Familicide, Gender and the Media: Gendering Familicide, Interrogating News 9811956251, 9789811956256

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Denise Buiten

Familicide, Gender and the Media Gendering Familicide, Interrogating News

Familicide, Gender and the Media

Denise Buiten

Familicide, Gender and the Media Gendering Familicide, Interrogating News

Denise Buiten The University of Notre Dame Australia Broadway, NSW, Australia University of Johannesburg Johannesburg, South Africa

ISBN 978-981-19-5625-6 ISBN 978-981-19-5626-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To all the women and children who were killed by someone they once loved.

Contents

Part I

Contextualising Familicide

1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Familicide, Gender, and the News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Context: Domestic Violence in the Spotlight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why Examine News Representations? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data Gathering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theoretical Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Note on Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 3 8 11 13 13 16 17 19

2

The Gender(-Based Violence) Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charting Contestations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paradoxes: Politics and Gender-Based Violence in Australia . . . . . . . . . . Gendered Violence or Just Violence? Contested Domestic Violence Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Developing Deeper Understandings of Gender and Violence . . . . . . . . . . Incendiary Issues: The Politics of Gender in Filicide Reporting and Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Brief Note on Anti-feminism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23 23 24

A Framework for Gender-Based Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What’s in a Name? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining Gender-Based Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mapping Gender in Gender-Based Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gendering Intimate Partner Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intersections and Gender-Based Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gender-Based Violence and Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gendering Varied Forms of Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

43 43 44 48 50 55 55 59 60

3

27 32 35 37 38

vii

viii

Contents

4

Gendering Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tackling the Complexity of Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Research on Familicide: State of the Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Familicide: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Types of Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Continuum Thinking in Relation to Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gendering Familicide: Identity, Interaction, and Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5

Notes on Gendering Filicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 What About Mothers Who Kill? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Filicide Research: State of the Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Gendered Drivers of Filicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 When Women Kill Their Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 When Men Kill Their Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 ‘Altruistic’ Filicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Silencing Children and Parent–Child Power Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Disability and Filicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Filicide as Gendered Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

6

Complex Connections: Mental Illness/Distress and Familicide . . . . . What About Mental Illness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Empirical Connections: Mental Illness and Family Murder-Suicide . . . . Mental Illness and Familicide: Tensions in Public Discourse . . . . . . . . . . Feminist Resistance to Psychocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sociological Approaches: Beyond Positivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Feminist Sociological Approach to Mental Illness/Distress . . . . . . . . . Gendering Mental Illness/Distress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gendering Mental Illness/Distress in the Context of Violence . . . . . . . . . Familicide and the Gendered Production and Mobilisation of Distress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Patriarchal Contexts of Mental Illness/Distress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part II 7

65 65 66 69 71 74 75 81

105 105 107 109 113 116 118 119 122 124 126 127

Familicide-Suicide in the News

The Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Familicide-Suicide Cases Under Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2014: The Hunt Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2015: The Milne Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2016: The Manrique Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2018: The Miles Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2020: The Baxter Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

135 135 138 140 141 143 146 147

Contents

8

9

Journalistic Complexities: Framing, Interpellation, and Talk-Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘They Printed What?!’ Reckoning with the Complexities of News Framing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Framing in News Representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Those Who Represent the World Are Part of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Familicide Representations in Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Non-journalist Social Actors and the Framing of News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining Sources in the Coverage of Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Talk-Back’ in the News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Not an Easy Thing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ix

151 151 153 155 156 156 157 164 165 166

Forensic Reporting and the ‘Mystery’ of Familicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘We May Never Know’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Isolated Incidents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unknowable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An ‘Ordinary Family’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mass Murder, But ‘No Violence’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forensic Reporting and the Hollowness of Minutia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mysterious Minds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

169 169 171 174 176 180 183 186 187

10 The Mental Illness/Distress Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . He Just ‘Snapped’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contexts: Mental Health and Domestic Violence Discourses in Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Familicide and the Mental Illness/Distress Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manifestations of the Mental Illness/Distress Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Overt Language of Mental Illness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Perpetrators Without Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Family Tragedies Without Agents of Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sad Men, Failed Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nice, White, Middle-Class Families Suffer from Mental Illness, Not Patriarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lack of Contextualisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Effects of the Mental Illness/Distress Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Talk-Back: Challenging the Mental Illness/Distress Frame . . . . . . . . . . . Beyond Either/Or’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

193 193

11 Troubling Intersections: Disability and Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inflecting Representations of Familicide: Disability and Childhood . . . . Essentialising Mental Distress as an Outcome of Caring for People with Disabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tacit Victim-Blaming of People with Disabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

227 227

195 198 199 199 202 203 206 209 212 216 218 219 220

229 233

x

Contents

Superfluous References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Complexities: Sources and Ableism in News Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Effects of Implicating Disability as Cause . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘We Should Be Critical’: Talk-Back Against Disability Narratives . . . . . Addressing the Link: Violence Against People with Disabilities . . . . . . . Child Victims: A Brutal Silencing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Representational Justice for Children and People with Disabilities . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

234 235 238 240 245 246 250 250

12 Notes on Filicide-Suicide Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maternal and Paternal Filicide-Suicide in the News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Existing Research on Gendered Representations of Filicide . . . . . . . . . . Filicide-Suicide Coverage 2015–2020 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mental Illness/Distress Frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children, Beyond Tropes or Symbols (and Why We as Feminists Should Care) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

257 257 259 262 263

13 Framing Domestic and Family Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It’s Up to Us to Make These Lives Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When Familicide Is Recognised as Domestic Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Domestic and Family Violence Is Usually Presented in News . . . . The ‘Horrific Incident’: Early Reporting on the Baxter Familicide . . . . . Thematic Reporting and the Recognition of Patterned Abuse . . . . . . . . . A ‘Gutless Monster’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Ideal Victims’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Arndt Affair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tentative Progress: More Work to Be Done . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Later Reporting: A Post-script . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

271 271 273 275 277 279 283 287 289 291 292 294

14 Conclusion: Working with Complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

299 299 301 302

265 267

About the Author

Denise Buiten is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Justice at the University of Notre Dame Australia, and a Senior Research Associate of the University of Johannesburg. Her research focuses on understanding gender-based violence and tracing the evolving discourses surrounding gendered violence in media, policy, and public debates.

xi

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 1.2 Table 5.1 Table 7.1 Table 13.1

Familicide-suicide cases analysed (2015–2020) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Newspaper data summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Filicide types by more common perpetrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Available coronial inquests (2015–2020) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Direct references to domestic and family violence in reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

14 14 90 137 281

xiii

Part I

Contextualising Familicide

Chapter 1

Introduction

Familicide, Gender, and the News It is difficult to fathom an act of domestic and family violence more extreme and explicit than the murder of an entire family by one of its own members. The murder of a partner and their children, often followed by the suicide of the perpetrator, is undertaken not only to end the lives of individuals, but to end the family itself—a family conceived of by the killer as a collective entity. It is a form of violence against individuals—almost always women and their children—and against the family ‘unit’ itself. This form of ‘family annihilation’, as it is often referred to, is defined as familicide (Wilson et al., 1995). Surely, when an adult kills their partner and children, it would be recognised as an extreme but not inconceivable crime—another manifestation of the pervasive problem of domestic and family violence against women and their children. Of course, only a small number of domestic and family violence cases end in familicide.1 Intimate partner homicides occur at much higher rates, as do filicides, the murder of children by their parents.2 While familicide is relatively rare, as Kelly (1987, 1988) has argued, gendered violence exists on a continuum—an expansive continuum of overlapping forms of violence that are profoundly patterned and connected even as they are varied. Familicide, when it arises, is shocking but not out of step with this continuum when considered within the context of what we know about patterns of 1

While national incidence data is sparse, reported rates include an average of one case of familicidesuicide a year in the Netherlands, to an average of 23 such cases in the USA between 2000 and 2009 (Karlsson et al., 2021). In Australia, news reports suggest about one case per year. 2 According to the Australian Domestic Violence Death Review Report (New South Wales Government, 2019), 292 adults were killed by a current or former partner in the context of domestic violence between 1 July 2000 and 30 June 2019, an average of just over 15 people per year; 234 of these were women, and the majority of women in all cases were the primary domestic violence victim leading up to the murder. The same report showed that 103 children were killed by a relative or kin in the context of domestic violence during this period.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_1

3

4

1 Introduction

domestic and family violence. Familicide is committed almost exclusively by men against women and children (Karlsson et al., 2021). It is often preceded by a history of domestic and family violence, separation, and custody disputes (Karlsson et al., 2021). It is often precipitated by an imminent or perceived loss of control over the traditional domains of masculine authority: women, children, and finances (Karlsson et al., 2021; Liem & Koenraadt, 2008; Mailloux, 2014). Yet, when a man kills his family, it is not always regarded as emblematic of epidemic levels of domestic and family violence—by the media, by police, or indeed sometimes by those close to the family. The connections between familicide and broader issues of domestic and family violence are often tenuous, inconsistently made, and contingent on the circumstances. Familicide is sometimes framed as the vile and abusive act of a monster, at others as a ‘family tragedy’ in which the killer is as much a victim (of mental illness or personal circumstances, for instance) as those whose lives he extinguished. How familicide is interpreted and framed is complex. This is understandable. As a form of violence, familicide is rare, involves multiple victims, is little understood and under-researched (Karlsson et al., 2021). Further, while familicide is almost exclusively committed by men, women kill their children (filicide) in roughly equal numbers to men (Brown et al., 2019),3 making the gendered dimensions of acts of fatal family violence involving children extremely knotty. Further, the existence of suicide in at least half of familicide cases (and in some studies, up to 100% of familicides) (Karlsson et al., 2021) often raises among the public the question of mental illness. It is therefore perhaps not unsurprising that familicide would not always be recognised as domestic and family violence or viewed as a patriarchal crime, receiving mixed interpretations. It may be interpreted as mental illness, as the outcome of personal stresses, as a mystery. Whether and how familicide is understood as a form of gender-based domestic and family violence is telling. It tells us not just how we understand familicide itself, but how we understand the link between gender and violence, how we understand parental violence against children, and what comes to mind when we think about domestic and family violence. It tells us about the contours and boundaries around how we conceptualise these issues. Examining how familicide is represented is, therefore, not just about familicide—it is situated within a range of discourses available to make sense of gender, violence, and families. It is about the interpretive possibilities marking various forms of violence and the extent to which they are culturally intelligible (Buiten & Coe, 2022) as being about gender. This book examines the representation of familicide-suicide in the news and what it reveals about cultural assumptions around domestic and family violence and gender. While there is much research on how domestic and family violence is

3

Incidence of male and female perpetrators of filicide varies. The most recent data in Australia suggests that, overall, men are more likely to commit filicide than women. Stepfathers are overrepresented within these numbers, however. Biological mothers are more likely to commit filicide than biological fathers (Brown et al., 2020). This is discussed further in Chap. 5.

Familicide, Gender, and the News

5

represented in the news, and a growing body of research on how filicide is represented,4 very little research has examined how familicide is portrayed.5 In this book, I seek to address this gap. Further, while there has been a range of research on familicide as a phenomenon, very little has examined it from a sociological perspective6 and far less through a feminist lens. As such, to scaffold an analysis of news representations of familicide, I first to advance a feminist sociological framework for understanding familicide, one that can inform a critical analysis of news representations. My aim is therefore twofold: to better understand familicide as a form of gender-based violence and to explore representations of familicide in the news to reflect on the range of discourses available to make sense of it—especially in cases that do not map neatly onto understandings of domestic and family violence, as is often the case with familicide. While the book focuses on providing an in-depth analysis of familicide-suicide in the Australian news, how this resonates with wider questions around news media representations of gendered violence internationally are highlighted throughout. Further, the theorisation of familicide as a form of gender-based violence provided in the first part of the book draws on and is oriented towards an international body of scholarship on familicide and gender-based violence. As such, it seeks to contribute to international conversations among a range of scholars of gender, violence, and the media. Given the rarity of familicide, one may ask why this specific form of violence warrants research attention. There are two reasons I think it does. First, familicide as a form of gender-based domestic and family violence has some unique characteristics at the intersection of femicide, filicide and often suicide that warrant specific exploration. Not all perpetrators of familicide have a history of domestic violence and abuse, for instance (Websdale, 2010). However, while familicide often presents in ways that distinguish it, it is important to situate it as part of a complex continuum of gendered violence. Part of the aim of this book is to show the value of what Boyle (2019) has called continuum thinking around gender-based violence. This involves distinguishing and seeking to understand the unique characteristics of different forms of violence, while appreciating the deep connections between them (Boyle, 2019). Accordingly, in this book I cast a feminist sociological lens on familicide to better understand its unique features and to show its connections to other forms of gender-based domestic and family violence. The second reason for tackling how the phenomenon of familicide is represented in the news is that, when it

4

See, for example, Grau (2021) and Barnett (2005) for the US context, Niblock (2018) and Walklate and Petrie (2013) for the UK context, Cavaglion (2008, 2009) for the Israeli context, and Little (2015, 2021) and Little and Tyson (2017) for the Australian context. 5 Buiten and Coe (2022), Galvin et al. (2021), Quinn et al. (2019), and Sisask et al. (2012) are among the few scholars who have examined representations of familicide, the latter two focusing on social media responses to news portrayals. 6 Websdale (2010) is an exception here.

