‘Family violence happens to everybody’: gender, mental health and violence in Australian media representations of filicide 2010–2014

Little, Janine

doi:10.1080/10304312.2015.1025366

Cited by 18 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…My argument is supported by recent Australian scholarship that observes the filicidal father or step/foster father represented in news reports as an aberration, a perverse masculine identity who must be either 'mad, or bad' (Little, 2015;Little and Tyson, 2017). It is a representation correlating with American journalistic characterisations of homicidal mothers as 'deceptive, destructive, and deviant women' in news reports asking 'how any sane woman could kill her children' (Barnett, 2016: 111).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…A reading of what stories that journalists write about filicide do with perpetrator representation, in working contexts where ‘subjectivities, histories and cultures are not only split along the lines of gender, but fractured across multiple differences’ (Thornham, 2000: 197), is therefore appropriate. It directs my selection of a purposive sample of newspaper texts for a theory-based method aiming to develop work on filicide in Australian media and culture published elsewhere (Little, 2015; Little and Tyson, 2017). Purposive sampling involves selection of information-rich cases that illustrate a particular issue or event (Patton, 2002: 230).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…News coverage of Rick Thorburn as the filicide perpetrator provides an opportunity to see journalism as at times deconstructive of cultural myth and ritual around both ideal and perverse notions of masculine behaviour. For instance, community responsibility appears in journalism's attempts to interpret paternal filicide to the public as the act of a 'mad man' who should have been monitored more carefully (Little, 2015). Yet this interpretation does not resolve Thorburn's perversion of the foster/father role.…”

Section: Rick Thorburn/tiahleigh Palmermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Filicide, journalism and the ‘disempowered man’ in three Australian cases 2010–2016

Little

2018

Journalism

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Rick Thorburn/tiahleigh Palmermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Filicide, journalism and the ‘disempowered man’ in three Australian cases 2010–2016

Little

2018

Journalism

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As such, it is revealing of the quick-trigger meaning-making mechanisms available to journalists, particularly where cases do not map neatly onto power and control models of domestic violence. Policy and media portrayals of domestic violence also tend to centre on violence against women (Murray and Powell, 2009), making domestic violence less readable in cases involving children (Little, 2015).…”

Section: Discourse Culture and The Intelligibility Of Familicidementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Buiten

Coe

2021

Crime, Media, Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

“…Looking specifically at studies on the media coverage of filicide, there is a tendency to focus exclusively on female offenders (Barnett, 2016;Cavaglion, 2008;Saavedra & Oliveira, 2017) or male offenders (Cavaglion, 2009;Little, 2015Little, , 2018. However, there is little discussion on how gender and the gendered understandings of parenthood could influence media coverage.…”

Section: Media Coverage Of Filicidementioning

confidence: 99%

Multifaceted Offenders and Minimization of Victims: U.S. National News Media Coverage of Offenders and Victims in Coverage of Filicide

Grau

2021

AM J QUALITATIVE RES

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There has been more discussion by and from the media in recent years over the issue of domestic violence, this has largely overlooked instances of fatal family violence. This project examines 340 cases of parents or stepparents who killed their children between January 1, 2004, and December 31, 2013 and reported in the U.S. national news media. A content analysis of the news coverage identified themes of positive, negative, and sympathetic portrayals of offenders and victims as well as the minimization of victims. News coverage of offenders depicted them as multifaceted persons with details that could humanize or other offenders while victims were minimized with more focus on the harm done to them than the lives they led. As the focus on offenders occurred in conjunction with the minimization of victims, it is concluded that news media coverage is offender-centric and such media coverage needs to be more balanced in portrayals of victims and offenders to better address and respond to the issue of fatal family violence.

show abstract

‘Family violence happens to everybody’: gender, mental health and violence in Australian media representations of filicide 2010–2014

Cited by 18 publications

References 15 publications

Filicide, journalism and the ‘disempowered man’ in three Australian cases 2010–2016

Filicide, journalism and the ‘disempowered man’ in three Australian cases 2010–2016

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

Multifaceted Offenders and Minimization of Victims: U.S. National News Media Coverage of Offenders and Victims in Coverage of Filicide

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About