Stephen Wright, a self-described “battle-hardened crime journalist”, spent 33 years covering crime for the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. In 2025, he reported that Peter Sullivan, imprisoned with a life sentence, was most likely innocent of murdering Diane Sindall in 1986. 

The UK press had dubbed Sullivan “the beast of Birkenhead”, a name Wright used, even in reporting his wrongful conviction. Talking about whether such labelling might have been harmful, Wright told me: “I’ve never really thought about that. This is the culture I’ve been brought up in... This is how we do it in the UK.” 

It’s one example of how journalism has a problem: We are addicted to “monsters”. The monster label – used explicitly or simply implied – is an extraordinarily efficient storytelling device. 

“These are cases with enormous click potential,” said Line Vaaben, editor at Danish newspaper Politiken. “Most of us live very boring lives, so true crime is like a mental roller coaster for most of us: exciting, but safe.” 

The monster frame gives audiences a clear moral boundary: they are evil; we are not. It simplifies complicated stories, makes them easier to tell and easier to remember, and can provide the sense that justice has been done. 

But journalists should be interested in understanding people who have done terrible things. Not forgiving them, excusing them or giving them a platform without scrutiny. But the kind of understanding that can help audiences examine how harmful behaviour develops and what might contribute to change.

The trouble with ‘monsterfication’

The media, police and justice system are not independent actors observing the same case from separate vantage points. They influence one another, creating a feedback loop in which assumptions can become mutually reinforcing. When journalism resorts to monsterfication, it can disrupt the social functioning of all three institutions. 

Monsterfication creates confirmation traps, it fuels moral panic, stigma, and vigilantism. And there is a deeper problem with such demonisation: when we ascribe “othering” and labels to behaviour we don’t understand or condone, as if it is only committed by people who are fundamentally different from ourselves, we may make it harder to understand how harmful behaviour develops – and therefore harder to understand how it might be prevented.

A 2007 study by media historian and communication scholar Dr Claire Wardle found coverage of child murders in the UK had become overwhelmingly “personal” in recent decades: rather than focusing primarily on the criminal justice system and the process of bringing perpetrators to justice, newspapers increasingly centred victims’ families, their grief, and the emotional response of society to the crime. “There is little tolerance for attempts to contextualise these offenders,” Wardle wrote.

More recent research suggests that this victim-centred framing has persisted: analysing 323 Los Angeles Times articles published between 1990 and 2015, Rebecca A. DiBennardo found that coverage of sexual predators placed particular emphasis on child victims and used their stories to construct offenders as “predatory” and deserving of harsh punishment.

The personalisation of crime has done important work: it has made victims visible and forced institutions to listen to those who were once ignored. But it has also made crime into something one person does to another person, with less room for systems, institutions, histories, failures, mental states, prevention and the long road into harm. What we’ve gained in simplicity, we may be losing in understanding. The alternative to monsterfication is not moral neutrality. The act can be condemned without reducing the person who committed the act.

A toolkit for change

That distinction is at the heart of the set of tools I have gathered to help journalists conduct humane interviews and publish nuanced stories about terrible crimes. This is because how you talk to people influences the amount of information they choose to give you. 

For decades, criminologists have studied how different approaches to police interviewing affect what suspects disclose, partly in response to wrongful convictions involving trickery, coercion and false confessions. Their research offers insight for every step of the journalistic process.

First, protect yourself

The journalists I spoke to for this project (and I, myself) have seen some of the darkest sides of humanity, and dealt with material that can unleash overwhelming emotional distress. Norwegian journalist Annemarte Moland met her limit while reporting on the 764 network, which preys on vulnerable minors, coercing them to record increasingly extreme acts of self-harm – to the point of suicide. 

“I have reported on stories about pedophiles, abusers, and suicide among teenage girls,” she told me. “When I started investigating 764, I met myself at the door,” she said.

In the aftermath, Moland and her Aftenposten colleagues investigating 764 developed strict rules for how to deal with the material. These include working in pairs, viewing material on a small screen with the sound off, setting time limits, and debriefing. 

Elin Floberghagen, who led the Norwegian Press Association’s 2024 commission to investigate the media’s role in the wrongful conviction of Viggo Kristiansen for the murder of two girls, also recommends that every newsroom appoint a “cold brain” who can act as a devil’s advocate – someone who asks critical questions about the editorial approach, and sees the story with fresh eyes.

