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

Abstract

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.

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

“…While previous research tends to suggest that filicidal mothers and fathers are framed as bad, mad, or sad (Cavaglion, 2008(Cavaglion, , 2009Naylor, 2001;Saavedra & Oliveira, 2017) and comparisons of male and female offenders find female offenders portrayed as manipulative (Collins, 2016) or male offenders as more sympathetic (Elizabeth, 2016;Little, 2018), I find that mothers and fathers are portrayed positively, negatively, and sympathetically almost equally. Like prior research (Barlow, 2015;Collins, 2016;Greer & Jewkes, 2005), there is evidence of othering.…”

“…This research may have only looked at the U.S. context, but these findings can translate cross-nationally. Prior research demonstrates commonalities of media portrayals of filicide across cultures with mothers framed as mad, bad, or sad in Australia (Naylor, 2001), Israel (Cavaglion, 2008), Portugal (Saavedra & Oliveira, 2017), and the U.S. (Huckerby, 2003), while fathers are framed more sympathetically portrayed in Australia (Little, 2018), Israel (Cavaglion, 2009), and New Zealand (Elizabeth, 2016). O' Brien and Culloty (2020) have already demonstrated that news coverage in Ireland is similarly offender-centric and minimizing.…”

“…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.…”

“…It is thus important to know what can be gleaned from this reporting. Research on news media coverage of filicide has largely focused only on offenders (Barnett, 2016;Deckert, 2019;Little, 2018;Niblock, 2018); there has been less research comparing offenders and victims (Collins, 2016;DiBennardo, 2018). Scholarly attention on victims of crimes has increased (Gruenewald et al, 2013;Pemberton et al, 2019;Walklate et al, 2019), but it is still an underdeveloped field of research.…”

Reporting familicide-suicide in broadcast media: An Irish case study to inform better practice

“…Cavaglion (2009: 131) examined filicide by fathers in Israel and noted that the press ‘makes the story easy, clear, readable, understandable but also stereotyped’. Jewkes (2011: 147) and Little (2018) notes that sympathy is often shown towards men who kill their intimate partners in media reports that construe such events as a ‘tragic’ cases of decent husbands or doting dads gone wrong. While Fairburn and Dawson (2013) identified a reduction in the blame frame over time, from 29% in the 1970s to 14% in the late 1990s, they nonetheless found that coverage continues to employ victim-blaming news frames.…”