In the wake of the appalling terrorist attack in Christchurch this week I’ve seen several posts on social media about how the incident is affecting people personally. As a journalist over the past few years I have been constantly confronted by the problem of dealing with terrorism and it has become something of a personal research project. I thought now would be a good time to share some of my takeaways in the hope that it might be of service to others.

The biggest takeaway and one I’ll come back to constantly is that you shouldn’t be scared by terrorism. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be affected, moved or impacted by it… but you should not be scared.

The first and easiest reason for this is that statistically the odds of being personally affected by a terrorist attack are incredibly low. Ridiculously, infinitesimally low.

To put things in perspective, in 2017 there were 18,814 deaths globally due to terrorism compared to 1,350,000 from car crashes; That’s a 0.14% likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack instead of a car crash. And a 99.98% chance of not dying in either one.

But that’s being rather generous, since the majority of terrorism deaths occur in areas of conflict and developing nations. So let’s narrow it down some more.

In Australia there were four people killed by terrorism in 2017; a relatively high number given we’ve only had 19 fatalities in total between 2017 and 1970. In comparison 1,224 people were killed on the road, 18,590 died from heart disease and 2,782 from accidental falls.

Yet even though it’s statistically unlikely, it’s far easier to imagine and to worry about a terrorist attack than a car crash. This is normal. It’s human psychology to worry about things that seem out of the ordinary. Everybody knows about heart attacks, traffic accidents and falling down the stairs; its been ingrained in our collective unconscious for centuries. We take these things for granted in Western society. For us, terrorism seems fairly new… but it actually isn’t.

Historically it’s only very recently that states could (and indeed do) guarantee safety as a fundamental right. Back in the Middle Ages it would be ludicrous to think that the king would be able to protect all his peasants from a treasonous rebellion. It’s only in the last several hundred years that states have managed to reduce political violence to almost nothing… which we as citizens now take for granted. To quote best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari in this excellent article on terrorism:

This is what makes the theatre of terrorism so successful. The state has created a huge space empty of political violence. This huge space acts as a sounding board, amplifying the impact of any armed attack, however small. […] Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence make them particularly vulnerable to terrorism. An act of terror that would have gone unnoticed in a medieval kingdom can rattle much stronger modern states to their very core.

The fact that almost every single one of us gets up every day and goes about our lives without ever being shot, blown up or taken hostage is proof that the vast majority of people in our society are not violent extremists. How many times have you caught public transport without seeing a suitcase bomb? Yet compare that to how many times you’ve worried about it? We think about “us versus them” when most of the time it’s just “us versus us”.

Why has it come to this? How has fear and suspicion, out of all proportion, become so normalised in everyday life?

I believe the media (of which I am a member) is largely responsible. It’s well known that the political message of terrorism is actively helped by media coverage. But that doesn’t stop the world’s news outlets making it the lead story of their bulletins whenever there is a new terrorist incident.

Someone made an analogy the other day that I think works quite well, likening coverage of terrorism to coverage of suicide. There is now a well-established convention in the media to avoid reporting suicides. Many studies have shown that raising awareness of this topic can influence copycat behaviour and evoke similar thoughts, known as the Werther effect. The exact same thing applies to terrorism, with one study suggesting that every new report about an attack increases the number of attacks in the following week by an average of 1.4. Yet our reporting of terrorism has not changed in the same way it has around suicide.

We need to become more mature in our reporting of terrorist incidents. Although the public does want to know about these events, they don’t need to be bombarded with information. We need fewer stories, fewer pictures and less emotive language. Who, where and how are not as important as why. We need to hear from experts, not commentators. Psychologists, not scaremongers.

It’s a responsibility shared to a lesser extent by media consumers. Let your favourite news outlets know how you want them to cover these stories. Comment on social media. Send the producers an email. Tell them they have a responsibility. Source your news from places that follow this advice.

Take heart in this fact; terrorists are at an incredible disadvantage. There is absolutely no way they can ever win using their own resources. The only possible chance they have for victory is their enemy overreacting and metaphorically shooting themselves in the foot. To quote Yuval Noah Harari again;

Provoking the enemy to action without eliminating any of its weapons or options is an act of desperation, taken only when there is no other way. […] Terrorists undertake an impossible mission: to change the political balance of power when they have almost no military abilities. To achieve their aim, they present the state with an impossible challenge of its own: to prove that it can protect all its citizens from political violence, anywhere, anytime.

Terrorism shouldn’t make you scared. It should make you motivated to change the world for the better. Turn that emotion into something positive. Empathy for those who’ve been affected. Solidarity with your fellow peace-loving citizens. Action to change our flawed media coverage.

This is not a crisis, it’s a challenge. Don’t be scared.