Filicide in Australian Media and Culture

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.

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

“…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).…”

“…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).…”

“…A stepfather/foster father is identified as a 'disempowered man' in stories that also position these father figures alongside state institutions that are perceived to have failed child victims. This 'disempowered man' was suggested initially in a recent study of filicide in Australian media and culture published elsewhere (Little and Tyson, 2017). As a masculine subject, it is imbued with meaning because masculinity and femininity are co-constructed in representation in ways specific to place and culture (Lazar, 2005: 143).…”

“…Given Australia’s relatively high rate of parents killing children, journalism’s ‘public mandate’ (Carlson, 2017) to explain filicide is a timely consideration (Brown et al, 2018; Pritchard et al, 2013). There are about 20 filicide cases recorded in Australia every year (Little and Tyson, 2017: 2), and mothers are shown to perpetrate filicide more frequently than fathers, unless stepfathers are included in the figures. When they are, men are shown to kill children in their care more often than women (Brown et al, 2018: 151).…”

Why Women Commit Filicide: Opinions of Health, Social Work, Education and Policy Professionals in Malaysia

“…Until we began our own research (Razali, ; Razali et al ., , , ), there were no reports of filicide research in Malaysia (nor in neighbouring countries), and there was no way of knowing whether the phenomenon in Malaysia differed from what had been found elsewhere. In recent decades, filicide and infant abandonment have attracted media interest and increased public concern worldwide (Little and Tyson, ; Niblock, ), including in Malaysia (Niner et al ., ), where there are frequent accounts in the media of infants being abandoned or their bodies being found. This is discussed by opinion leaders as attributable to bad parenting, poor religious education, internet pornography and overexposure to sexual liberalism (Razali, ).…”