuelled their dissemination had not gone away. If anything, it grew stronger response to the perceived ‘soft treatment’ the boys were receiving.

A viral Irish Mirror article around this time capitalised off of public anger around the sentencing and punishment. It asserted that the “cold and callous murderers” were not really being punished in Oberstown Children’s Detention Campus, where they were being held. The article describes the campus as “a luxury centre”, providing offenders with “the best education money can buy – it is arguably the best resourced school in the country, including the top private colleges.” It taps into feelings of moral outrage by insisting that it is the Irish taxpayer who is really being punished, not the “two monsters”: “The taxpayer will foot the bill for keeping the killers, both 15, under lock and key. It will cost €340,893 a year each to keep Boy A and Boy B in detention until they are old enough to be sent to an adult prison. That’s 10 times the European average. The final bill to taxpayers will top €2 million for the next three years” (Reilly, 2019). The two boys are thus presented as the ‘absolute others’, portrayed as being in society, but not of it. By directly addressing the taxpayer, the article presents the reader the opportunity to engage collectively in the affirmation of a virtuous shared identity through insisting on the non-identity and unworthiness of the ‘evil monsters’, pure animals that are ’not like us.’ It encourages readers not just to identify and empathise with Kriegel, but to become emotionally involved in joining the condemnation and punishment of the offenders, portrayed as evil and beyond redemption (Greer, 2004 p.110 and 113). It makes her murder personal, inviting us to believe that as taxpayers, we are actually and tangibly proximate to her and her killers. It further invites the reader, the taxpayer, to feel complicit in this ‘soft treatment’.

This article was effective. On Facebook, responding to the articles, popular comments read: “We need the death penalty brought back,” “Juvenile detention is too good for these evil bastards,” and “No sentence will ever be enough.” On Reddit, users wrote “Evacuate the other staff and prisoners [in Oberstown] and drop a bomb on the filth,” “Hanging them would be way too soft of a punishment. Rehabilitation is a waste of tax money,” and “The monsters who killed Ana get to live in luxury until they reach 18, Ireland is a joke of a country.”

In 1993 in Liverpool, there were similar calls for retribution and harsh punishment from the media², but since social media did not exist at the time, it is difficult to retrospectively gauge how the audience was responding. Did the audience feel more or less strongly about the murder than the journalists? Did people really view the event in such sensational terms, or was this a narrative created to sell more papers? In the case of Bulger, we may never get a definitive answer. The Kriegel case is different, and highlights gaps in scholarship on the relationship between major crimes and the media – most of these studies predate social media and need to be updated to understand the ways in which consumers can now interact with media. The tabloid’s hands are tied in a way that social media users’ are not – it cannot use profanity, for one, nor can it explicitly call for harsher and medieval punishment for two teenage boys without violating various codes of ethics and compromising the integrity of the publication itself. Its central argument, that the boys are not really being punished properly, can only be heavily implied and not said plainly. It also has to be edited by a third party and approved before it is circulated – no such checks and balances exist to stop social media users sharing their feelings, however crude they may be. Therefore, social media users can express their response in more extreme terms – worryingly, this extreme language used by individual users is not utilised to sell newspapers but to express an individual’s sincerely held beliefs. This media interaction is cyclical – the two media forms feed off each other. The media seeks to provoke, social media users respond, the media analyses their response and uses it to create more content.

The news media is increasingly working in service to tech companies and relies on social media to survive, as their old form becomes more and more obsolete with each passing year – people are not buying newspapers anymore, and instead opt to read their news on social media. Therefore, media outlets have to make content that social media users will respond to and share with others – without clicks, they will fail. Therefore, traditional media outlets must play by the rules of the attention economy to “sensationalise, bait and entertain in order to survive” (Lewis, 2017). If these traditional outlets can spark viral outrage, that is a success for them. One benefit of viral outrage is that it democratises moral progress, letting anyone play a role in defining what social justice is – what are the social rules, and what are the most important moral principles of the day (Sawaoka and Monin, 2019). Another benefit is how it allows users to create a sense of virtual collectivism and identity in an uncertain physical world – it is worth noting here that Kriegel died in the midst of a time of great political tension in Ireland. She died just 11 days before the referendum to remove the constitutional ban on abortion – this was a bitter referendum campaign characterised by highly emotional and tense debate nationwide. Kriegel’s death allowed for respite amidst the fighting, and allowed a nation to join together against a common enemy. In theory, this is a positive – one of the only positive outcomes of a tragic event. However, this was short-lived.