6

1 Introduction

occurs, it receives intense media coverage. How it is reported on is therefore of consequence; these high-profile cases can act as influential flashpoints for understandings of domestic and family violence. I have chosen to focus on cases of familicide ending in suicide (familicide-suicide). This is for two main reasons. In practical terms, most cases of familicide reported in Australia over the last few years ended in suicide. Importantly, too, I am interested in how emerging public discussions of mental illness and suicide may be shaping news reporting on violence. Reporting on domestic homicides involving suicide often feature the inclusion of suicide prevention and mental health discourses (Quinn et al., 2019; Richards et al., 2014a, 2014b); examining cases that involve suicide, therefore, provides an effective starting point from which to interrogate of the thorny issue of mental illness. For the sake of scope and clarity, I do not focus on cases of filicide-suicide, a form of violence committed in roughly equal numbers by women and men. This is not to avoid the issue of female-perpetrated violence; indeed, I believe more work is needed looking at how filicide-suicide by both fathers and mothers is understood in gendered terms and represented in the media. Both familicide and filicide-suicide are particularly complex issues, in some ways overlapping and in others distinct. They are both worthy of close attention. In this book, I focus on familicide-suicide. However, I reflect briefly through some preliminary research notes on filicide-suicide as a gendered phenomenon (Chap. 5) and how it is reported in the news (Chap. 12). The book first presents existing research on familicide to articulate it as a form of gender-based domestic and family violence, before presenting on a study conducted on mainstream news media representations of familicide-suicide in Australia over a six-year period (2014–2020). During this time, five cases of familicide-suicide were reported, one of which sparked a moment of reckoning around domestic and family violence in Australia. I place these representations within the context of broader international debates about gender and domestic and family violence and examine what these representations tell us about how we conceptualise those connections. I show that familicide is represented in complex and varied ways, and that a range of intersecting discourses—around mental illness, the gendered nuclear family, disability, and childhood—operate to support and rationalise particular news frames. I advocate for continuum thinking (Boyle, 2019) around gender-based domestic and family violence, enabling us to see (and represent) the connections between familicide and other forms of domestic and family violence, even while we recognise its distinctions. The book is divided into two parts. Part One sketches the context in which the study emerges, looking at key debates around the connection between gender and violence, and presenting a feminist sociological understanding of familicide. It discusses what I call the gender(-based violence) wars—the scholarly and public debates that signal the contested position of a feminist lens on domestic and family violence—arguing that familicide and how it is represented needs to be considered in the context of these debates (Chap. 2). I then present a sociological framework for gender-based violence that moves beyond a narrow conceptualisation of male violence against women (while recognising that this is a principal form of gendered violence), accounting for more varied forms of violence (Chap. 3). Chapter 4 applies this framework to

Familicide, Gender, and the News

7

the issue of familicide, showing that—despite it seldom being recognised or even researched as such—available empirical evidence suggests familicide is indeed a form of gender-based domestic and family violence. Female-perpetrated filicide often elicits questions about the usefulness of a gender lens to understand family murder involving children. Therefore, while familicide is the focus of this book, Chap. 5 offers some theoretical reflections on how filicide-suicide can also be understood as a gendered form of violence. I then tackle the controversial question of mental illness and familicide (Chap. 6), acknowledging the role mental distress plays in familicide while arguing against psychocentric approaches that assume it stems from the minds or bodies of individuals. I advocate for a feminist sociological approach to mental illness and distress that addresses its social dimensions and situates it within gendered contexts. Part Two presents the findings of the study on Australian news representations of familicide-suicide. I outline the details of the five familicide-suicide cases covered in the study of news media representations (Chap. 7) and reflect on some of the unique challenges and complexities encountered when examining media portrayals of familicide-suicide (Chap. 8). In particular, I argue that beyond critiquing journalists and ‘the media’ for the ways gender-based violence is represented, we need to examine the broader cultural context that is shaping the news and engage reflexively with complex role of surviving family members and social advocates in shaping the news. Chapter 9 examines the tendency to frame familicide as an unknowable, unpreventable mystery, particularly in cases without a known history of domestic and family violence, often characterised by a hollow focus on the forensic minutiae of the crimes in the assumed absence of social context. Chapter 10 examines the mental illness/distress frame in reporting on familicide cases without a known history of domestic and family violence, showing how such a frame is rationalised by notions of the idealised heterosexual, nuclear, middle-class family. I specifically interrogate some of the troubling ways intersecting discourses of disability and childhood operate to support and rationalise the mental illness/distress frame (Chap. 11), perpetuating ableist and adult-centric discourses that silence children and people with disabilities are full human beings. I then present a brief comparative reflection on news representations of filicide-suicide, showing overlaps and distinctions with reporting on familicide-suicide. Finally, in Chap. 13, I examine the rarer instances in which reporting on familicide cases did represent it as a form of gendered domestic and family violence, exploring what these reveal about when it is rendered culturally intelligible as a form of gender-based violence and reflecting on some of the limitations of these discourses. The remainder of this chapter briefly situates this book within broader public discourses on domestic and family violence. Specifically, I contextualise it within the emergence of domestic and family violence as a public issue in Australia, and the simultaneous advancement of mental health as a public policy issue.

8

1 Introduction

Context: Domestic Violence in the Spotlight There has been a significant shift in the last few decades in Australia towards conceiving of domestic and family violence in gendered terms—in policy and political discourse (Murray & Powell, 2011; Stubbs & Wangmann, 2017) and in media (Hawley et al., 2018). This shift, however, is by no means complete, uniform or uncontested. The role of gender in domestic and family violence has historically been a controversial and contested issue (Yates, 2018, 2020). While feminist scholarship and activism has significantly marked the domestic and family violence policy landscape in Australia and elsewhere, employing gender as an explanatory frame remains politically provocative. Gendered narratives compete with a range of alternative frames—such as mental illness—for hegemony. Nowhere is this clearer than in media reporting on the rare, sensationalised, and emotive issue of familicide on which multiple, often contradictory, meanings are laid in an attempt to make sense of extreme violence. Familicide connects multiple forms of violence—against children, against women, against the self—and transgresses a variety of cultural values about the family, parents and relationships between parents and children. The context and characteristics of familicide also regularly differ in significant ways to other forms of femicide, making a coherent broader narrative about its aetiology difficult to establish. As such, familicide can become a site at which a range of available discourses play out in mixed ways. In this section, I briefly outline some key points around the discursive context for the study. During the 1970s, domestic violence came to be marked as an issue of social concern in Australia, coming out of the shadows of the ‘private sphere’ and being repositioned as a matter of public policy (Stubbs & Wangmann, 2017). Feminist activism and the women’s refuge movement were central to this shift (Murray & Powell, 2011; Stubbs & Wangmann, 2017), as were the revelations to emerge from the Australian Royal Commission on Human Relationships between 1974 and 1977 (Arrow, 2018). These processes challenged the normalisation and minimisation of men’s violence against women in the home, articulating domestic and family violence as a product of inequal gender relations (for example, Dobash & Dobash, 1979), and constructing it as a public issue (Arrow, 2018). In the 1980s, national and state governments commissioned several major inquiries into domestic and family violence, notably via the Commonwealth/State Co-ordination Task Force on Domestic Violence and a succeeding range of state-based task forces and commissions (Stubbs & Wangmann, 2017). These investigations revealed the extent of the issues at hand and compelled a more structured response to domestic and family violence (Murray & Powell, 2011). This push was further emboldened by international developments in women’s rights and the 1995 United Nations Beijing Declaration and Plan of Action which required states to develop national plans of action tackling violence against women (Murray & Powell, 2011). Since the 1980s, and especially from the late 1990s, Australia introduced and transformed a raft of policy measures and set up a multipronged support service system to respond to domestic and family violence—from policing, law reform,

Context: Domestic Violence in the Spotlight

9

special courts, and refuges, to medical, financial, and housing services for women experiencing violence (Murray & Powell, 2011). Government funding for domestic violence services, campaigns and action plans have also been significantly extended since the late 1990s (Murray & Powell, 2011). In many of these spaces, feminist perspectives on domestic violence have been increasingly influential—although not uniformly across institutions, governments, and states. Conservative governments such as Howard’s in the late 1990s and early 2000s, for instance, put in place considerable funding and services in relation to domestic and family violence but saw a “demise of feminist influence on domestic violence policy” (Murray & Powell, 2011, p. 30) and the advancement of ‘genderneutral’ language that obfuscated the role of gender. Some policy reforms at this time reverted to quite traditional gendered constructs of women as wives and mothers, men as heads of households and the in-tact nuclear family as the cornerstone of healthy communities—the “‘white picket fence’ discourse” (Murray & Powell, 2011, p. 30). In contrast, the successive Labour government headed by Julia Gillard was both more open to and prone to utilise feminist sector expertise to guide policy (Murray & Powell, 2011). Taking a rights-based approach and expanding the focus of domestic and family violence beyond physical and sexual violence to include emotional and other forms of abuse, the Labour government between 2007 and 2011 “incorporated a feminist analysis in addressing violence against women” (Murray & Powell, 2011, p. 32). From 2013 to 2022, a more conservative Coalition government came into power. While a reasonably strong policy focus on domestic and family violence was maintained during this period, and a gendered analysis survived—under some prime ministers more than others7 —the sector also saw a rolling back of funding for frontline women-centred services including (but not limited to) austerity measures imposed by the Abbot government following the global financial crisis (Pruitt et al., 2017). The Coalition government under Scott Morrison between 2018 and 2022 had what might generously be termed a spotted record with respect to violence against women, at once committing high levels of domestic violence service funding in some areas, while retaining a pointed deafness to many women’s voices surrounding issues of gender, violence, and inequality (see Hill, 2021). The impact of the more recent election of a Labour government in 2022 remains to be seen. Despite the resurgence of more conservative politics in the preceding decade, among domestic and family violence services dealing directly with victim/survivors, a “feminist power and control analysis of DFV prevails” (Yates, 2020, p. 262). Some, like journalist and writer Hill (2019), have gone as far as to suggest that a feminist discourse on domestic violence has achieved relative hegemony in Australian public policy and sector practice. This, she argues, has been incredibly important, but has also calcified a narrow focus on structural accounts of gender inequality as a driver for domestic and family violence, to the exclusion of a psychosocial approach that acknowledges the connection between social and psychological factors. Yates 7

Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, for instance, famously cited disrespect for women as the root of domestic violence, and a national campaign centred on this idea was rolled out.

