We shouldn’t talk about this kind of fearmongering as some accident or aberration, as if, when the consent factory tells you to be scared of stuff, that fear is ever justified.
Just tonight, I had to listen while some of my TV-watching friends clucked about the apparent new craze for stabbing people with roofie syringes. I don’t need to check the source to know that’s horseshit, because that’s how the genre works. If you had a real cause for fear (killer cops, banks, landlords), that’d be the last thing the TV news would call your attention to.
The agenda is always to make you feel afraid of Elsewhere (the Big City, other countries, poor neighborhoods), and conversely, safe and secure at home with your friend the TV. If you understand the media as an abusive husband, the stuff they do and don’t say makes a lot more sense.
Not Halloween related - but there was a chemist in London that accidentally poisoned 200 kids - killing twenty one of them - the number of real incidents however seem to be small enough to count on one hand.
There were a few cases where they initially suspected poisoned candy, but it turned out the kid actually got into a family member’s drug stash and it had nothing to do with candy at all (and presumably the family threw suspicion on candy to avoid the family member getting in trouble). But yeah, the cases where candy actual was tampered with were due to parents trying to harm their kids or get attention for themselves. And in all cases, it was close family members that were the actual threat to the kids, not random strangers and their candy.
Figures released on Wednesday reveal 56 incidents of spiking by injection were recorded by police in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in September and October, in addition to 198 confirmed reports of drink spiking.
In those three pieces, the Guardian presents one account of a woman who speculates that she may have been injected, and otherwise just reports a widespread belief that this is a real thing. The main thrust of each piece is that we should be more afraid and have more surveillance.
The Guardian is capable of phoning round police forces to find one or more cases with actual witnesses or evidence. If their goal here was to inform people, that’s what they would have done (and if they couldn’t find the evidence they’d have said so).
I don’t claim this has never happened (most outlandish things have happened at some time). But the linked stories don’t make the case that it’s a remotely realistic thing to worry about, because they’re not trying to. If you tell a million people there’s a scary rumor going around, that assertion automatically becomes true. It may even become self-fulfilling, although that’s hardly a defence of the choice to promote the scare story in the first place.
That’s not incompatible with believing women. Cynical media organisations shining a flashlight under their chin are very different to individuals speaking from lived experience.
