When I was 13, I listened to a story about a missing and murdered young girl. This led me down a rabbithole. I told myself I was watching these videos to learn, to think about what I would do differently. They made me look at the world differently, and people differently, not knowing who might try something. And, if they did, what would I do to protect myself?

Well, the truth is, I have no idea what I would do if I were put into the back of a car, if I were approached with a weapon, if I were caught alone with (a man) and they tried something funny. If this isn’t the truth behind my watching, what was? And what makes women everywhere so into being scared? How has this content changed how we think about our safety?

On average, the audience for true crime content is 73% women. This includes docuseries, documentaries, podcasts, YouTube videos, TikTok content, books, and more. It’s become so normal to indulge in these topics because other people are doing it too. Why? The shock value. Women enjoy the kind of adrenaline that comes from horror and true crime, because we’re constantly looking for what comes next. This “what happens next” feeling gives us the same rush as the child-like feeling of playing hide and seek and trying not to be found. We’re all looking to feel like a child again, but women may have found a loophole.

Not only do we get this childish feeling of bottled up excitement, but we get a chance to explore and better understand the mindset of criminals. The content we seek out often shares information known or suspected about the psyche of the killer, kidnapper, whomever. This is the information we (or at least for me) want to know in order to have that aspect of, “what would I do here?” We fear becoming a victim, a statistic, but how can we keep ourselves from this same fate unless we know a little bit about the perpetrators themselves. Why did they do what they did? What made them choose the person(s) they chose? Why did they choose the methods they chose? What was the purpose? What was the message they wanted to leave behind? Are these people just crazy or are they calculated? We get to find out even just partial knowledge on these subjects within the horror we consume.

Another side to the story is the victim. Who were/are they? How did they fall into the trap of this person? How did they escape, if they did? How are they using that experience now after making it out alive, provided that they were able to make it out. True crime presents itself in a sense of justice. If the victim survives, they get a chance to make a difference, and if they don’t, then we do.

Women want to protect themselves and their fellow women. We are more often than not the victims in these horrific stories, and we can either lie here terrified or we can take the information we hear and we can use it to educate, protect, and serve others. We live in a world that is so male-dominated, whether we want to think so or not. We are constantly made to feel unsafe and afraid. It’s an everyday feeling. Maybe we want to learn how to take care of and protect ourselves, because in reality nobody else will.

We hope that the feeling we get when we hear a story about a survivor can be a feeling all women may one day feel, when the justice system decides to protect us properly, and work as hard as we’d like them to to adequately protect us

Why Women Watch So Much True Crime

Cults of Horror: The Death Cult in The Invitation (2015)

Sex Equals Death: Exploring Sexuality and Misogyny in “It Follows”