What is this ‘justice’ that is being sought?

May 22, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News- The death of an 11-year-old girl is a tragedy that demands explanation. And in the absence of one readily furnished by the authorities, the public supplies its own. The case of Adriana Younge has become not merely a question of how she died, but of what story her death will serve. The cry for “justice” rises like a chant from the chorus, but what is meant by the word? Is it the patient unravelling of truth, or is it the confirmation of a foregone conclusion?

Justice, in the abstract, is blind, impartial, and dispassionate. It does not flinch from inconvenient facts, nor does it bend to the will of the mob. But the justice demanded in the court of public opinion is often of a different kind—one that is impatient, righteous, and already convinced of its own verdict.

The autopsy report, conducted by three international specialists, concludes that the girl drowned. A simple, if sorrowful, explanation. Yet for many, this is not justice. Justice, to them, must wear the face of villainy. It must have a murderer, a conspiracy, a shadowy hand behind the act.

Why? Because the randomness of accident is intolerable. An accidental drowning is a meaningless thing, a slip of fate, a moment of inattention with no one to blame. But drowning by murder is a story. It has a villain, a victim, and thus, a moral.  Many do not want justice so much as they want narrative satisfaction.

There are those who have already decided that Adriana Younge was murdered, and no amount of evidence to the contrary will sway them. The autopsy is dismissed—doctors, they say, can be bought, reports can be falsified, governments can lie. The insistence on homicide is not yet born of evidence, but of a deeper, more visceral need: the need, by many, for an enemy.

This is not new. History is littered with cases where the public’s hunger for a villain outstripped the facts. The crowd knows what it knows, and what it knows is that there must be someone to punish. To accept that the girl drowned accidentally is to accept that there is no one to hang. And that is an unbearable thought.

When some people cry for justice in cases like this, what they often mean is vengeance. They do not seek understanding; they seek retribution. The difference is critical. Justice asks, “What happened?” Vengeance asks, “Who must pay?”

If the girl was murdered, then there is a target for rage. If she were not, then grief must stand alone, without the solace of righteous fury. And grief without an enemy is a harder thing to bear. It is easier to believe in malice than in chance, because malice can be fought. Chance is indifferent, and against indifference, we are powerless.

In the digital age, the demand for justice has become a kind of theater. Social media platforms are stages upon which people perform their outrage, their sympathy, their demands for action. The louder the cry, the more virtuous the crier. But how many of those shouting for justice have considered the findings of the preliminary autopsy? How many have considered the possibility that the truth might be simpler, if no less tragic, than the story they wish to tell?

When justice becomes synonymous with a predetermined outcome, truth is the first casualty. Facts are no longer discovered; they are selected. Evidence is not weighed; it is either embraced or rejected based on whether it fits the desired narrative. This is not justice—it is dogma.

The autopsy says the girl drowned. If this is true, then the real question is: how? Was it accidental or because of negligence? An unguarded pool? A moment of childish recklessness? These are painful questions, but they are the ones that must be asked if truth is the goal. But if the goal is not truth, but the satisfaction of rage, then such questions are irrelevant.

If justice is the impartial pursuit of truth, then what is being demanded in Adriana Younge’s name is something else entirely. It is the insistence that reality conform to expectation. It is the refusal to accept that tragedy sometimes wears no face, that the world is cruel in its randomness.

Perhaps what is really being sought is not justice, but meaning. The death of a child is an unbearable thing, and unbearable things must be made bearable—through story, through blame, through the illusion of control. If she were murdered, then at least the world makes sense. If she were not, then the abyss opens beneath our feet.

But justice does not exist to comfort us. It exists to uncover what is true, whether we like it or not. And if we reject truth in favour of the story we prefer, then we have abandoned justice altogether.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.) 

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