I’ve
decided to drop everything this Friday to attend Swedish journalist Kim Wall’s
memorial service at the Swedish Church here in London.
Why
would I choose to do that, given that I certainly didn’t know Kim personally?
I
remember sitting in remote Swedish Lapland when the story broke that a female Swedish
journalist was missing in Denmark. How I hoped that story would have a happy
ending… It did not, and the man Kim was interviewing for an investigative piece
of journalism, Peter Madsen, now stands accused of her brutal and shocking
murder.
The
question that has come up, and that irks the hell out of me, in the aftermath
of this horrible crime, is “why did Kim put herself in that situation?”, as
though we as journalists, and in particular female
journalists, should be “more responsible” in our approach to our work. We
should somehow be aware, beforehand, what kind of tendencies the person we’re
interviewing might have. This is not possible. Kim could not possibly have
known what kind of situation she was getting into, when she was interviewing Madsen, who might have seemed eccentric, but was well-known as an
inventor, not a homicidal maniac.
Now, I
don’t do investigative journalism, I don’t write about politics or world
affairs, I don’t cover war zones, but that said, I can think of countless
occasions, as a travel writer, when I have had to rely on complete strangers in
remote locations, without recourse to the usual safety nets. I’ve simply had to
trust that “this person is all right”, even though I’d never met them before,
just to get the work done in the smoothest and best possible way open to me at
that time. Had I been Kim, investigating that piece, would I have taken the
same risk as her? Undoubtedly.
If there
were people in Madsen’s life, people who’d known him over the years, who did
not suspect him of being capable of murder, then why on earth would a journalist
on assignment realise it? I don’t think it’s (female) journalists taking unnecessary
risks, but rather to do our job we have to make a judgement call on when to
trust people. The better we’ve become over the years at choosing wisely, the
more we assume that we are “safe with strangers.” And let’s face it, most of
the time we are. One of the reasons this case is so shocking, is because it’s
so unusual. Even though journalists the world over have seen their professional
life become more dangerous in recent years, we manage to interview people every
day in all sorts of settings and make it home at the end of the day. Just like Kim
should have been able to – she could not foresee this mission would be her last.
Kim Wall’s
death is a sad loss, but to lose our desire and ability to explore and
investigate would be a sadder loss still. To creep back under our safety nets
for fear of the repercussions would be a tragedy, because in this day and age, staying
silent is the real danger. Kim Wall’s legacy is all-important.
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