10

1 Introduction

(2018, 2020), while acknowledging the tremendous influence of gendered accounts of domestic and family violence in public administration in Australia, has highlighted how feminist accounts of domestic and family violence have been inconsistently interpreted and applied across contexts. The overall picture is of a not-insignificant influence of feminist accounts of domestic and family violence, but an ideological push and pull around the role of gender in understanding and addressing these issues (Murray & Powell, 2011). Contemporary representations of familicide examined in this book must be considered in this context. As high-profile cases of familicide entered news headlines in Australia over the past few years, feminist ideas around these issues were receiving growing public visibility. With this, however, came a renewed scrutiny of the utility of a gender lens—and in many ways, a backlash against feminist accounts. Alcorn, for instance, wrote in The Guardian newspaper in February of 2016 that Australia had witnessed “a year-long consciousness-raising exercise on domestic violence, a communal confronting of a once-ugly secret” that generated “unprecedented momentum, goodwill and hope” (Alcorn, 2016). Yet, as Alcorn moved on to state, the ostensibly feminist understanding of domestic and family violence as stemming from the ‘disrespect’ of women that characterised this period was being vocally challenged. Commentators such as Alcorn herself questioned the feminist lens on domestic and family violence, arguing that while this lens is “pervasive, often presented as self-evident”, it has been subject to questioning by “serious researchers who have serious doubts” (Alcorn, 2016). While acknowledging the importance of the issue of domestic and family violence, many like Alcorn have remained sceptical about the scientific rigour of feminist accounts of domestic and family violence.8 Another commentator, McKenzie-Murray, questioned what he called the “Great Narrative” that is a feminist perspective on domestic and family violence, a narrative he argued has been “canonised by repetition” (2015). For McKenzie-Murray, gender as a lens through which to understand domestic and family violence has become so hegemonic and so narrow, that all other perspectives on the issue have become excluded. As such, while feminist ideas in this space have gained traction in public and media discussions, they have been subject to ongoing questioning, often discredited as part of what some researchers have identified as a backlash against gender equality (see, for example, Dragiewicz, 2011; Dragiewicz & Burgess, 2016; Flood et al., 2021). At the same time as gender and domestic and family violence were subject to growing visibility and scrutiny, mental health as an issue of public importance has been gaining ascendancy in policy, political, and public debates (see, for example, Bastiampillai et al., 2021; Cui et al., 2019; Holmes, 2016). Like domestic and family violence, the scale of mental illness has been measured and reported in unprecedented ways. Like domestic violence, it has been coming out of the shadows as an issue that affects millions of people living in Australia. Suicide as a national problem, especially among young people, Aboriginal people, and men, has become subject to greater levels of research, policy, and funding. Like domestic and family violence, mental illness and suicide are increasingly been framed as public health 8

More around this will be discussed in Chap. 2.

Why Examine News Representations?

11

issues (Buiten & Coe, 2022). However, while feminist explanations of domestic and family violence have been garnering greater authority, when it comes to mental illness a psychocentric lens has remained—that is, while mental illness is regarded as a public issue in terms of scale, its aetiology has remained largely understood in individualistic, “psychocentric” terms (Rimke, 2016).9 It is unsurprising, then, that when cases of familicide-suicide have, in all their horror, pierced news headlines they would be subject to a range of interpretations at the intersection of emerging public discussions about mental health and domestic and family violence. Familicides, as I will show in Chap. 4, do not always fit cleanly into the discursive categories of mental illness or ‘domestic violence’. As such, cases of familicide represent what Fairclough (1992) called “moments in crisis”—points in time and space, often around particular events, characterised by high levels of ambiguity. In these spaces, things that had often remained naturalised or out of view are laid bare: hidden meanings, assumptions, and values bubble to the surface as social actors struggle to forge clarity and meaning. Not only do moments in crisis reveal, but they create: they reflect “change in process” (Fairclough, 1992, p. 230) where disputes over meaning can create new understandings. Such “moments of crisis” can often be seen around cases of familicide-suicide that attract concentrated media attention and puzzle the public.

Why Examine News Representations? News on domestic and family violence has had a considerable, if complex, role to play in national understandings of gender and violence (Sutherland et al., 2017). As Berns (2004) has observed, “most people learn about domestic violence from the popular media. The media are the most common and influential tour guides for exploring the landscapes of social problems” (p. 37). News reporting plays a significant role in determining which problems come to be seen as public issues, “invested with a broader meaning and made available for public consumption” (Sacco, 1995, p. 142). This in turn shapes policy responses (Berns, 2004). News reporting on domestic and family violence can also have more immediate lived effects, acting as a catalyst for victim-survivors to seek support (Richards et al., 2014b). It can influence would-be perpetrators; sympathetic portrayals of intimate partner murder-suicide can potentially encourage similar actions by others (Richards et al., 2014a). When couched in the language of parental love, framings of the murder of children as ‘altruistic’ can serve to validate the thoughts and plans of potential perpetrators of filicide (O’Hagan, 2014).

9

More on this is discussed in Chap. 5. As Bastiampillai et al. (2021) point out, policy provisions and funding to address mental illness in Australia have focused on individual, rather than sociological, factors.

12

1 Introduction

In Australia as elsewhere, high-profile cases in the news have also spurred considerable changes in public attitudes and policy responses, demonstrating the power of news coverage of prominent cases. This can be seen in the national response to the 2014 murder of eleven-year-old Luke Batty by his father. As Hill observes, “Nowhere did an entire population wake up to [the issue of domestic violence] like Australia did on February 12” (Hill, 2019, p. 2). On this day, eleven-year-old Luke Batty was murdered by his father while attending cricket practice, a case that attracted national attention. Luke’s father had abused Luke’s mother, Rosie Batty, for several years before she managed to escape the relationship. However, on that day Luke’s father arrived at his son’s cricket practice and, as people began to leave, killed his son in broad daylight. Luke’s father later died of police gunshots and self-inflicted stab wounds. Luke’s murder in the context of domestic and family violence against his mother woke Australia up to the extreme consequences of domestic and family violence and the failings of the system for preventing its escalation despite multiple points of contact with courts and police. The effect of this case on the Australian public was one of “scales [falling] from our eyes” (Hill, 2019, p. 3), a watershed moment for Australian public debate about domestic and family violence (Hawley et al., 2018). Since then, Australia has been shaken by numerous family murder-suicides, many of which have become major cases in the news igniting debate around issues of family violence. This has included, on average, one case of familicide every year. In 2014, Geoff Hunt shot and killed his wife, Kim, and their three children, Fletcher, Mia and Phoebe. In 2015, Darren Milne disabled the airbags in the family car, filled it with petrol bombs and deliberately drove his family into a tree. His wife Susana, who was 29 weeks pregnant at the time, and son Liam died; their second son, Benjamin, was the sole survivor. In 2016, Fernando Manrique gassed and killed his wife, Maria, and their two children, Elisa and Martin, along with the family dog in their home in Sydney. In 2018, Peter Miles shot and killed his wife, Cynda, adult daughter, Katrina, and her four children, Taye, Rylan, Arye, and Kadyn in the largest mass shooting in Australia since Port Arthur.10 All cases had been perpetrated by men and ended with suicide. Then in January 2020 Rowan Baxter murdered his former partner Hannah Clarke and their three young children, Laianah, Aaliyah, and Trey. Hannah Clarke had fled her relationship with Rowan Baxter, who had for years been subjecting her to myriad forms of abuse. In response, he tracked her and their three children down on the school run, doused them in petrol and set them alight. When passers-by tried to help Hannah and the children, he stopped them, ensuring they could not be saved before he took his own life. While Baxter’s actions were unspeakably cruel and contextualised within an extended history abuse perpetration, the other cases were more opaque; they did not, at least to the knowledge of the public, involve a known history of abuse prior to the murders. Yet, they represented the ultimate expression of violence and control. This raised questions for me: when is an act of extreme violence against the family 10

The Port Arthur massacre of 1996, in which a shooter killed 35 people, lead to sweeping gun reforms in Australia.

Methodology

13

reported in the news as ‘domestic and family violence’? When is it recognised as gendered? The ambiguity in many cases of familicide-suicide makes news reporting on it a site on which a range of potential meanings can be layered and stripped away. How it is represented in the news can, in many ways, reveal to us about how domestic and family violence, and its relationship to gender, are understood.

Methodology This book addresses the following research questions: • How is familicide-suicide represented in mainstream Australian news media? • How do media representations reflect or counter a feminist sociological understanding of familicide? Part One of this book sets the scene for answering the second question, reviewing literature on familicide, and placing it into dialogue with broader feminist sociological accounts of gender-based violence. To answer the former question, news articles representing familicide-suicide over the period of September 2014–September 2020 are analysed. The period of study follows the watershed case of Luke Batty’s murder in 2014, which shifted public understandings of domestic and family violence (Wheildon et al., 2021) and captures a period of, on average, one case a year ending with the highly publicised murder of Hannah Clarke and children Aaliyah, Laianah, and Trey in January 2020. Table 1.1 outlines the cases of familicide-suicide cases included in the study.

Data Gathering The study is based on five cases identified via an online search for all reported cases that meet the definition of familicide-suicide applied in this book during the period of 2014–2020, namely the murder of a partner/former partner and at least one child and ending in suicide (Wilson et al., 1995). The news coverage analysed in this book comes from the major mainstream news outlets for states and major cities, representing a spread of coverage across Australia (see Table 1.2). Some large national news sources, both traditional and tabloid, right-leaning and left-leaning, are included. Two independent critical news outlets, Crikey and the New Matilda, are also included as alternatives to the more mainstream, conglomerate-owned newspapers, though their coverage of the cases is relatively sparse. The sample used in this study comes from the Australian and New Zealand Reference Centre, used to source print, as well as an online search conducted in 2020 capturing online-only content for the same publications.

14

1 Introduction

Table 1.1 Familicide-suicide cases analysed (2015–2020) Year

Familicide perpetrators

Adult victims and relationship to perpetrator

Child victims (no.)

Names of child victims/age/relationship to the perpetrator

2020

Rohan Baxter

Hannah Clarke (former partner)

4

Aaliyah, 6 (child) Laianah, 4 (child) Trey, 3 (child)

2018

Peter Miles

Cynda Mile (partner) 6 Katrina Miles (daughter)

Taye, 13 (grandchild) Rylan, 12 (grandchild) Arye, 10 (grandchild) Kadyn, 8 (grandchild)

2016

Fernando Manrique

Maria Lutz (partner) 3

Elisa, 11 (child) Martin, 10 (child)

2015

Darren Milne

Susanna Estevez (partner)

2 killed 1 survived + 1 unborn

Liam, 11 (child) Benjamin, 7 (child)—survived + Unborn, 29 weeks

2014

Geoff Hunt

Kim Hunt (partner)

4

Fletcher, 10 (child) Mia, 8 (child) Phoebe, 6 (child)

Total

5 (5 men)

6 (6 women)

20 + 1 unborn

14 (7 boys; 7 girls)

Table 1.2 Newspaper data summary Publications The Australian

Cases Hunt

Milne

Manrique

Miles

Baxter

Total

5

1

7

10

13

36

7

5 7 + 1 duplicate (SMH)

25

The Canberra 5 Times (CT) The Daily Telegraph (DT) (Sydney)a

4

8

21

1 +5 duplicates (News.com)

1

40

Sydney Morning Herald (SMH)

19

4

16 +1 duplicate (CT) +3 duplicates (The Age)

9 +8 duplicates (The Age)

53 +1 duplicate (WA; The Age)

114

Northern Territory News

1

1

2

4

(continued)

Methodology

15

Table 1.2 (continued) Publications

Cases Hunt

The Daily Mercury (Tasmania)

1

The Age (Melbourne)

10 + 12 duplicates (SMH)

Milne

3 duplicates (SMH)

Manrique

Miles

4 +1 duplicate (DT)

9 +2 duplicates (News.com)

5 +9 duplicates (SMH)

16

48 duplicates (SMH)

103

10

7

17

The West Australian (WA)

Baxter

Total 17

The Guardian 7 (Bundaberg)

4

6

15

32

Crikey

1

2

6

9

2

2

5

56

86

91 (75 original)

210 (161 original)

491 (original)

The New Matilda News.com

4 +1 duplicate (DT)

1 +3 duplicates (DT)

Total

70 (56 original)

20 100 (14 original) (81 original)

13 +3 duplicates (DT)

a The

Daily Telegraph content is also shared across other platforms such as the Hornsby Advocate, Manly Daily and NewsCorp Australia Network content. As such, these representations have wide reach

The Baxter case received by far the greatest level of news reporting, with further reporting emerging well into the writing of this book. Given the rolling and increasingly temporally dispersed nature of reporting on the case, I focus on the first few months of coverage, the most intensive period of reporting, after which attention to the case significantly died down as the COVID19 pandemic came to dominate the news cycle for several months. However, a postscript is provided after the final chapter reflecting on some emerging trends in later reporting on the case, especially reporting catalysed by a Coronial Inquest held in 2022. There are a range of challenges to conducting online news media searches (Blatchford, 2020), among them significant duplication of articles across multiple publications and the more ephemeral nature of online news, where changes to content and access can quickly change. This book reports on data that was downloaded to PDF and saved in the form it was initially accessed in 2020. Articles with some overlapping content are treated as separate news items, while complete duplicates are excluded as separate news items but noted in Table 1.2 to show the spread of access

16

1 Introduction

to this content across publications. The search term used was the name of the perpetrator of the crime, noted as the most reliable way of capturing news stories relating to these cases. Following up links embedded within articles to similar content also enabled further checks for relevant content.

