Familicide – the killing of a partner and child(ren) – is a rare and complex crime that, when it occurs, receives intense media coverage. However, despite growing scholarly attention to filicide in the news, little research to date has looked at how familicide is represented. Situated at the intersection of filicide, intimate partner homicide and very often suicide, how the knotty and confronting issue of familicide is reported on is telling of the discourses available to understand complex forms of family violence. In this article, we argue that reporting on familicide mirrors broader feminist concerns about the tendency to frame fatal family violence at the hands of men in individualised terms – often as driven by mental illness – at the expense of an accounting of gender and power. Here, we seek to elaborate on and contextualise what we call the mental illness/distress frame as part of the broader tendency towards psychocentrism. This is amplified in cases of familicide where cultural signifiers for the increasingly publicly conceived of issue of ‘domestic violence’ are often not apparent, leading to popularised psychological explanations to be assumed. The mental health/distress frame operates not only to obscure the role of gender and power in domestic and family violence; it obscures the connection between gender, mental distress and violence, naturalising (and gender-neutralising) mental distress and violence as a response to it. We argue that intersecting discourses – of gender, age, disability and the heterosexual nuclear family, for instance – operate in important ways to suggest, support and rationalise this frame. We illustrate these ideas through a detailed case study analysis of news reporting on a case of familicide in Sydney, Australia.

Rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' suicide and the concerns over experiences of mental "ill" health are increasing. In recent years, this has caused contestation over approaches to "health" that seek to address this. Within this context, Social and Emotional Wellbeing, a holistic, decolonising approach to health, has ascended in Australian health policy. This paper applies a Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis, using his theoretical framework of power, knowledge and discourse, to four Australian policy documents associated with addressing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' Social and Emotional Wellbeing and "mental health". Findings reveal aspects of the Social and Emotional Wellbeing discourse having presence in the policy documents. Its understanding, however, is constrained by a cultural and institutional context that privileges and perpetuates a biomedical lens. Additionally, there is a failure to address systemic neocolonialism even while acknowledging that health disparities stem from colonialism. As such, this paper argues that, although integration of Social and Emotional Wellbeing has commenced in these policy documents, the hegemony of colonial discourses persists. This is along with a lack of policy reference in these documents for coordinated activity across social institutions and structures to address holistic demands.

There has been limited exploration into the online engagements of people who are Indigenous and gender and sexuality diverse. There are, however, two separate bodies of literature that provide substantial insights into the digital involvement of Indigenous Australians, and gender and sexuality diverse people. Each has identified a myriad of complex negotiations, interactions and resistances that take place through the affordances of digital spaces, along with identifying impacts on well-being. This scoping review discusses dominant themes within existing research on these topics, and documents research that discusses an online blog entitled Archiving the Aboriginal Rainbow that is designed to foreground representations of Indigenous gender and sexuality diverse people. To contextualise this discussion, the paper begins with a review of scholarly literature that articulates and challenges the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous peoples’ gender and sexuality. The literature reviewed exposes new research directions. Namely, the importance of exploration into Indigenous gender and sexuality diverses peoples’ online engagements, and their interrelationship with well-being.

No abstract