Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility: Familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news

Abstract

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.

Representations of Violence, Representations as Violence: When the News Reports on Homicides of Disabled People

“…The analysis centres on mainstream news coverage of familicide-suicide in which at least one victim was identified in the press as disabled. While non-traditional media plays an increasingly important role in mediating discourses of violence, mainstream news continues to enjoy broad public consumption, playing a significant role in setting the terms of debate and often influencing public perceptions and policy (Buiten 2022). Recognising that discourses of disability circulate in complex ways across and within various media platforms, we begin our analysis here, in the not-uncontested but influential Fourth Estate.…”

“…Positioning disability primarily as 'as suffering' (Waltz 2008) or a loss that has already occurred (McGuire 2010) legitimises framings of these murders as 'mercy killings' (Loftis 2016;Perry 2017;Seal 2018). Discourses of disability as burden-reducing the flourishing not just of the self but also of others-bolster narratives of the murders as understandable, if tragic, responses by 'overwhelmed' parents (Buiten and Coe 2022;Loftis 2016).…”

“…While relatively rare, familicide-suicides-the murder of a partner and child(ren) followed by suicide (Wilson, Daly and Daniele 1995)-are highly newsworthy events (Galvin, Quinn and Cleary 2021). Further, most recent familicide-suicides in Australia have included disabled victims, with disability featuring prominently in reporting (Buiten 2022). While disabled people experience a range of violences aside from homicides, many of these do not meet key news values-those elements of a story considered 'newsworthy'-and are therefore unlikely to be centred in reporting (Jewkes 2015).…”

The Problematic Scientificity of Psychology in the Media: How Mental Illness Coverage Could Lead to Criminality Prejudice

“…Quantitative analysis shows that Whites and Latinos are more likely to have their crime attributed to mental illness than Blacks, which suggests racial variability (Duxbury et al, 2018). News reporting of familicide tends to be reduced to "psychocentric frames" of mental health, leaving aside more broad social explanations (Buiten and Coe, 2021). However, these studies tend to leave aside the problematic role of psychology as a producer of knowledge, and its function in the judicial system.…”

“…This powerful narrative about an individual that has a problem that happened because he was unable to manage his emotions characterizes the explanations that psychology offers to the case. We can say that experts reduce the case to "psychocentric frames", leaving aside more broad social explanations (Buiten and Coe, 2021).…”