Theoretical Framework I have applied a sociological, feminist lens to gender-based violence, articulated in Chap. 3. This theoretical framework for understanding gender-based violence is applied to consider familicide as gender-based domestic and family violence (in Chap. 4), and to identify how news representations reflect, contest, adopt, and resist a feminist sociological understanding of domestic and family violence and familicide (in Part Two). To analyse these news items, I use critical discourse analysis. Discourse analysis enables a close examination of language and other forms of communication to explore how meaning is constructed. Critical discourse analysis adds to this a normative component: the goal is not merely to investigate and describe, but to explore how discourse is connected to social outcomes, and to provide a social critique that can shed light on how better social outcomes can be produced (Lê & Lê, 2009). Drawing on Fairclough (1992), within the tradition of critical discourse analysis language is conceived of as a social practice and a form of social action. In other words, it is used in patterned ways that tell us about our society, and its use contributes to shaping society. As such, it is both reflective and constitutive, “defin[ing] and produc[ing] the objects of our knowledge” (Lê & Lê, 2009, p. 5). The way issues such as familicide are portrayed in news media, in line with this, is understood as both signifying contemporary social meanings around gender and violence (among other things), and as (re)creating them. These representations are therefore examined as material, of consequence to the pursuit of social outcomes. My approach to critical discourse analysis of news is influenced by the work of Carvalho (2008), who proposes a framework for attending to three dimensions of critical discourse analysis that, she argues, are often undertheorised and underapplied in research on news: examining the discursive strategies of various social actors in producing the news (including but not limited to journalists); analysing how discourses shift across time and space, attending to the (contextualised) evolution of discourse; and what she calls “extra- or supra-textual effects” (p. 164), the way representations in turn shape the genealogy of social and political issues. As such, my analysis of news representations of familicide is contextualised within political debates around, and mediated depictions of, gender-based violence. This helps to move beyond, as Carvalho calls it, a ‘snapshot’ approach to critical discourse analysis of news that characterises much media scholarship. While the period for the research is six years, Part One of this book seeks to provide a strong sense of the historical evolution of thinking around domestic and family violence. My analysis also seeks to highlight the possible effects of the way these cases were represented

A Note on Terminology

17

and how they may have contributed to the unfolding of discourses around these issues. Finally, I agree with Carvalho that many analyses of news representations pay scant attention to why and how different social actors utilise news media, in varied ways, to shape discourse on social issues, and the influence of social actors beyond those working within the newsroom. Here, I pay close attention to these factors, highlighting the complex role of feminist researchers, political commentators, families of familicide victims and various social advocates in moulding diverse and competing news frames. Finally, Bacchi’s (2009) framework for the application of discourse analysis to problem representations is used. Bacchi’s work is useful in providing a systematic set of questions to applied to texts, questions attuned to Carvalho’s points on aspects of discourse analysis that need particular attention. Bacchi’s set of guiding questions critically unpack problem representations by asking researchers to identify problem constructions, the assumptions they rely on and the silences that are maintained. In line with Carvalho (2008), Bacchi’s (2009) guiding questions encourage researchers to consider how discourses come about (the evolution of discourse over time), where, how, and by whom they are disseminated, contested and defended (the strategies of social actors) and their effects—both lived and discursive (supra-textual effects).

A Note on Terminology A note on the terminology employed in this book is important. There is substantial contestation around terms such as ‘domestic violence’, ‘domestic abuse’, ‘violence against women’, and ‘intimate partner violence’. Words matter and thinking about terminology is important. That said, I agree with Boyle (2019) who urges us to employ terminology critically without seeking to erase the value of different terms, ensuring instead that we articulate the insights they bring and the connections between them clearly. As she says, “the answer is not to abandon any of these terms or to claim one as inherently better (or worse) than the other, but to be alert and critical to the ways in which they are used and to think about the—conceptual, political, practical—work they enable us to do” (p. 32). First, I use the term familicide to reference the murder of an intimate partner or former partner and at least one child (Wilson et al., 1995). I argue that while not all familicides follow the same patterns as other forms of domestic abuse, such as coercive control, it is indeed a form of domestic and family violence. Further, I argue it is a form of gender-based violence, a violence fuelled in important ways by gender (Boyle, 2019; Buiten & Naidoo, 2020). The meaning of and theoretical underpinning of the latter is explained in depth in Chap. 3. In this section, I wish to explain my choice of the term domestic and family violence to discuss familicide rather than, for example, violence against women, domestic abuse, or family violence alone. In Australia, ‘domestic violence’ has been a term generally applied to violence between intimate partners. The term ‘family violence’, or combined use of ‘domestic and family violence’, is increasingly also being employed in recognition of many

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Indigenous peoples’ preference for the term ‘family violence’, which more closely acknowledges a range of kinship connections and the impact of violence on whole families and communities (Stubbs & Wangmann, 2017). Further, unlike terms such as ‘intimate partner violence’ or ‘domestic violence’, the term ‘family violence’ is better able to capture violence between a range of family members, such as between siblings, extended family members, and parents and children (ibid.). A fuller appreciation is also developing of how domestic violence against women and other forms of family violence, especially violence against children, are often inexorably intertwined.11 The term domestic and family violence can therefore help to extend the account beyond violence between intimate partners, centralising it while signalling the intertwined nature of women’s and children’s experiences in this context. Some scholars and advocates have criticised terms such as ‘domestic violence’ and ‘family violence’ as endorsing a de-gendered approach, preferring terms such as ‘violence against women’ (Boyle, 2019). One of the limitations of this term, however, is both its breadth (many forms of violence, outside of the family or intimate partnerships are included) and its capacity for circumscription (it precludes, for instance, intimate partner violence between same sex, queer, and gender nonconforming partners, or parental violence against children) (Boyle, 2019). As will be discussed in Chap. 2, most domestic and family violence is male violence against women, meaning there are important connections between the terms ‘domestic and family violence’ and ‘violence against women’. However, these terms are not synonymous. Thus, in the context of this book I use the term domestic and family violence because it captures violence against women as well as violence against children. I note that while this is an ostensibly gender-neutral term, within the Australian context ‘domestic violence’ has come over time to be associated with a gendered approach (Yates, 2020). To continue to signal the important connection between gender and domestic and family violence, I often use the terms together—calling it gendered domestic and family violence or including it under the umbrella term of gender-based violence. In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to shift understandings of domestic and family violence away from a narrow preoccupation with physical violence. As such, domestic and family violence is progressively being used to refer to a range of abuse, not just physical but emotional, financial, sexual, and even religious. Resultantly, there has been some criticism of the continued use of the term ‘violence’ to reference a range of abusive behaviours that may not involve direct or physical violence. Some scholars, writers, activists, and survivors have preferred to use the term ‘domestic abuse’ rather than ‘domestic violence’ (Hill, 2019). I acknowledge both the strategic and conceptual value of the term ‘abuse’ over ‘violence’. In the context of this book, however, I have chosen to use the term domestic and family violence for two main reasons. One reason is that, in line with the contributions of feminist scholars, I conceptualise violence more broadly than as physical 11

See for instance Katz (2016) and Dragiewicz et al.’s (2021) work on the imbrication of coercive control of women and their children, or Kirkwood (2012) and Mailloux (2014) on why children are murdered in the context of domestic violence and separation.

References

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abuse, as a form of violation and harm (Pilcher & Whelehan, 2004). Second, given this book deals with fatal physical violence that is not always preceded by a known history of patterned domestic abuse, the term domestic and family violence is better able to capture the context and meaning of the violence that is familicide without precluding cases without a known history of abuse. The term violence is, from a feminist perspective, suitable to describing domestic homicide without a known history of abuse while capacious enough to capture a range of non-physical forms of violence or harm. Boyle (2019) asks of feminists to consider what certain terminology can ‘do’ in a particular context—politically, theoretically, and conceptually. In this case, the term domestic and family violence, which I articulate as one form of gender-based violence against women and children, works to enfold children as family members into the discussion, while recognising the connection to other forms of domestic and family violence against mostly women. It enables us to understand both familicides following patterned abuse and those without a known history of abuse as ‘violence’. In the following chapter, I dig deeper into the context for the study, examining the contested position of gendered understandings of domestic and family violence within politics, public debate, and academic research. This next chapter therefore fleshes out what I have briefly introduced here: the politically live question of identifying and treating domestic and family violence as gendered, and some of the key discourses and debates within which representations of familicide are located.

References Alcorn, G. (2016, February 19). Australians are being told that gender inequality is the root cause of domestic violence. But is it? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/ 19/australians-are-being-told-that-gender-inequality-is-the-root-cause-of-domestic-violencebut-is-it Arrow, M. (2018). Making family violence public in the royal commission on human relationships, 1974–1977. Australian Feminist Studies, 33(95), 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2018. 1498731 Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be? Pearson Education. Barnett, B. (2005). Perfect mother or artist of obscenity? Narrative and myth in a qualitative analysis of press coverage of the Andrea Yates murders. The Journal of Communication Inquiry, 29(1), 9–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859904270053 Bastiampillai, T., Looi, J. C. L., Allison, S., Delaney, S. K., & Kisely, S. (2021). National mental health policy and Australia’s ‘deaths of despair.’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 55(5), 517–518. https://doi.org/10.1177/0004867421998778 Berns, N. (2004). Framing the victim: Domestic violence, media and social problems. Routledge. Blatchford, A. (2020). Searching for online news content: The challenges and decisions. Communication Research and Practice, 6(2), 143–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2019.167 6864 Boyle, K. (2019). What’s in a name? Theorising the inter-relationships of gender and violence. Feminist Theory, 20(1), 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700118754957 Brown, T., Bricknell, S., Bryant, W., Lyneham, S., Tyson, D., Fernandez Arias, P. (2019). Filicide offenders. In Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, 568. Australian Institute of Criminology.

