Victims of metaphor: serious crimes and stepping into creativity

the eight Buffalo schoolgirls “were victims, though no one realized it at the time, not only of a rapist, but of a metaphor.”

You might reasonably ask how that could be.Well it is to do with how the police investigating framed their task and how that framing was summed up in metaphor (or is that vice versa?) In this case the police didn't put certain information into the public domain that could have pceweted further rapes because they saw their task as catching the bad guy rather than saving girls from violation.

And this article on dehumanisation in generating violence seems to show a similar process at work: reframing using metaphors* to categorise and 'prime' responses.

The articles referenced here report some research into how metaphoric framing affects reasoning ability in relation to crime.The article links this to the way that science is reported (because in actual fact, popularising science relies on metaphor and simile) but the same could be said of practical theology.

This insight tells us how important it can be that we reflect on the way that we are perceiving and thinking about things. We can be trapped in our own approaches and limited perceptions. By questioning them and consciously seeking to look at them differently or to supplement them using other images, models or metaphors we can create new possibilities, new futures, more resilient solutions more creative responses. In theological reflection the exploration/analysis should be a point of recognition of the metaphors, models or images that we currently use and to become aware that they may be limited and pull in new-to-us ways to view whatever it is. In the reflection stage we consciously try to bring to bear the riches of biblical imagery or incidents which can in turn open up not only different ways to think about whatever it is but also give us the possibility of perceiving and connecting with the ways of God in it.


*Though David Livingstone Smith claims that 'untermenschen' is not a metaphor but literal. I'm not so sure that works not when the term is linked as it was to terms like "vermin" or "disease" applied to people. It seems to me that untermenschen in that case is merely a catch-all term for a cluster of metaphors aimed at reframing a certain group in terms that made an implicit case for their enslavement and eventual elimination.