As social media users ‘grieved’ Kriegel, a parasocial connection formed, a connection that was used later on to justify cyber vigilantism. Parasocial relationships are one-sided connections that consumers establish with media personas – a parasocial interaction, an exposure that gathers interest in a persona, becomes a ‘relationship’ after repeated exposure to the persona causes the consumer to develop illusions of intimacy and identification (Horton and Wohl, 1956 p. 215-229). I have already outlined why Kriegel was the perfect victim, a blank canvas onto which the public could project their feelings about idealised childhood innocence. However, with repeated and excessive exposure, this projection becomes something more extreme and inappropriate altogether, in my view. It is bad enough for the public to overstep boundaries by continuously referring to a dead child with the nickname her grieving parents used for her, reclaiming that private name as public property, as a symbol. Even referring to her on first name basis, as Irish people have done, implies a relationship between subject and object that does not, did not, and will not ever actually exist. She is curiously referred to as ‘ours’ throughout social media. Commenters claim to feel a profound sense of loss – ‘Ana’ is “a beautiful brilliant girl that everyone in Ireland will always remember and keep in our hearts forever,” (Twitter user, 11 November 2019), “I’m absolutely furious and nearly in tears just reading about this case,” (Reddit comment, 19 June 2019), “No matter how many times you listen to the story about #anakriegel the heartbreak doesn’t get easier.. So bloody sad, what a beautiful and innocent girl” (Twitter user, 11 November 2019). The public did this with James Bulger too, referring to him as “our Jamie” when Bulger was not ‘ours’ – we did not know him, he did not belong to us – nor was he ‘Jamie’ – his parents repeatedly chastised the media for using this name for their son, but they did not listen. He was ‘our Jamie’ too, the public felt – his life and death represented something to consumers. In this way, his parents’ grief no longer belonged to them and to them alone, but had to be shared with strangers who felt entitled to information about what was certainly a very tragic, private event from which it would be hard to recover even without the media glare. The issue here is Bulger and Kriegel did not want to become famous and receive sympathy from others. They did not initiate the par asocial relationship. They are not like celebrities who have passed away after a long and public career and left behind a legion of mourning fans who ‘knew’ them in life. These children are famous only because they had horrible deaths. They did not consent to becoming media personae in the way that other media personae and subjects of parasocial attention (presenters, musicians, actors) usually do – therefore they have no way of controlling their image, and neither do their parents as once their deaths are consumed into the cultural and moral fabric of a nation, their deaths are no longer their own – they are public property, the grounds where debates about childhood and gender-based violence begin. They died violently and sadly – those claiming to be heartbroken by their deaths would not have been heartbroken if they had died of natural causes, if they had had normal non-newsworthy deaths. The love they received in death surpassed the love they received in life – had Kriegel lived, none of the people claiming to be heartbroken over her death would actually be in her life.

Greer (2004 p. 116) offers an explanation to why this performative grief and ‘claiming’ of victims happens: “Becoming emotionally involved with the victims of high profile, mediated murders, participating in their suffering and sharing in their grief, is one way of outwardly and expressively demonstrating one’s depth of feeling – of proving one’s humanity – in a cynical and fragmented society. That compassionate empathy is being directed at strangers serves to amplify the expression of humanity still further.” As consumers and creators of media, we engage in the “virtual performance of pathos and moral virtue” (Oliver, 2017) by cultivating and encouraging feelings of intimacy and identification with Kriegel – a fact I find curious, because as I have outlined, it was not as if she was difficult to empathise with. Quite the opposite. The cultural context of her death and her position in society (white, middle-class, young, female) made her an irresistible victim who no one could fail to feel sorry for. It is the performative and over-the -top nature of this pity – the grief roadshow – that I take issue with, as outlined.

Greer (2004 p. 116) continues: “Collectively engaging and expressively sharing in the intense anguish of others – unknown others – conduces the development of an economy of suffering and pain in which members may compete to appear the most hurt and therefore, the most human. It contributes to the ritualisation and commodification of grief, where grief becomes something to be conspicuously consumed, and then discarded; another commodity in an aggressive neocapitalist economy. Signing the book [of condolences], leaving the message, all these things provide a fast working but short-lived antidote to the uncertainty and anxiety that characterises the late modern human condition – temporarily satisfying, but ultimately unfulfilling. The emotions diffuse, the murders are forgotten, the books of condolence close, and the ‘imagined community’ dissolves away into cyberspace, only to be recreated, re-established, reconnected in the wake of the next murder featuring ‘suitable’ victims and offenders.” I would add to this that it is not just grief that is commodified, but anger. The notion that social media users could ‘protect’ and ‘avenge’ ‘[their] Ana’ was a harmful and misguided one, justified by passionate and unrestrained display of emotion and construction of a moral panic. Social media users are observers and commentators – they do not hold the power or the authority to avenge Kriegel – a young girl they did not know. This did not stop them, however, from using her death as an excuse to bully and intimidate innocent and unconnected individuals (chiefly, the families of the two murderers) under the guise of protection. The sad truth is too late to protect Kriegel – the assumption that we can protect her in death overstates our own power and importance and worse, assumes the desires of a dead child are the same as our own desires – that we can ‘doing right by her’ by acting on these desires ‘since she is not here to do it.’ It is nothing but a fantasy.

Conclusion

Kriegel’s death forces us to reckon with things we do not like to think about. More than twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the Bulger murder, Jackson (1995, p. 41) urged the public to abandon old notions of innocence and accept that “childhood isn’t a fixed place of unchanging, natural innocence. Childhood is a social construct that shifts in its meanings as the social/cultural conditions that shape it change as well.” The public could not, or would not accept it then. It still has not accepted it in 2019. We all want to believe that people are good, that evil will be eradicated, that innocence exists and can be protected. We all want to believe that we are capable of rising to this mammoth task. When we insist that shocking events like the murder of Anastasia Kriegel are freak happenings, acts of evil, we “deepen [our own] powerlessness to do anything about what happened. It erodes our personal responsibility for understanding and challenging the individual and social forces that have produced such a numbing event. To demonise the two boys remove the causes for what they did from the realm of social action and leaves us in a greater state of despair” (Jackson, 1995 p. 4).

None of us want to accept that what happened in Glenwood House in May 2018. But we must try, or else we will continue to inadvertently invade upon the very real grief of the Kriegel family. We will continue to sensationalise the very tragic death of a young person who should still be with us today if we do not examine our language and the psychosocial forces that determine our responses.

Footnotes

1. See the following headlines for example: Digital Desk staff, ‘Ana Kriegel verdict: A vulnerable, innocent 1 girl who just wanted a friend,’ Irish Examiner, 18 June 2019; Gareth MacNamee ‘Ana Kriegel’s wish was to have friends. Instead, she was shunned, bullied and murdered,’ (journal.ie, June 18 2019). ↩︎
2. Famously, the headline of the Daily Star on 25 November 1993, the day the two boys were found guilty, 2 read ‘How Do You Feel Now, You Little Bastards?’ ↩︎

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