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Brown, T., Tyson, D., & Fernandez Arias, P. (2020). Filicide: The Australian story. Children Australia, 45(4), 279–284. https://doi.org/10.1017/cha.2020.47 Buiten, D., & Coe, G. (2022). Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility: Familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news. Crime, Media, Culture, 1–19. https://doi.org/10. 1177/17416590211009275 Buiten, D., & Naidoo, K. (2020). Laying claim to a name: Towards a sociology of ‘gender-based violence.’ South African Review of Sociology, 51(2), 61–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586. 2020.1813194 Carvalho, A. (2008). Media(ted) discourse and society: Rethinking the framework of critical discourse analysis. Journalism Studies: Language and Journalism, 9(2), 161–177. https://doi. org/10.1080/14616700701848162 Cavaglion, G. (2008). Bad, mad or sad? Mothers who kill and press coverage in Israel. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 4(2), 271–278. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659008092332 Cavaglion, G. (2009). Fathers who kill and press coverage in Israel. Child Abuse Review, 18(2), 127–143. https://doi.org/10.1002/car.1028 Cui, J., Lancaster, K., & Newman, C. E. (2019). Making the subjects of mental health care: A cross-cultural comparison of mental health policy in Hong Kong, China and New South Wales, Australia. Sociology of Health & Illness, 41(4), 740–754. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566. 12851 Dobash, R. E., & Dobash, R. (1979). Violence against wives. The Free Press. Dragiewicz, M. (2011). Equality with a vengeance: Men’s rights groups, battered women, and antifeminist backlash. Northeastern University Press. Dragiewicz, M., & Burgess, J. (2016). Domestic violence on #qanda: The “man” question in live Twitter discussion on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Q&A. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 28(1), 211–229. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjwl.28.1.211 Dragiewicz, M., Woodlock, D., Salter, M., & Harris, B. (2021). “What’s mum’s password?”: Australian mothers’ perceptions of children’s involvement in technology-facilitated coercive control. Journal of Family Violence. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-021-00283-4 Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press. Flood, M., Dragiewicz, M., & Pease, B. (2021). Resistance and backlash to gender equality. The Australian Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 393–408. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajs4.137 Galvin, A., Quinn, F., & Cleary, Y. (2021). Shaping the ‘inexplicable’: A social constructionist analysis of news reporting of familicide-suicide. Journalism, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/146 48849211063265 Grau, A. B. (2021). Multifaceted offenders and minimization of victims: U.S. national news media coverage of offenders and victims in coverage of filicide. American Journal of Qualitative Research, 5(1), 185–205. https://doi.org/10.29333/ajqr/10929 Hawley, E., Clifford, K., & Konkes, C. (2018). The “Rosie Batty effect” and the framing of family violence in Australian news media. Journalism Studies, 19(15), 2304–2323. https://doi.org/10. 1080/1461670X.2017.1343096 Hill, J. (2019). See what you made me do: Power, control and domestic abuse. Black Inc. Books. Hill, J. (2021). The reckoning: How #MeToo is changing Australia (Quarterly Essay). Black Inc. Books. Holmes, K. (2016). Talking about mental illness: Life histories and mental health in modern Australia. Australian Historical Studies, 47(1), 25–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2015. 1120336 Karlsson, L. C., Antfolk, J., Putkonen, H., Amon, S., da Silva, J., de Vogel, V., Flynn, S., & Weizmann-Henelius, G. (2021). Familicide: A systematic literature review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 22(1), 83–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838018821955 Katz, E. (2016). Beyond the physical incident model: How children living with domestic violence are harmed by and resist regimes of coercive control. Child Abuse Review, 25(1), 46–59. https:// doi.org/10.1002/car.2422

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Kelly, L. (1987). The continuum of sexual violence. In J. Hanmer & M. Maynard (Eds.), Women, violence and social control (pp. 46–60). Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, L. (1988). Surviving sexual violence. Polity Press. Kirkwood, D. (2012). ‘Just say goodbye’: Parents who kill their children in the context of separation. Domestic Violence Resource Centre Australia. Lê, T., & Lê, Q. (2009). Critical discourse analysis: An overview. In T. Lê, Q. Lê, & M. Short (Eds.), Critical discourse analysis: An interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 3–15). Nova Science Publishers. Liem, M., & Koenraadt, F. (2008). Familicide: A comparison with spousal and child homicide by mentally disordered perpetrators. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 18(5), 306–318. https://doi.org/10.1002/cbm.710 Little, J. (2015). “Family violence happens to everybody”: Gender, mental health and violence in Australian media representations of filicide 2010–2014. Continuum (Mount Lawley, W.A.), 29(4), 605–616. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1025366 Little, J. (2021). Filicide, journalism and the ‘disempowered man’ in three Australian cases 2010– 2016. Journalism, 22(6), 1450–1466. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918809739 Little, J., & Tyson, D. (2017). Filicide in Australian media and culture. Oxford University Press. Mailloux, S. (2014). Fatal families: Why children are killed in familicide occurrences. Journal of Family Violence, 29(8), 921–926. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-014-9643-0 McKenzie-Murray, M. (2015, August 8–14). The hidden politics of family violence. The Saturday Paper, Issue 72. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/law-crime/2015/08/08/the-hiddenpolitics-family-violence/14389560002224 Murray, S., & Powell, A. (2011). Domestic violence: Australian public policy. Australian Scholarly Publishing. New South Wales Government. (2019). NSW domestic violence death review team report 2017– 2019. Domestic Violence Death Review Team. https://www.coroners.nsw.gov.au/content/dam/ dcj/ctsd/coronerscourt/documents/reports/2017-2019_DVDRT_Report.pdf Niblock, S. (2018). “He just snapped”: Gendered narratives of parents killing their children in the UK press. Journalism Studies, 19(16), 2451–2469. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.135 0117 O’Hagan, K. (2014). Filicide-suicide: The killing of children in the context of separation, divorce and custody disputes. Palgrave Macmillan. Pilcher, J., & Whelehan, I. (2004). 50 key concepts in gender studies. Sage. Pruitt, L., Hamilton, G., Heydon, G., & Spark, C. (2017). Abbott’s ‘budget crisis’, CALD women’s loss? Service providers explore the impact of funding cuts. Australian Journal of Political Science, 52(3), 335–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2017.1332157 Quinn, F., Prendergast, M., & Galvin, A. (2019). Her name was Clodagh: Twitter and the news discourse of murder suicide. Critical Discourse Studies, 16(3), 312–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17405904.2019.1568896 Richards, T. N., Gillespie, L. K., & Smith, M. D. (2014a). An examination of the media portrayal of femicide–suicides: An exploratory frame analysis. Feminist Criminology, 9(1), 24–44. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1557085113501221 Richards, T. N., Gillespie, L. K., & Givens, E. M. (2014b). Reporting femicide-suicide in the news: The current utilization of suicide reporting guidelines and recommendations for the future. Journal of Family Violence, 29(4), 453–463. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-014-9590-9 Rimke, H. (2016). Introduction: Mental and emotional distress as a social justice issue: Beyond psychocentrism. Studies in Social Justice, 10(1), 4–17. https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index. php/SSJ/article/view/1407 Sacco, V. F. (1995). Media constructions of crime. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 539(1), 141–154. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716295539001011 Sisask, M., Mark, L., & Värnik, A. (2012). Internet comments elicited by media portrayal of a familicide-suicide case. Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, 33(4), 222–229. https://doi.org/10.1027/0227-5910/a000134

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Stubbs, J., & Wangmann, J. (2017). Australian perspectives on domestic violence. In E. S. Buzawa & C. G. Buzawa (Eds.), Global responses to domestic violence (1st ed., pp. 167–188). Springer International Publishing. Sutherland, G., Simons, M., & Blatchford, A. (2017). News media and the primary prevention of violence against women and their children: Emerging evidence, insights and lessons. OurWatch. Walklate, S., & Petrie, S. (2013). Witnessing the pain of suffering: Exploring the relationship between media representations, public understandings and policy responses to filicide-suicide. Crime Media Culture, 9(3), 265–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659013493917 Websdale, N. (2010). Familicidal hearts: The emotional styles of 211 killers. Oxford University Press. Wheildon, L. J., True, J., Flynn, A., & Wild, A. (2021). The Batty effect: Victim-survivors and domestic and family violence policy change. Violence Against Women, 1–24. https://doi.org/10. 1177/10778012211024266 Wilson, M., Daly, M., & Daniele, A. (1995). Familicide: The killing of spouse and children. Aggressive Behavior, 21(4), 275–291. https://doi.org/10.1002/1098-2337(1995)21:4%3c275::AID-AB2 480210404%3e3.0.CO;2-S Yates, S. (2018). Power, process, plumbing: Big g and small g gender in Victoria’s family violence policy subsystem. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 77(4), 568–582. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1467-8500.12265 Yates, S. (2020). Gender, context and constraint: Framing family violence in Victoria. Women’s Studies International Forum, 78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2019.102321

Chapter 2

The Gender(-Based Violence) Wars

Charting Contestations Calling violence gendered is a political act in Australia, as elsewhere. As scholars, activists, and practitioners in areas of gender-based violence can attest, invoking the explanatory power of gender for understanding a range of forms of violence is sure to stir up resistance from some quarters. While a gendered account of domestic and family violence has gained significant traction, there remains a tension, at times a direct backlash against it. As Dragiewicz (2008) observes, this “reveals the dialectical nature of social change as an ongoing struggle over authority, power, and knowledge” (p. 121). Disputes over the gendering of domestic and family violence are about a continued and evolving struggle over the power to define our understanding of it, and in turn our response to it. Media representations cannot and should not be considered in isolation—they are located within the continual push and pull of competing knowledges. A key part of what this book seeks to do is to examine how media representations of familicide reflect and shape evolving understandings of gender-based violence. It explores news media representations with a view to not only filling an empirical gap in our knowledge on how familicide is portrayed in the news but also with a view to understanding how these representations might sit within broader struggles over the meaning of gender-based violence. This chapter outlines the contested position of a gendered account of violence that forms the context for media representations of familicide. First, I offer some illustrative examples of the contradictory position of gender in Australian political debates about domestic and family violence. I then consider the paradoxes highlighted in the political sphere against the major academic debates about gender and domestic and family violence, mapping some of the key arguments put forward by feminist scholars and the academic counter-discourses these have been subjected to. There are two key issues that have become prime loci for these competing interpretations of the role of gender in domestic and family violence—intimate partner violence

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_2

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and filicide. Research data suggesting ‘gender symmetry’ in both these crimes is often weaponised to discredit feminist theorisations of violence. In this chapter, I focus mostly on discussions around intimate partner violence, showing how scholarly debates about the relationship between gender and violence have necessitated some fruitful clarifications of feminist theory in this area. As a result, a nuanced set of conceptual distinctions have emerged that can help to better understand the connections between gender and violence. More briefly, I reflect on the gender politics around the incendiary issue of filicide, suggesting that it has been a site of anti-feminist backlash and that further feminist work in this area is needed.

Paradoxes: Politics and Gender-Based Violence in Australia Early in 2020, on the heels of the murders of Hannah Clarke and her three children Laianah, Aaliyah and Trey, I penned an article on gender and familicide for The Conversation (Buiten, 2020), a news outlet publishing journalism by academics. The aim of the article was to summarise the research on familicide in terms of what we know about it as a gendered phenomenon. Who is more likely to perpetrate it, to whom, in what context and why? I summarised the available research on the topic and argued that on this basis it should be considered a form of gender-based violence. As fits the pattern of much media coverage of issues around gender and violence, the article received a powerful response, both affirming and critical. The horrendous nature of the murders and high levels of coverage they received certainly shaped this interest. However, some of the questions and comments I received in response to the article revealed there was more to it than that. They were passionate, caustic—even blistering—and often angry. Online debates broke out between those in support of and against a gender lens on family violence. Alternative research studies were cited, methodologies and statistics provided and questioned, and accusations of ideological blindness hurled in both directions. The most common question raised was: what about family violence committed by women? Filicide, the only known form of family violence committed by both men and women in roughly equal numbers (Brown et al., 2018), was often raised as evidence of feminist bias in research and media coverage. Some commentators suggested that the fact that women kill their children in roughly equal numbers to men means that family violence is not about gender. Discussions about gender-based violence, it seems, tap acutely into increasingly partisan culture wars about gender and feminism. Both online and offline, contestations over gender and violence remain fiery in contemporary Australia. Here, I wish to paint a picture of a mixed contemporary landscape around these issues, one characterised by contradictions. In current political debates, the role of gender and gender inequality in domestic and family violence is both increasingly recognised and ruthlessly challenged. From Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s $328 million pledge to combat domestic violence, which he cited as an issue stemming from a lack of “respect” for women (Scott Morrison says …, 2019), to Senator Pauline Hanson’s invective against feminist perspectives on domestic

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violence as “man-bashing” and “idiotic” (Wolfe, 2019) in the same year, the role of gender in shaping family and domestic violence—and the utility of feminist perspectives—is far from resolved. These contestations are exemplified, for instance, by the befuddling array of activists and social commentators that have been awarded honours for their contributions to gender equality in Australia. In 2015, activist and domestic violence survivor Rosie Batty, who premised her awareness campaign around a sharp focus on male perpetrators of family violence and the role of gender inequality (Hawley et al., 2018), received the Australian of the Year Award for her work in domestic violence activism. In 2019 she was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia, a notable award of recognition. Yet, a few months later in January 2020, the Australia Day Award was bestowed on Bettina Arndt, a conservative social commentator, author and former ‘sex therapist’ renowned for advocacy of men’s rights. Arndt was honoured for her “contribution to gender equity” (Henriques-Gomes, 2020). Some of Bettina Arndt’s controversial claims, in recent years, relate to what she has called the “fake rape crisis” on university campuses, the “persecution” of men by feminists, and a sympathetic interview she conducted with a man convicted of the repeated rape of a teenager, in which Arndt suggested that teen girls should guard against using their “seductive power to ruin the lives of men” (Henriques-Gomes, 2020). A staunch critic of many domestic violence campaigns and policies in Australia, and an advocate for greater attention of women’s violence against men, articles on Arndt’s website include among them “The Domestic Violence Industry—learn the truth beyond 40 years of lies about domestic violence” (Arndt, 2020). Rosie Batty echoed the sentiments of numerous domestic violence and women’s rights activists when she said she was first “shocked” and then “dismayed” by the decision to award Arndt for her work (Henriques-Gomes, 2020). In another fantastical turnaround, the victim-survivor at the centre of the controversial interview conducted by Bettina Arndt, Grace Tame, was awarded Australian of the Year in 2021. The interview between Bettina Arndt and Grace’s convicted abuser, Nicolaas Bester, became part of the impetus for a national campaign called #LetHerSpeak, spear-headed by journalist, victim-survivor and activist, Nina Funnell. The campaign sought to “abolish sexual assault victim gag-laws”1 that allowed convicted offenders, such as Bester, to have a public platform to speak while denying victimsurvivors, such as Tame, the right to legally tell their stories to the media. As of 2021, the campaign had secured law reforms across three jurisdictions. Grace Tame was awarded Australian of the year for her work as part of this campaign and as a victimsurvivor advocate. Since then, she has participated powerfully and unrelentingly in the post-#MeToo reckoning in Australia around issues of sexual violence. From Rosie Batty and Grace Tame to men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt, the celebration of such wildly different—even incompatible—conceptual and political positions on issues of gender and violence against women is highly illustrative of the contemporary domain.

