The ‘most maligned’ witness in the Christopher Dawson case: Gender, power, media and legal culture in the digitally distributed live-streamed court

Abstract

This article analyses the cultural construction of gender in a highly mediated, globally publicised Australian murder trial. Using the tools of multimodal socio-linguistic analysis, it interrogates the construction of a key female witness – known by the legal pseudonym ‘JC’ – in the physical, digitally distributed and livestreamed courtroom and subsequently through the media sphere, including in newspapers, magazines, podcasts, television and social media. It surfaces a victimblaming narrative in relation to alleged child sexual abuse that was an underlying theme in pretrial reporting, a central feature of the defence’s courtroom strategy and cross examination, and subsequently a dominant focus of the mainstream media’s trial coverage. It traces the emergence of a counter-discourse on social media largely propelled by contributors self-identifying as young women, and the radical reframing of the media narrative in response to the court’s verdict. The article also contextualises its findings against a background in which media technologies and media logics are dramatically reshaping the court’s practices and procedures in relation to ‘open justice’, as evidenced by the operation of the virtual media gallery and publicly livestreamed verdict. It concludes that the hyper-gendered narratives that framed the case are not new. Instead, media technologies – including the court’s livestream, and the public’s use of interactive media platforms – have brought new visibility to a longstanding socio-cultural problem. In Australia, R v Christopher Michael Dawson has been widely celebrated as a step forward for gender equality and the treatment of domestic and sexual abuse by and in the media and the legal system. This analysis demonstrates that in reality change is marginal and uneven.