Crafting Ethical True Crime
A Carleton Master’s Grad Creates a Guide for Care-Full Storytelling
Story and photos by Ainslie Coghill
Content Warning
The following story contains multiple references to and discussions about sexual and gender-based violence.
“…does our collective desire to consume true crime and search for justice, particularly for women, root itself in a search for justice from a system that so rarely delivers it?”
Bailey Reid, Creating Care-Full True Crime: A Sandbox Methodology (2024)
True crime demands to know “Whodunnit?” but rarely asks, “How did this happen? How can we prevent it from happening again? And how can we heal?”
Podcasting and the democratization of the medium has brought countless true crime stories about gender-based violence (GBV) to the mainstream, and almost anyone can tell these stories.
Through her thesis project, Bailey Reid (MA/25, Sociology) has devised a framework for storytellers (and fans) to carefully consider their choices when creating and consuming true crime.
The Care-Full True Crime Sandbox is the first tool of its kind created for and in collaboration with true crime storytellers to address themes like GBV in a more “care-full” way. The tool is fully available online, including video tutorials and other helpful resources.
“I’m always thinking, ‘How do we prevent gender-based violence?’ True crime has great power to create change, and if we can think about how to use true crime as a means of advocacy, that is what I wanted to capture with this work,” says Reid.
The “sandbox” methodology, borrowed from Dr. Max Liboiron’s work, invites us to consider four parameters (think: sandbox walls) for true crime storytellers and critical listeners: expert GBV Analysis, Purposeful Storytelling, Narrative Style, and Storyteller Identity.
Inside the sandbox, “the sand” is where narrative formulation, creativity, experimentation and advocacy can take shape for those willing to put in the work.
Reid began her master’s degree while working at Carleton University. She’s the Senior Advisor for Gender and Sexual Violence Prevention and Support and is the university’s top expert in GBV and sexual violence prevention. For nearly twenty years, she has dedicated herself and her career to survivors.
Episode One: The Beginnings
When the podcast sensation Serial was released in 2014, like many of us, Reid was immediately enthralled. She also recognizes she’s part of true crime’s top audience: a millennial, white, cisgender woman.
Sarah Koenig, the host and producer of Serial, is a professional journalist with an impressive resume, and Serial is often credited with taking podcasting into the cultural mainstream.
“I started reading things about it online, and one of the biggest criticisms of Koenig was that she was a woman looking in on two communities that she wasn’t part of at all,” says Reid. “That made some of her storytelling problematic.”
The post-2014 proliferation of true crime happened alongside Reid’s emerging career and her frontline work with survivors, and there came a point where she could no longer stomach the genre and felt frustrated by how it continually approached themes of GBV through stereotypes, tropes and misinformation.
“Many of these cases are framed as a ‘mystery,’ but the statistics about gender-based violence tell us we likely know what happened and should have known all along. But that’s not talked about because these podcasts are a blend of entertainment and mystery,” she says.
Episode Two: True Crime’s Potential for Change
Nearly a decade later, Reid felt ready to revisit the genre for her thesis work, which included a critical discourse analysis of seven serialized (i.e. one case per season) podcasts dealing with GBV: Serial, Suspect, Do You Know Mordechai, Someone Knows Something, Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams, Dirty John and Welcome to Paradise.
The critical listening process is what led her to identify common tropes and gaps in storytelling and helped shape the parameters of her Sandbox tool. She also consulted several true crime creators and subject matter experts.
In her thesis, she writes, “People have disregarded news [about GBV] for decades, and yet, since 2014, they will keenly tune in to a serialized podcast that discusses decades-old unsolved cases that centre around those very issues.”
For Reid, this is a clear missed opportunity for the genre to do more and undo harm.
“For example, Cree journalist Connie Walker did this with the Missing & Murdered series,” she says. “She raised awareness about violence against Indigenous women and systemic racism and shows the potential for telling true crime in ways that change the narrative around gender-based violence and encourage advocacy.”
She says the Sandbox offers creators some structure to tap into that kind of advocacy more easily.
“For instance, it asks people to think about what their identities and privileges are in relation to the people in the story. GBV is rooted in power, and an imbalance of power, so that must be a critical piece of the work,” she says.
The Finale: A Long Time in the Making
Reid wrote the bulk of her thesis in January 2024, while caring for a toddler and nine months pregnant with her second child. She recalls daily 5 a.m. writing sessions, necessitated by the fatigue that would set in later in the day. Her thesis defense took place when her second child was six months old.
“For me, this was an amazing way to bring some of my passions together and doing it as a mom was special because it gave me something outside of this new identity as ‘mom,’” she says.
“I’m now going to go to a convocation twenty years after I went to my first one, and I think that’s pretty fun.”
Reid has taken the day off work to attend the ceremony on Friday, June 20, 2025, where she will cross the stage to receive her Master’s degree, supported by proud family and colleagues.
Resources
- Sexual Violence Prevention and Survivor Support at Carleton
- Honouring Each Other, a campus prevention strategy for sexual violence
- Carleton University Sexual Violence Policy