1

https://www.letusspeak.com.au/.

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Government funding and political appointments reflect similar contradictions. High levels of successive federal funding have been made available to campaigns that have, at their heart, gendered and feminist research and messaging. For instance, the extensively funded national Stop it at the Start campaign launched in 2016 centred on tackling sexist and violence-excusing attitudes underlying violence against women. It focused particularly on the role of entrenching respectful and gender-equitable messages among children to achieve cultural change. As in other contexts (see, for example, Downes et al., 2019), feminist knowledge of domestic violence is increasingly recognised and utilised in policy and law, albeit often articulated without “explicit links” (270) to gender and gender inequality. Here, while concentrated on the notion of “respect” and worded in largely gender-neutral terms as for “young people”, the campaign clearly took its cue from feminist insights about the role of gender norms and inequalities in legitimating male violence against women. In 2019, it was announced that an additional $1.86 m in funding would be provided to the campaign as part of the Fourth Action Plan 2019–2022 of the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children led by the Federal Government. This time, the campaign focused on how seemingly minor or trivial expressions of sexism underlie violence against women, drawing its central messaging from seminal feminist work on the continuum of violence (Kelly, 1987, 1988) in which “everyday” sexism and violations of women’s autonomy are understood as connected to more overt forms of sexual and physical violence. At about the same time as this new campaign was being launched, however, domestic violence advocates were stunned at the announcement that Senator Pauline Hanson would be appointed as head of the Royal Commission into the Family Court, which had been a subject of serious scrutiny over the past few years in relation to its handling of custody issues in the context of domestic violence (Nelson & Lumby, 2021). Senator Hanson is well known for her animosity towards feminism and her view that (white) men are being demonised in Australian society (Wolfe, 2019). She has expressed publicly her belief that false domestic violence charges against men are frequently used by women as a cynical tactic in custody disputes (Pauline Hanson lashes women …, 2019). From 2020 to 2021, a remarkable string of revelations of sexual violence, sexism and sexual harassment in Parliament House emerged (Hill, 2021; Jenkins, 2021), including accusations of sexual violence committed by members of the government (Hill, 2021), the fallout from which is still ongoing. While publicly rejecting violence against women, the response of the Prime Minister at the time was characterised by many anti-violence against women advocates as uncommitted, politically strategic and insincere, deflecting personal and government responsibility for the issues and lacking in any concrete signs of commitment to change (Hill, 2021).2 Moving beyond politics, while the federally funded Stop It At The Start campaign was running, a group of academics, politicians, and social commentators presented 2

For a fuller account of the incredible series of events related to violence against women that characterised 2020–2021 and, according to a number of commentators, contributed to the Coalition’s downfall in the 2022 Federal Elections, see Hill (2021).

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their own independent campaign, 1 in 3,3 claiming that at least one in three victims of domestic violence are men. While drawing attention to the issue of male survivors of sexual and domestic violence, the campaign conveyed a deep dissatisfaction with feminist approaches to domestic and family violence, preferencing de-gendered psychological and intrafamilial theories of violence. Drawing on a range of research resources from academic debates around gender in domestic and family violence, the campaign suggested activists and politicians are ignoring or misconstruing the research evidence of women’s violence against men. Gender, and especially men and masculinity, occupy a hotly contested position in political discourses about domestic and family violence. Dragiewicz and Burgess (2016) termed this the “man question”, a central feature of public, media, and political debates about violence in Australia with a raft of implications for policy, law, and practice. This dizzying mix of public campaigns, accolades for anti-violence activism, and political messaging and funding around domestic and family violence reflects what can be referred to as the contemporary gender(-based violence) wars—the way the issue of gender-based violence taps into, and is weaponised in service of, the contested position of feminism and gender equality more broadly.

Gendered Violence or Just Violence? Contested Domestic Violence Research Campaigns such as 1 in 3 do not merely emerge from the bowels of Twitter wars and social media trolling that have been a significant conduit for anti-feminist sentiment and men’s rights advocacy in recent years (Gotell & Dutton, 2016). Campaigns such as these, and commentators such as Bettina Arndt, draw extensively on academic research in making their claims. The 1 in 3 campaign, for instance, links to numerous research studies on domestic and family violence to support their arguments. These public and political debates, therefore, are situated within an extended dispute in academic research spaces about the gendered nature of domestic and family violence. As will be shown in this section, while many activists, practitioners, and academics working in the spaces associated with violence against women and their families conceptualise such violence as highly gendered (see, for example, OurWatch and Domestic Violence NSW), the role of gender in shaping domestic and family violence is not uncontested in academic circles. Extensive gender-based and sociological theorisations of domestic and family violence have been presented by feminist scholars and, indeed, used to inform policy and practice in various contexts. However, feminist perspectives on these issues have also been vehemently challenged in some academic spaces. Scholars such as Straus (for example, 1979, 2007, 2011) and Dutton (for example, 2006, 2010, 2012) have published numerous research suggesting that domestic violence is largely ‘gender symmetrical’—that is, committed almost 3

www.oneinthree.com.au.

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equally by men and women—and that it stems from psychological issues rather than social or structural gender inequalities. Dutton (2006, 2010, 2012; Dutton & Nicholls, 2005, 2009) has been highly critical of what he has called the ‘gender paradigm’. This refers, he argues, to a tendency within gender and feminist literature to perpetuate the erroneous assumption that intimate partner violence perpetrators are exclusively or disproportionately male. According to Dutton, “all data inconsistent with this view are dismissed, ignored, or attempts made to explain them away” (Dutton & Nicholls, 2005, p. 682). In fact, Dutton has likened this “radical feminist paradigm” (Dutton, 2006, p. 682) to a “cult” (Dutton, 2010, p. 100) that disavows reasonable scientific method and data. A large part of his critique of the “gender paradigm” is what he regards as its overemphasis on the role of politics and structural inequalities in domestic and family violence and an underemphasis of the role of individual psychology in producing abuse. As such, he has called for a “[revival of] psychology and science in domestic violence research and practice” (Dutton & Corvo, 2006, p. 457), presenting and defending empirical research that suggests that gender is largely irrelevant to domestic and family violence. Some feminist scholars have been especially active in countering these challenges and defending a gender lens on domestic and family violence. This includes, among others, Dobash and Dobash (for example, Dobash, 1994; Dobash & Dobash, 1992, 2004), whose work focuses on the role of patriarchy in domestic violence. Johnson and colleagues (for example, Johnson, 2005, 2006, 2010; Johnson & Ferraro, 2000) and Stark (2007, 2009) have also developed work to distinguish different typologies of domestic violence, accounting for the apparent disparities in the data at the heart of these debates about whether and how gender shapes domestic and family violence. Johnson, as well as DeKeseredy and colleagues (for example, DeKeseredy, 1999, 2000, 2011; DeKeseredy & Dragiewizc, 2007; Schwartz & DeKeseredy, 2008) have challenged what they deem the “cartoonish” (Johnson, 2011, p. 291) mischaracterisation and oversimplification of feminist scholarship on domestic violence in the work of Dutton and his colleagues, which they situate as part of an anti-feminist backlash. The debate between these two groups of scholars has been intense, at times even vitriolic, with scholarly invectives and accusations over shoddy methodologies and ideologically motivated research levelled in both directions.4 1979 was a notable year for the genesis of some of the ongoing disputes over gender and domestic and family violence. In this year, Dobash and Dobash (1979) released their seminal work Violence Against Wives, which positioned gender norms and patriarchal structures at the heart of domestic violence. Dobash and Dobash, among others, began to identify male-perpetrated domestic and family violence as fuelled by gender norms, “linked to the affirmation of traditional masculine values that position men as providers, protectors, rational thinkers and authority figures” 4

See, for example, the critiques by Johnson (2011), DeKeseredy (2011), and Gondolf (2011) of Dutton’s writing on the ‘Gender Paradigm’ (Dutton, 2006; Dutton & Corvo, 2006; Dutton & Nicholls, 2005; Dutton et al., 2009) in Aggression and Violent Behavior, and his subsequence invited response (Dutton, 2012) in the same journal.

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(Downes et al., 2019, p. 270). They located intimate partner violence within a system of gender norms and inequalities, proposing a functionalist-sociological account of such violence as a mechanism for the maintenance of patriarchal power. In many respects, this echoed other feminist work being undertaken at the time around issues of sexual violence, such as MacKinnon’s (1979) work theorising sexual harassment as a mechanism for the reinforcement of gendered power. Dobash and Dobash’s (1979, 1992) early work in this area has been extensively cited and influential for understanding domestic violence and its relationship to gender. However, in the same year as this ground-breaking work was released, Straus’ influential and prolifically utilised Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) model for measuring family violence was also published (Straus, 1979). The model has since been used in scores of studies of family violence, and the data it has generated used to contradict gendered theories of domestic and family violence by scholars such as Dutton and by men’s rights activists (Anderson, 2005). The CTS measures all forms of conflict-related action within the family ranging, for example, from discussing a point of contention calmly, to sulking, verbal insults, pushing, slapping, or otherwise violently assaulting one’s partner. It has been particularly significant to debates about gender and domestic violence because studies that have utilised it (including by Straus himself) have tended to yield results in support of ‘gender symmetry’ of domestic violence across nearly all of the conflict tactics; that is, the application of the CTS in research tends to find that women and men in heterosexual intimate partner relationships use very similar levels of both verbal and physical violence against one another (Straus, 2011). Studies employing the CTS have signalled; therefore, an empirical basis for considering violence within heterosexual relationships as a function of conflict rather than gender and power as was proposed by Dobash and Dobash. According to Kimmel (2002), in two key reviews of the ‘gender symmetry’ literature spanning two decades (Archer, 2000; Fiebert, 1997), the vast majority of studies cited had used the CTS. In other words, most empirical data in favour of ‘gender symmetry’ in domestic violence arises from this measurement tool. The CTS has therefore been a significant point of contention for gender scholars and the data it generates is often cited as counterevidence for the notion of gender-based violence. While Straus and Dutton offered empirical data and methodological arguments suggesting that feminist understandings of domestic and family violence were a fallacy, other scholars, service providers and advocates were reporting something quite different in their work—the existence of highly gendered patterns of abuse. As Kimmel (2002) notes, there is a vast discrepancy between the data that has been generated from the CTS and trends emerging from crime victimisation studies, hospital and clinic data, and domestic violence shelters. In those spaces, a decidedly gendered picture continues to emerge of women and children as disproportionately representing victims of domestic abuse. In fact, gender-symmetry data presents an important contradiction to broader research on gender and violence, which shows that in almost every area of life, men are more violent than women (Kimmel, 2000, 2002). How could this be accounted for?

