No abstract

Filicide is the deliberate act of a parent killing a child. Despite its low occurrence, filicide is one of the most emotive offenses for a public audience. The murder of a child by their own parent challenges many of our fundamental expectations about the role of parenthood, prompting a sense of horror, outrage, and deep distress: It violates the idea of parental instincts as a protection for children. While maternal and paternal filicide is committed in roughly equal numbers, historically, filicide has been regarded as a female crime. However, media coverage of mothers who commit filicide differs from coverage of fathers who commit the same crime. Infanticidal mothers in particular have a long history of being demonized by the media and in popular culture. Research shows that this is partly because such events shatter expected feminine and maternal norms. Despite the considerable body of scholarly work conducted in this area of crime and media culture, there were few studies of filicide in Australia until recently. As a consequence, the media’s portrayal of these tragic cases is to treat them as “inexplicable” while also attempting to find an explanation, most often through stereotyping, simplification, or rationalization.

How can journalism about parents killing their children improve public understanding of the factors influencing these filicide perpetrators? Three Australian cases occurring between 2010 and 2016 focus this question on stepfathers and foster fathers; a group recognised by international filicide research as of high risk for filicide. I consider questions of gender and masculine subjectivity in relation to Australian media coverage of filicide that involves these father figures so that a ‘disempowered man’, a figure introduced in previous work by Little and Tyson, is seen at the centre of journalism about filicide. The purpose of this study is to highlight the need to differentiate between this representational subject as an ideological construct of journalism about lethal family violence, and the perpetrators’ more fragmented and complex lives and social circumstances. It asks how the presence of a ‘disempowered man’ in media representation of filicide signals wider assumptions about appropriate gender role performance that need to be more fully accounted for and addressed as part of improving public understanding of the crime.

It is a familiar refrain to describe journalism as, simply, story-telling (Manoff, 1986). The aim of this article, however, is to explore how that simple project turns complicated in a place like Australia, with its lingering anxieties of culture and identity (Gelder & Jacobs, 1998, p.142). This article is a start to a longer study of the specific critical and cultural implications of contemporary journalism, practised in an 'unsettled' Australian postcolonial milieu. Here, the study makes some speculative observations of gender representation in long-running news stories about two women: Schapelle Corby and Lindy Chamberlain. My disciplinary background is cultural studies, not social sciences. The result here, therefore, is not a set of conclusions drawn from content analysis, as would be the case in a different kind of paper. I also want to lend support to the discussion in journalism scholarship of the conundrum of 'objectivity' for journalistic practice in socio-political contexts where assumptions of 'objectivity' may, in fact, obscure journalism's public interest principle.

CCTV," the security camera recording of Melbourne woman Jill Meagher's last minutes alive, registered more than 677,000 views on YouTube by early 2014. Little happens for most of its 232 seconds and, as would be expected with surveillance footage, there is no sound. In Australia, "Jill Meagher CCTV" forms part of a haunting iconography of a rape and murder victim that not only resonates with fictional narratives in other places, but also influences the way the Jill Meagher story, as a whole, is read. As Melissa Jane Hardie (2010) suggests of the "true crime" story (citing Bronski 2005, 29), the public reaction to high profile stories of violent crime "is often an emblematic cultural citation that represents a social problem or fixation." This article considers "Jill Meagher CCTV" as such a cultural citation and goes further by highlighting its gothic tendencies. Highlighting the gothic aspects of "Jill Meagher CCTV" resonates with surrounding narratives of violence and gender justice, which have material consequences for women in the way that the most prevalent forms of violence against women continue to be downplayed in those narratives.