I HAVE been watching an American television show called Furious. It is about two women on opposite sides of the law. One is a former police officer named Alice who reported her violent boyfriend to their department. The department turned on her, not him. The other is a woman named Catherine who kills men. Men with money, men with records, men with connections that kept them untouchable. The show does not ask you to approve of Catherine. It asks you to notice that by the time she picked up the needle, every system that should have intervened had already left the room.

It is remarkably good television. The writer clearly understands something that most crime dramas do not. It’s not who did it; it is what happened before. What trail existed? Who saw it? Who could have stopped it? And why the answer to that last question is almost always nobody, or nobody who mattered.

There is a scene in which an older sex crimes detective, Nora, delivers a monologue by a hospital bed about what years of watching children abused has done to her. “You think you’re ever going to catch anyone who matters?” she says.

It is not a question. It is a diagnosis.

Name, hashtag, outrage,........

© Dawn