The 9/11 memorial and museum: New York, New York, USA: Crime and Contemporary Tourism

As was famously written, ‘[t]errorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening, not a lot of people dead’ (Jenkins, 1975: 158) and nothing invokes the theatrical nature of extreme violence as remembering the 9/11 attacks, carried out by Al Qaeda against the US in 2001. The sheer horror of 3,000-plus individuals being murdered created a spectacle the likes of which we can only hope not to see again. Like a theatrical event, the attacks attracted an audience of millions of people around the globe (The Guardian, 2001) who sat and watched the horror unfold on their television sets and millions more will have seen the footage replayed on the news, over the internet and, even, as part of university courses studying a range of topics as varied as international relations, military history, terrorism studies and law enforcement. Such a huge audience was inevitable as the attacks are indelibly stamped on the course of history and rank alongside events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of Princess Diana. Even twenty years later many people report being able to recall exactly where they were when either they saw the attacks unfold or heard about them (Hartig and Doherty 2021).

Such a traumatic event has clearly changed people’s lives and not just those who lost loved ones in the attacks themselves. First responders, who risked everything to save people on the day, have died in large numbers (Freedman 2004)9/1.