Please note this blog mentions death, drug addiction and exploitation.
I was watching football when the text came. A death on the street, a woman found unresponsive and pronounced dead. Earlier that day she had left The Project and hugged one of the support workers on her way out. There is huge sadness. What makes this death different is the 'street celebrity’ status. Within a couple of hours of the death the first social media appeared, “Social media icon” found dead.
In the coming weeks, as a city, we will note the failings we are aware of in our depleted and stretched system. But depletion can’t be an excuse. One thing we are all aware of is our collected inability to prevent her being used by social media posters to improve their online presence.
“Just for likes, that’s what it comes down to. They exploited her just for likes.” When we say exploited, that’s what we mean. It wasn’t a casual filming of someone you come across, which many think is bad enough. No, she was sought out, she told us she was given money to be on social media, to swim in fountains in the middle of winter or dance in an inebriated state like a performing clown or whatever.
How is that exploitation? I know some will argue it isn’t. Being offered money to entertain isn’t illegal, it happens all the time. This form of capitalism is shunned by many who would support the capitalist project because it fed an illness. She was effectively being fed booze to perform because that was her addiction. Dance and we’ll give you more of what you crave, what you can’t do without, what your body craves and needs. Dance and we’ll reward you with the funds to buy more.
Some will say they didn’t know. Come on, let’s be real, it was hard to not know. Her alcoholism was the attraction, her fuelled with drink and what she would do when drunk, that was the sought after video, JUST FOR LIKES!
One of our colleagues who worked with her said, ”some people who will hail her as a Sheffield legend are the same people who used her vulnerability as click bait to get more attention on social media, are now the same ones who did nothing to help her. The truth is she was a person, a daughter, a niece. She was a human being not an entertainment.”
Is that what we are as a society? Watchers of misfortune, bystanders recording the tragedy of others, JUST FOR LIKES! I don’t think so.
For some time now there has been a concerted effort to stop the exploitation of this person. Law enforcement, city centre management, public sector and voluntary sector agencies are the ones who supported her. So, why didn’t we do a better job? That’s a question we have been asking for a while and for a good reason. Her life was complex and the thorny issue of ‘capacity’ loomed large. When she was drunk, she didn’t have capacity. In other words, she didn’t have the ability to care for herself in any way. She was physically at risk, emotionally at sea and unable to assess safety from danger. But at other times she had capacity, that is she could demonstrate a cognitive understanding of her situation and the options before her.
There is a lot of unhappy, hurt, upset and angry people who worked closely with her in homeless and other agencies today. We will take time to think through what it is we might have done differently to prevent this tragedy. What we do know is that voyeuristic social media gurus worked against those of us who were supporting her. They made her life worse. Today we will mourn, we will think of her and her family and the hurt they will be feeling.
