vicarious grief and its many obscenities

I was discussing this with Clem from The Dawn Chorus last week, and it seems to have come full circle.

An autopsy report by the Victorian Coroner's Office today confirmed that 'the body' belongs to Britt Lapthorne. In light of this news and what is undoubtedly a tragic case for everyone involved, here's the column I wrote for the paper this Sunday. I'm not entirely sure what to expect when I check my newspaper email tomorrow...angry tirades, I imagine.

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I WAS terribly upset last week to hear the news that a body found floating off the coast of Dubrovnik in Croatia was that of backpacker Britt Lapthorne. According to media reports, Lapthorne's body was so badly decomposed that police in Croatia believed at first it couldn't have been hers.

Her admirably stoic father Dale hinted that not only were there missing limbs and hair in parts, but the body's extreme condition may have been due to Britt being exposed to acid.

No one is sure yet of the exact circumstances of Britt's death; indeed, they may never be certain.

Regardless of what happened, I was overwhelmed by reports of the particular state of her body and the potentially violent and frightening way in which she died.

So don't get me wrong – like everyone else, I'm terribly sad for Britt Lapthorne, her family and her friends. What should have been a great adventure turned out horribly wrong and has left devastating consequences for all those close to her.

But I'm concerned by the peculiar concentration of grief that seems to be coming from quarters entirely unconnected with Britt Lapthorne. The public naturally grieves when a human face is put on a tragedy, but they often do so with a remarkable lack of awareness for the alternatives.

When Britt's body was initially found, newspaper forums were inundated with people hoping beyond hope that it wasn't her. The media looked for a miracle. Even the Croatian police said they had hoped for a happier outcome.

And here is where I bristle. What happy outcome could there have been? If the body found off the Dubrovnik coast hadn't been Britt Lapthorne's, it would still have been equally as real and equally as sad – because it still would have been someone else.

We have a perplexing attitude to tragic death in the West. It happens to be a fact that missing or murdered pretty, middle-class white girls garner far more attention than their non-Anglo counterparts. Especially if they happen to be blonde.

In America, this is most obvious in the kind of attention given to missing black women and missing white women. Last year, Huffington Post writer John Ridley compared the media coverage given to victims of crime Stepha Henry and Kelsey Smith, and found it overwhelmingly favoured the latter.

Both were bright, young university graduates and both went missing within a few days of each other. But while Smith's story was flogged relentlessly through media outlets, Henry barely received a mention.

Guess which one was black? Ridley is careful to remind readers that while "race is not a factor in the cases of these women gone missing (it is) clearly a factor to the media and in regard to the news they chose to report".

EARLIER this year, marieclaire magazine reported similar treatment of native Canadian women missing or found murdered on what has been dubbed the "Highway of Tears".

Stretching 720km, by 2006 an overwhelming 32 women had disappeared along the highway. Some were found murdered, others have never been seen since. Of the 32 reported missing, only one was not of native Canadian descent. And of these 32, only one received nationwide media attention.

A public memorial service was held this weekend for Britt, and it doubtless will have attracted huge numbers. But tragic as it may be, why should Britt Lapthorne's death move people in a way that others don't? Why should people hope especially for her when they largely don't even think about others in similar positions?

Women, men and children go missing or are murdered every day in Australia. Some are never found. Not all of them come from "good" families or have faces that sell papers.

It seems to me an awful obscenity to treat their lives as less valuable than another's, simply because we have allowed ourselves to be swept up in a tide of grief that behaves as if this sort of thing has never happened before.

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I didn't really have the word limit I would have liked for this. Perhaps I should have blogged it for the paper instead. I want to highlight further that one of the worst circumstances of this case is the nature of 'the find'. There's something awfully humiliating about being disposed of and left to rot; to have missing limbs and missing hair, and just be casually tossed away like an empty lunch bag.

I think that's what saddens me especially about the case. Here is a human being afforded zero dignity in death; whose body has to be collected and identified in an incredibly decomposed state, subject to a media circus and the object of vicarious grieving from people taken by the moment.

What saddens me the most is that had this not been pretty Britt Lapthorne, daughter to a devoted father and with the world at her feet, then it would have just been another body found in the ocean - humiliated and rotting, but with no one to care about it. There would have been no dusk memorial services, with strangers crying for a girl they didn't know and feeling obscure, unquantifiable grief.

Am I being too harsh? I felt compelled to be affected by this as anyone. It makes me sick to think of what happened. But in an ideal world, the loss of every person in violent or lonely circumstances would matter. I object to my emotions being manipulated simply because she's more angelic than others - and I can't help but feel less of people who don't recognise this.