It takes a community

Her daughter’s best friend was brutally murdered, the victim of a sordid crime, left in the woods only to be discovered weeks later.

The perpetrator was a resident of the small town in which everyone is a neighbour and every neighbour is a friend.

The town was in a state of shock not only because the crime was committed by someone they knew but also because the defenceless young girl could have been anyone’s daughter, niece or best friend.

Notions like these terrorized that small Canadian community, throughout which rumours circulated like a virulent tornado, destroying everything in its wake.

While the victim’s family suffered the most, the death of their little girl also affected the entire community. A lack of support and leadership from an unprepared local government and sensationalistic media coverage, among other factors, fractured the community and cast a shadow of suspicion over the town.

Rosemary Reilly, Cert 89 (fam. life ed.), a Concordia associate professor of Applied Human Sciences and director of Concordia’s Centre for Human Relations and Community Studies, and former Concordia professor Kate Connolly received a research grant in 2006 to look into how traumatic events like this one affect a community and how a community can avoid fragmenting and actually grow following a trauma.

Connolly left the project in 2008 to be replaced by current co-investigator, Linda Kay, MA (media studies) 01, chair of Concordia’s Department of Journalism. “There is a lot of research that talks about what happens to individuals after a trauma,” Reilly says. “But what happens to the neighbourhood and community when your next-door neighbour kills his wife and family? Or when there is a shooting at a school that you or your children go to?”

After examining three separate murders in Canadian communities and interviewing local neighbours, friends, leaders and journalists, Reilly discovered three paths a community tends to take following a trauma. As seen in the sordid small-town crime mentioned above, it can debilitate, resulting in residents feeling angry and untrusting. Community members can also pick themselves up and move forward. The best-case scenario, Reilly reports, is that trauma acts as an impetus for growth that creates cohesiveness and services for people who become marginalized.

While a community—much like a victim’s family—has to be nurtured and provided outlets for grief, it also needs time to heal, Reilly points out. “Murders are so devastating to a community. The whole idea that within a year you’re okay is only partially true and that is if the death happens in a natural course of events,” she says. “When it’s violent and unexpected, when it deals with something outside the normal life cycle, it can have very damaging effects.” Communities and their constituents are also affected even if they don’t know the victim. “If you think about the reaction to the death of Princess Di [in a car crash in 1997], people were sobbing and crying. Just because they didn’t know her doesn’t mean they weren’t affected by her.”

Yet, an unnatural death in a community is even more devastating than the death of a beloved princess or Hollywood icon, Reilly reports, because it shatters its members’ idealistic notions of security. “We rely on community; we are connected and defined by it. Who we are is very much influenced by what groups we are members of. Therefore, when we find purpose and satisfaction in life is disrupted and tainted by violence, then we have to regain this sense of connection and purpose and safety,” Reilly says.

Grief leadership

One of the Concordia researchers’ foremost recommendations is that community leaders play an integral role in the healing process. Religious leaders, government officials, teachers, social workers and members of volunteer organizations have to step up and lead the way by creating spaces for mourning and opportunities to build support. For example, they can nurture the grieving process by holding public memorials and squelching hurtful gossip.

“Dispelling rumours is very important, particularly in small communities where it can be very destructive. People try to make sense by assigning blame, so it’s because this person is from a particular ethnic group or social class that the incident occurred,” she says. “By explaining it this way, they remove themselves from being part of that group, saying it will only happen to that type of person. Gossip is so detrimental to a community moving forward.”

In one of the murders examined by the researchers, a mayor sat in on a focus group of the town’s residents and was taken aback to learn about how extensive the impact was on her community. “She told us, ‘I would never have thought this would be part of my job,’ ” Reilly recalls. But if this new research has anything to prove, it’s that community leaders must adapt to each situation and take on new roles in the aftermath of trauma. City officials shouldn’t focus exclusively on governance, for example, and classroom teachers should be prepared to field tough questions and provide honest yet appropriate answers.

“Teachers aren’t professional psychologists but there are going to be questions about so-and-so not being at her desk one morning because her daddy murdered her, and that must be addressed,” she says. Another recommendation based on the research is that educators or social workers reach out to parents so they can reflect on their own feelings and discuss how to broach the subject with their children. Reilly says many parents don’t know how to approach their children after a murder, especially if it involves someone in their child’s class, or worse, a close friend.

