ABSTRACT
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) has been a dominant subject in the “golden age” of true crime podcasts (TCPs). TCPs have proliferated in the Australian context and have focused on cases or accounts featuring the rape, murder or disappearance of women and girls. In this chapter, the author pays attention to the cultural and social functions of TCPs and how they demonstrate “informality” by reconstituting the roles of community and reconceptualising justice interests. Also examined is why TCPs might be easily recognised as a contemporary informal justice mechanism in the current social and political context. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the porosity of “informality” and explores how TCPs remain imbricated with the carceral state and crime control logics. “Fact is scarier than fiction” (Casefile 2019).