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The CTS has been a thorn in the side of advocates, researchers, and service providers working with women experiencing violence, who have over the decades found this data surfacing repeatedly in a way that detracts from and undermines their work—and what they see happening—on the frontline of domestic and family violence services. As such, it has been important for some feminist and gender scholars to remain active in addressing gender-symmetry claims and developing ways of accounting for what appear to be important disparities in data. Responding especially to the claims emerging from Straus’ work has stimulated some valuable feminist theoretical developments and typological refinements in the field. Kimmel (2002) provides an accessible summary of the main criticisms made against the CTS. First, while the CTS measures individual acts of violence, verbal or physical, it does not adequately place these within a context or examine the intentions behind these acts (Kimmel, 2002). This means, for example, that a defensive act of violence would ‘count’ equally to an aggressive act of violence. The context of the relationship, including power dynamics (physical, financial, or social), are not considered, providing limited insight into the meaning and causes of individual acts of violence. Further, the CTS excludes some important data that could add to context, such as longer-term patterns of abuse and the use of sexual abuse in intimate relationships (Kimmel, 2002). Therefore, as Kimmel (2002) points out, “if she pushes him back after being severely beaten, it would be scored 1 conflict tactic for each. And if she punches him to get him to stop beating their children or pushes him away after he has sexually assaulted her, it will count as 1 for her and none for him” (p. 1341). For Kimmel (2002), therefore, the quantitative data yielded through the CTS does not present important qualitative distinctions such as the difference between what he terms ‘expressive’ and ‘instrumental’ violence in relationships—violence expressive of emotion in the heat of an argument, and patterned violence that is used “instrumentally—to control or subdue and to reproduce subordination” (p. 1342). Others have raised similar concerns, arguing for the need to make more qualitative distinctions about the nature of violence in intimate relationships. Johnson (2017), for example, differentiates between ‘situational couple violence’ and ‘intimate terrorism’. Situational couple violence, for Johnson (2017), refers to “the most common violence between intimate partners […], a product of conflicts that become arguments that escalate to violence from one or both of the partners” (Johnson, 2017, p. 157). Situational couple violence, acknowledges Johnson, is indeed used in about equal numbers by heterosexual men and women as reflected in the CTS. This closely resembles what Kimmel (2002) termed ‘expressive violence’. More akin to Kimmel’s ‘instrumental violence’, and less common, is ‘intimate terrorism’ (Johnson, 2011). Intimate terrorism refers to “the use of violence and the threat of violence, in combination with other control tactics, to terrorise one’s partner” (Johnson, 2017, p. 158). Intimate terrorism, according to Johnson, is far more likely to be committed by men within socially patriarchal contexts that position men, normatively, as ‘kings of the castle’ and structurally reinforce these inequalities, making this form of control more accessible to men. He points to research that has shown that men with more markedly patriarchal or misogynistic attitudes are

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more likely to commit intimate terrorism than non-violent men or men engaged in situational couple violence (Holtzworth-Munroe, 2000; Sugarman & Frankel, 1996). Because the CTS does not adequately capture motive and context, it can also miss how women’s violence is situated. In a context of intimate terrorism—a pattern of behaviour with severe consequences for victims—victims are likely at various points to resist it with violence. This is a third type of violence identified by Johnson (2011): ‘violent resistance’. “Many victims of intimate terrorism do respond with violence of their own. For some, this is an instinctive reaction to being attacked […]. For others, it doesn’t happen until it seems that the assaults will continue forever if something isn’t done to stop them” (Johnson, 2011, p. 290). Without understanding this context, it is easy for courts and law enforcement to misidentify ‘primary victims’ and ‘primary perpetrators’, failing to identify the “person most in need of protection” (see, for example, Nancarrow et al., 2020). Not easily captured by the CTS, therefore, is the severe asymmetry of certain forms and patterns of intimate partner violence. As Johnson (2011) asserts, studies that do account for these typological distinctions of meaning and context “find that intimate terrorism and violent resistance are heavily gendered” (p. 291). Stark (2007) agrees. Stark’s work in many ways extends on and refines theoretical work on the more coercive tactics identified by Johnson as part of intimate terrorism. Like Johnson, Stark’s work challenges ‘gender-symmetry’ arguments by emphasising the importance of context and meaning in understanding the nature and impact of violence. He extends on this in an important way by de-emphasising the role of physical violence (which can occur independently of and in conjunction with coercive control) and focusing on acts of control that, when taken individually, do not appear violent but in sum have a devastating effect on victims’ liberty, autonomy, and sense of personhood. Drawing an analogy with methods of torture during wartime, he shows that patterned and sustained acts of control create an environment of terrifying and brutalising coercion, with or without the exercise of physical force. He coined the term for this ‘coercive control’. Stark and Johnson’s work helps to account for the seeming disparities between what CTS data shows and what those working in domestic violence shelters, in law enforcement, and in clinical contexts hear and experience—it is those fleeing coercive control and intimate terrorism who are more likely to end up in shelters (Johnson, 2011) or subject, eventually, to extreme forms of violence when they attempt to leave coercive controlling partner (Stark, 2007). In a recent study conducted in England and Wales (Myhill & Hohl, 2019), coercive control was identified as the ‘golden thread’ in the risk of domestic violence requiring police intervention. It was an important predictor, overall, of domestic violence cases escalating to the point of requiring police intervention, and a common preceding factor for cases of severe and sublethal physical violence such as choking or the use of weapons. Similar results have been found in a recent Australian study on intimate partner femicide; while nearly half of the intimate femicide cases showed no history of physical or sexual violence in the months leading up to the murders, the majority involved coercive controlling

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behaviours and the presence of coercive control in conjunction with other forms of physical or sexual violence was a particularly significant risk factor (Johnson et al., 2019).

Developing Deeper Understandings of Gender and Violence The debates about gender and domestic and family violence, while regarded by many as detracting from important efforts to understand and prevent the abuse of women, have fuelled some fruitful clarifications and distinctions among feminist scholars. One of these is the re-articulation of the complex relationship between sex and gender in feminist research. For feminist scholars, while sexed patterns in violence exist (for instance, more men or women perpetrating or experiencing certain forms of violence), a gender lens is about more than that; it is about how that violence is driven by the social and institutional construction of gender. What is often referred to as ‘gender symmetry’ is, in fact, sex symmetry. This sex symmetry in certain acts of violence does not necessarily indicate symmetry of gendered experiences, contexts, and motivations. Further, where sex symmetry or asymmetry exists, this itself is not a finding as to cause; we need to look deeper at how and why sexed patterns are smoke signals for the role of gender in producing these practices. Coercive control and intimate terrorism exhibit sexed patterns because they are gendered. There are, as has been pointed out, sexed patterns in perpetration (and victimisation) of intimate terrorism and coercive control. Women can and do become intimate terrorists, in lesbian relationships (Renzetti, 1998) and, though much rarer, in heterosexual relationships (Johnson, 2010, p. 25). However, the majority of perpetrators of intimate terrorism or coercive control are men (Hester et al., 2017; Johnson, 2010, 2011; Myhill, 2015; Tanha et al., 2010), who are more likely to engage in multiple, patterned forms of abuse (see, for example, Hester, 2013). But what is particularly significant here is not just the sexed pattern; rather, it is what it may signal about the gendered causes and contexts of these forms of domestic and family violence. Coercive control and intimate terrorism are fuelled by gender norms and structures. Stark’s (2007) account of “bespoke practices of control” (Downes et al., 2019, p. 269) suggests that coercive control is rooted in the use of power to enforce and maintain women’s subordination in domestic life, making gender and power central to the motivation behind them. These tactics of control, Stark (2007) showed, are fashioned in ways that specifically target domains associated with the performance and expression of femininity, such as dress and appearance, how household tasks are undertaken, socialisation with friends and family, and sexual intimacy. As such, they constitute a “gendered microregulation of everyday life” (Downes et al., 2019, p. 269). Anderson (2009) extends on the gendered dimensions of Stark’s conceptualisation of coercive control. Identifying gender as functioning at three levels—identity, interaction, and structure—Anderson draws together evidence of the gendered nature

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of coercive control at these three levels. Arguing that we need to consider all three levels, she shows that gender norms, the performance of gender, and structured gender inequalities lie behind the sexual asymmetry of coercive control. Work such as this expands on the gendered meanings, contexts, and causes of arguably the most dangerous underlying form of domestic and family violence. The consequences of domestic and family violence are also sexed and gendered. As Dragiewicz (2011) has argued, “symmetry claims can be made only when research on the negative outcomes of intimate violence is ignored” (p. 75). The extreme psychological abuse and “unreality” imposed on victims of coercive control (Williamson, 2010), most often women, are often cited by victims as the most harmful and debilitating, yet seldom fully understood and recognised within the legal system (Easteal et al., 2019). Looking at impacts of violence is an important part of considering the context and meanings of violence in a way that is not adequately measured through the CTS; if coercive control (rather than situational couple violence) is more damaging, more dangerous, and more prone to be perpetrated by men against women, this is significant. Sexed patterns in the consequences of abuse also reveal gender is at play; for example, ‘gaslighting’ as a mechanism for coercive control is both a feature and reinforcement of patriarchal beliefs about men and women, mobilising, exploiting and re-intrenching gendered inequalities (Sweet, 2019). Men’s violence against women also leads to higher rates of injury and hospitalisation than the reverse, a point Straus and his colleague Gelles (1995) conceded, revealing a further qualitative gendered difference in forms of violence. Women and men also experience differentiated levels of fear arising from intimate partner violence (Johnson, 2011). In a recent Australian national survey, 46% of all women who experienced current partner violence experienced significant anxiety or fear due to the violence, compared to 32% of men5 (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2017). Levels of fear of a former partner were further differentiated, with 50% of women and 29% of men experiencing fear and anxiety in relation to a previous partner who had been violent (ABS, 2017). Official data tells us that heterosexual women who are abused have a far greater reason to be fearful during and after the relationship—even more so than their self-reported experiences of fear. A recent review of all domestic homicide cases in Australia, the Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review report (ANROWS, 2018), showed that heterosexual women are substantially more vulnerable than heterosexual men to fatal violence at the hands of intimate partners or former partners. Further, it showed that domestic abuse by men preceded most intimate partner homicides—including cases in which women killed their male partner. Of the 152 cases of intimate partner homicides reviewed between 2010 and 2014, 98% occurred within heterosexual relationships.6 Heterosexual women were 4.3 5

Although the data on men should be used with caution, as the ABS states it has an estimate Relative Standard Error of 25–50%. The data is also not clearly differentiated in relation to sexuality and sex of partner. Further, it is unclear from this study how many men experiencing fear of their partner were in heterosexual or same-sex relationships. 6 There were no cases of female-to-female intimate partner homicides during this period. Three cases of male-to-male intimate partner homicides were recorded.