Help or hindrance

“If it bleeds, it leads.” The common newsroom credo assumes violence and murder sells. Reilly and Kay found that media presence can either drastically help or hinder a community following a murder. In the case of the murder of the young girl in a small town, journalists from neighbouring cities parachuted in and brought chaos to a town that was already reeling from shock. “They descended upon a small town, parking trucks on rural roads, rushing from one area to another, getting in the way of the police investigation, cornering people in the street and shoving microphones in their face,” Reilly says.

Kay, a working journalist for many years before arriving at Concordia in 1990, says in this case, the media had the worst possible effect on the community, especially since they traveled in packs and hunted for the same story. “The omnipresence of the TV trucks and all that equipment in the centre of the town was invasive and citizens felt they couldn’t leave their houses,” Kay says. “They didn’t want to go for groceries because they were afraid they were going to be corralled to give an interview. They felt like prisoners.”

She recommends a shift in the way journalists—along with their editors and producers—approach covering traumas. “It’s usually the youngest [journalists] who are thrust into these situations because they are the general assignment reporters who are sitting around waiting for something to happen,” Kay says. “It’s only recently that news editors are beginning to take note that communities can be very offended by the presence of journalists descending on a town.”

To teach her Journalism students to get the story without being too intrusive or betraying their own ethics, Kay has been gradually implementing role-playing activities in the classroom. After acting out a scenario of a journalist covering trauma, the class discusses what could have been done better and what questions should have been asked, as well as those that were too invasive. “You’ve got to figure out a way to get the story without trampling on anybody or betraying yourself,” she points out.

Kay knows firsthand the hardships young reporters face. At 23, she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting under deadline at the San Diego Evening Tribune for covering the 1978 midair collision of a jet plane and a Cessna that resulted in the death of 144 people. “It was crazy because I was seeing things I had never seen in my life, seeing dead bodies,” Kay recalls. “Looking back on my career, I didn’t necessarily always handle things in the best way possible but I had no one to talk to. Nobody in the newsroom was talking about this stuff.”

To better understand a modern newsroom’s stance on the issue, Kay and Reilly conducted a focus group with Montreal journalists, including reporters and managerial staff. After revealing their findings, Kay and Reilly observed a change in the journalists, who approached their interview subjects with more sensitivity and were more cognisant that their presence can be construed as invasive. “We identified a higher awareness among the group, which is something that didn’t exist in newsrooms in the ’70s and ’80s,” Kay reports.

The duo’s research also showed that journalists can actually help a community heal and grow. In one case involving a school shooting, the media focused on the way the school community was moving forward and rebuilding, covering the school’s vigils, memorial scholarships and support for local women’s shelters instead of focusing on the gunman.

For Kay, who covered the 1989 École Polytechnique shootings in Montreal, it is equally as important to write sensitive articles as it is to report the news. “I think that journalists can help in the healing by allowing people to tell their stories because they feel powerless. I did that for Polytechnique by writing anniversary stories that are meaningful; that remembered these women or talked about gun control and have some kind of resonance in the aftermath,” she says.

Empowered to heal

Whether lending a neighbour a cup of sugar or providing a shoulder to lean on, regular folks, according to the research, can make a marked difference in how a community copes with traumatic incidences. For example, few people think about what happens to the teddy bears, flowers and notes that are left at the site of a murder or vigil. In many instances, the stuffed animals and messages are thrown out by city workers. However, as Reilly notes in her research, several communities found ways to honour those expressions of grief. Some donated the stuffed animals to needy families, with the consent of the victim’s family. In one case, the community composted the flowers and used it to plant a garden in the victim’s memory. “We have such a hard time as a culture in dealing with grief and death that we just want these signs of grief to disappear,” Reilly says. “So why not create a tradition for community-level mourning?”

The research project is ongoing. Reilly says she plans to visit more communities and, ultimately, use creative avenues to disseminate the findings, such as turning some of the interview transcripts into a play and a poem. “We do research to make a difference and if only academics are going to read it, then that’s a very limited impact,” she says.

Ultimately, Reilly and Kay’s project demonstrates that while it’s incumbent upon community leaders and journalists to do their part in furthering the healing process, some of the burden should be shouldered by ordinary people. “It takes a village to raise a child,” Reilly says. “But it takes a community to heal a community that has undergone a trauma.” 

Adam Avrashi is a Concordia Journalism student and freelance writer.