Building rapport with the perpetrator

The next step is building rapport. This does not mean becoming friends with a source or making them comfortable at all costs. It means creating an environment in which they can provide information. Research into investigative interviewing shows that even small amounts of maladaptive interviewer behaviour can increase maladaptive behaviour in the interviewee. Humane interviewing is therefore not about being “nice”. It is about being effective.

The Rapport Compass, based on John Birtchnell’s Interpersonal Octagon and Laurence and Emily Alison’s ORBIT, adapts this principle for journalism. Instead of imposing one interviewing style, it asks the journalist to pay attention to how the source is behaving – whether they are controlling, cooperative, guarded or confrontational – and respond appropriately. A source who is ashamed may need space and agency. A source who is dominating the conversation may need a clearer frame. A hostile source may need directness without humiliation.

Trauma-informed interviewing

Journalism has developed substantial knowledge about interviewing victims and survivors of trauma. But perpetrators can also experience fear, shame, trauma responses and a reluctance to talk. Recognising those responses does not mean treating perpetrators as victims. It means recognising the psychological conditions under which people are capable of thinking, remembering and speaking.

The Global Center for Journalism & Trauma provides eight suggestions for trauma-informed interviewing: 

• Explain the process: Introduce yourself, explain why you want to talk to them, and establish roughly how long the interview will take.
• Let them set the pace: Don’t rush. Allow breaks and give them the option to end the interview. 
• Manage your own emotions: Be aware of your feelings without allowing them to cloud your judgement.
• Don’t over-empathise: Acknowledge the person's experience without making their feelings your own.
• Listen more than you talk: Be curious, use questions that open up areas of exploration, and avoid talking too much.
• Reflect back: Paraphrase, summarise and check your understanding.
• Close carefully: Let them know when the interview is coming to an end and ask whether there is anything else they want to say.
• Consider support: If someone remains clearly distressed, ask whether they have someone who can support them.

Building humanity

A third tool explains how to facilitate in-depth interviews: by resisting labels and building up the humanity of your interviewee, which may yield a fuller, more nuanced story. 

Psychologist Nadja Heym says labelling can underpin the idea that criminals should not be helped or rehabilitated. “But that’s not helpful to society. If you wish to improve society as a whole, the moral responsibility is that you should be rehabilitating these criminals.”

I have corresponded for years with Benjamin Faulkner, a 35-year-old Canadian serving a life sentence in an Arizona prison for the assault of a child and moderating what was once the largest online repository of child sexual abuse material.

He was angry when he first heard Hunting Warhead, the podcast Daemon Fairless and I made about him. “It didn’t see my side of the story,” he complained. 

Years later, in an interview for this project, Faulkner told me something else: the podcast helped him see himself from the outside. He could see how other people were looking at him. It made him reconsider how he looked at other people.

“If you ever want a person to learn from their mistakes, to help the next person with their mistakes and to be a productive member of society, it's important to talk openly. Let’s talk about what happened and why. How do we fix it for next time, for the next person?” 

The practical techniques for facilitating in-depth interviews are surprisingly simple: encourage reflection; explore principles and beliefs; ask about coping mechanisms; imagine a future; encourage perspective change; remind people that they have value; put painful experiences into the context of a whole life; explore meaning; recall relationships and connection; even, where appropriate, go for a walk together.

None of this means shielding people from consequences.

Faulkner has a different perspective now. “I deserve to be here because I hurt people,” he wrote to me recently. “I chose to do what I did. It’s a choice I have to take responsibility for.”

The Humane interview checklist

When I asked Faulkner whether there were circumstances in which it was appropriate to call someone a monster, he eventually said yes. “But only if you provide them an avenue out – a way to reflect and change.” That, ultimately, is the proposition of the HUMANE interview checklist.

Conclusion

This project makes the work of journalists more difficult. I won’t deny it. But I believe that difficulty is necessary if we want news to remain useful in society.

The “monster” frame is both ancient and modern: rooted in myth, fear and our desire to draw moral boundaries, but intensified by a late-modern society in which individuals are increasingly understood as entirely responsible for their own behaviour.

Moral boundaries matter.

As psychologist Nadja Heym told me: “It is not about removing the moral aspect, but trying to look at the events from a different angle.”

Reading and digesting news is always a conversation with oneself: What does this tell me about the world? How would I have behaved in this situation? What does it say about me?

Our responsibility as journalists is not to end that conversation by telling audiences who the monsters are. It is to give them enough truth, context and complexity to have a better conversation with themselves.