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times more likely to be killed by an intimate or former partner than their male counterparts,7 and when put in the context of histories of domestic abuse, a massive 87% of cases of intimate partner homicide were preceded by violence perpetrated primarily by the male partner. This included 92.6% of women who were killed having been the victims of their killer’s abuse before the murder, and 60.7% of men killed having been the primary domestic abuser leading up to the killing. In contrast, only 7.1% of the domestic homicides committed by women against men were found to have occurred in the context of the male partner being the primary victim of domestic abuse by a woman. These numbers support two key points of import to the ‘gender-symmetry’ debates. First, domestic violence by men against women is far more likely to be severe, both physically and non-physically, an important qualitative distinction. Women are more likely to be subjected to dangerous levels of violence—and fatal violence—at the hands of men. This means that not only are heterosexual women understandably more fearful in the context of domestic violence, but the nature of the abuse they experience is qualitatively different—it is more likely to be psychologically and socially debilitating, dangerous, or to escalate to fatal levels. These qualitative differences extend to children; forms of domestic and family violence more likely to be committed by men, namely coercive control, also have more severe effects on children (Haselschwerdt et al., 2019). Second, male-perpetrated domestic violence often precedes intimate partner homicides—by men and by women. This history of violence preceding homicide can be physical or non-physical (Johnson et al., 2019). This means that, as argued by researchers such as Johnson, Kimmel and Stark, it is indeed important to consider the context and broader patterns of violence to understand the meaning of individual violent acts. Some women’s use of violence in the context of severe domestic abuse (as opposed to situational couple violence) is more likely (although not exclusively) to be a form of violent resistance (Johnson, 2011). While not intended to be presented as a legitimisation of homicide, the point is that individual acts of violence considered out of context cannot be fully understood. As has been shown in this section, for feminist scholars, “gender is woven throughout domestic violent crime, in its scale, distribution, repetition, and seriousness” (Walby & Towers, 2018, p. 18), often in complex and nuanced ways. There has, however, been an active research cohort challenging the voracity of a feminist lens over the past few decades, and intense disagreements about how to measure and understand the aetiology of domestic and family violence. These disagreements mirror some of the paradoxes in public policy and debate I sketched at the beginning of the chapter. I have outlined these academic debates here in some detail 7

There is more recent data on family and domestic violence homicides available through the Australian Bureau of Statistics. However, the detail of the relationships between perpetrator and victims is less clear. For example, the 2018 Australian Bureau of Statistics Survey showed that 53% of all domestic and family violence homicide victims were female; however, 64% of these were intimate partner homicides, meaning that the remaining cases could involve several family-related murders such as siblicide, patricide/matricide and filicide. Further, it does not distinguish primary perpetrators of domestic violence preceding the homicides. The Death Review Report, therefore, while not as recent provides more detailed information to understand the context of these crimes.

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as I believe they provide important context to broader debates about gender and violence. While not always necessarily dominant, academic discourses play a role in the (re)construction of meaning—a role that appears to be expanding as more scholars participate as news sources (Buiten, 2020). Research is often invoked in public and online debates, increasingly today in the information age, and has for some time been utilised in policy development. Research and ‘expert’ sources are also often used by journalists to frame news stories, and research on gender and violence is often used to critique existing media representations. As such, research debates form an important part of the context in which news representations are constructed.

Incendiary Issues: The Politics of Gender in Filicide Reporting and Research The topic of filicide—the killing of children by their parents—is an incendiary issue for a range of reasons. Filicide stories “reflect wider cultural anxieties around gender and parental roles that are stirred by child murder” (Little, 2021, p. 1451). They challenge and lay bare deeply held cultural ideals of fatherhood, motherhood, and the heterosexual family. While a growing body of scholarship addressing the impact of adult domestic and family violence on children has emerged, research on filicide as a sub-category of domestic and family violence is relatively sparse. It is, however, growing. In Australia, the Monash Deakin Filicide Research and Education team conducted the first major Australian research study on filicide, the 2011 Victorian Filicide Study (Monash Deakin Filicide Research Hub, n.d.). This was followed up by a national study in 2016 and four annual conferences focusing on filicide between 2016 and 2019. However, at the level of public policy and debate, the issue of filicide still receives relatively little attention and is largely confounding when it does arise in the media. Unlike domestic and family violence between adults, there is not as easily available a range of potential activist or academic frames through which to interpret filicide. Media coverage of filicide therefore reflects current confusion over what motivates such violence, the role of gender, and even whether filicide is something committed more often by women or men. This confusion can be contextualised by the relatively sparse feminist or other gender-focused sociological analyses of filicide, as I discuss in more detail in Chap. 5. While public debate, policy, and campaigns on domestic and family violence in Australia have been prominent and strongly influenced by feminist narratives, this is not the case with filicide. Feminist and gendered frames on filicide are not, therefore, as readily available to make sense of filicide cases, nor any other activist frames given that filicide has been a relatively obscure political issue. Hence, when it does arise, it can receive muddled news coverage. The issue of filicide does indeed arise often. Australia has a proportionally high rate of filicide compared to other western nations. On average, one child is killed

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by a parent each fortnight in Australia (Brown et al., 2019). Many horrific cases of filicide and filicide-suicide have permeated news headlines in the last few years, including numerous cases involving multiple children. Further, a glance at social media commentary on news coverage of such cases shows that despite its relative obscurity as a domestic and family violence issue, when it does arise it is often an inflammatory one. Maternal filicide, of which there have been a growing number of cases in Australia in recent years (Goldsworthy, 2019), has been a particular lightning-rod for commentary and debate. Where maternal filicide is raised, the usefulness of a feminist lens on family violence has often been questioned: how can domestic and family violence be conceived of as gendered and patriarchal when so many women are killing their own children? This is a legitimate question, and one I offer some thoughts on in Chap. 5. Here, I would like to point out that cases of maternal filicide can be weaponised to discredit feminist analyses of violence and detract from male violence. Wielding women’s violence as evidence of the need for a gender-neutral account of domestic and family violence is not unique only to cases of filicide. The anti-feminist domestic violence camp discussed in the previous section frequently draw on research focusing specifically on the areas where women’s violence is present at equal or higher rates, such as violence in intimate heterosexual relationships among young men and women (for example, university students), where violence perpetrated by women is more common (Kimmel, 2002). There is also a great interest among anti-feminist groups in the growth of violent fighting among girls in schools (Carrington, 2013). Maternal filicide, however, is particularly provocative from a gender perspective because not only is it perceived to challenge the feminist activist line of domestic and family violence being the domain of men, but it challenges some deep-seated assumptions about women. It is perhaps for this reason that filicide research has historically shown a tendency to focus on mothers as perpetrators rather than fathers (Alder & Baker, 1997; Brown et al., 2018; O’Hagan, 2014). Cultural constructions of gender have also shaped the tendency to focus on psychiatric explanations of maternal filicide as a pathological anomaly, since only a ‘mad’ woman could be capable of killing her own child (Stangle, 2008). Sociological causes—how patterned social phenomena might contribute to producing this form of violence among women, one of the only forms of violence in which women are almost equally represented—are seldom explored in research. Explicitly feminist sociological scholarship is markedly scarce. While more recent research on filicide in Australia has begun to challenge the international dominance of maternal filicide research and primarily psychological accounts, shifting the research focus to include a greater interrogation of paternal filicide and filicide in the context of separation, divorce and domestic violence (for example, Brown et al., 2014; Johnson, 2005), most research does not apply gender theory in a significant way, and feminist scholars more broadly appear reluctant to engage with the topic. Researching and theorising women’s use of violence is a fraught issue in feminist research. As Fitzroy (2001) notes, “women’s violence has historically been a taboo subject within feminist practice and contemporary feminist literature on violence” (p. 7), posing a series of challenges to feminist theorising as well as policy and

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practice in areas of family violence. There is good reason for this. The feminist movement of the 1970s, and indeed up until today, has been tackling the difficult task of putting men’s violence against women on the research and policy agenda, convincing decision-makers to understand and address it in gendered and structural terms (Hill, 2019). There is a legitimate fear among researchers and practitioners that an examination of women’s violence can be deployed to undercut hard-won advancements in this area. Fitzroy’s (2001) research with human service workers, for instance, revealed that many “fear[ed] the potential negative political and social consequences for the feminist movement, if energy and resources were expended on women offenders [of violence]. There was general concern expressed by workers that the hard won acknowledgment that sexual and physical violence are gendered crimes may be lost within a ‘woman blaming’ backlash” (p. 11). While data on violence by women and girls can be—and is—weaponised in ways that need to be subjected to critique, evading questions of women’s violence is not fruitful either. As Carrington (2013) argues, “by concentrating on females as victims of violence and very rarely as perpetrators, feminist criminology has for the most part ducked the thorny issue of female violence, leaving a discursive space for anti-feminist sentiment to reign” (p. 63). As will be discussed in Chap. 5, feminist sociological theorising of women’s violence is important—for feminist theorising as well as for advancing public understandings of the role of gender in domestic and family violence. The link between gender and filicide, like intimate partner violence, is contested. As observed in the previous sections, sex symmetry is not necessarily indicative of gender neutrality. The aim here, however, is to note the contested nature of debates about gender in cases of domestic and family violence involving children.

A Brief Note on Anti-feminism These gender(-based violence) wars—disputes over the role of gender in violence and the utility of a gender lens for addressing it—occur at the nexus of two simultaneous trends: on the one hand, the growing popularisation of feminism in contemporary cultural spaces and implementation in policy and law, and on the other, the proliferation of anti-feminist backlashes and movements (Dragiewicz, 2011). This nexus has created intense negotiations over the nature and meaning of violence against women, as will be explored in Part Two of this book. For scholars such as Dragiewicz (2011) and Berns (2004), anti-feminist frames on intimate partner violence—frames that concurrently recognise such violence and deny its connection to gender and patriarchy—have a political function: they work to obscure and minimise the threat that feminist explanations present to the gendered status quo. As such, Berns argues that anti-feminist frames that deny the role of gender by raising women’s violence as an issue are less about a concern for victims, and more a “camouflage for what is primarily a political countermovement to other [feminist] constructions of domestic violence” (Berns, 2004, p. 122). Walby (1993), too, has said that backlashes against feminism are not merely designed to temper

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or dull the progress of the feminist movement, but to actively reaffirm patriarchal power. These struggles are not new. Anti-feminist counter-movements against feminist conceptualisations of domestic and family violence began to emerge as soon as feminist theorisations of violence did; in the late 1970s, according to Dobash and Dobash (1992), many politicians and practitioners reacted with discomfort to emerging politicised feminist accounts of ‘wife battering’ such as their own. This discomfort with a structural and political analysis fuelled a push to focus on victims of domestic violence, particularly from a psychological perspective. This manifested in questions around why abused women had allowed themselves to be abused or stayed with their abusive partners, avoiding a more direct confrontation violence perpetration that would, potentially, have laid bare questions of structure and power (Berns, 2004). Common strategies employed in anti-feminist backlashes against gendering domestic and family violence include minimising or detracting from male violence against women by refocusing on violence by women or against men and/or by acknowledging violence against women as an issue but denying its gendered nature (Dragiewicz, 2011; Flood et al., 2021). As I have shown in this chapter so far, these patterned responses by anti-feminist groups materialising in more contemporary political, popular, and academic debates share a similar set of strategies—they refocus attention on female violence, and/or deny the salience of gender in favour of other, more psychological, individualised accounts of interpersonal violence. We therefore need to understand anti-feminist arguments about gender-based violence not only as a product of contested methodologies, conceptualisations, and data, but as embedded within broader political struggles over the contribution and place of feminism. The utility of a gender lens needs to be clarified and distinguished as part of the continuing work of addressing common public perceptions and concerns about feminism, which is often distorted and oversimplified in the media, and indeed academia (Johnson, 2011). This is what the next three chapters aim to do, laying out a sociological framework for gender-based violence in Chap. 3—one that is capacious enough to account for violence against children and women’s use of violence—and mapping out what the existing research can tell us about the gendered nature of familicide (Chap. 4) and filicide (Chap. 5).

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ANROWS: Australian National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety. (2018). Australian domestic and family violence death review network data report 2018. https://apo.org.au/sites/def ault/files/resource-files/2018-05/apo-nid174811.pdf Archer, J. (2000). Sex differences in aggression between heterosexual partners: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651–680. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.126.5.651 Arndt, B. (2020). The domestic violence industry. https://www.bettinaarndt.com.au/articles/thedomestic-violence-industry/ Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2017). Personal safety, Australia, 2016 (Cat. No. 4906.0) https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/4906.0 Berns, N. (2004). Framing the victim: Domestic violence, media and social problems. Routledge. Brown, T., Bricknell, S., Bryant, W., Lyneham, S., Tyson, D., & Fernandez Arias, P. (2019). Filicide offenders. In Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, 568. Australian Institute of Criminology. https://aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi568 Brown, T., Tyson, D., & Fernandes Arias, P. (2014). Filicide and parental separation and divorce. Child Abuse Review, 23(2), 79–88. https://doi.org/10.1002/car.2327 Brown, T., Tyson, D., & Fernandes Arias, P. (2018). Filicide in Australia. In T. Brown, D. Tyson, & P. Fernandes Arias (Eds.), When parents kill children (pp. 145–166). Palgrave Macmillan. Buiten, D. (2020). It’s “vile” but is it violence? A case study analysis of news media representations of non-consensual sexual image-sharing. Feminist Media Studies, 20(8), 1177–1194. https://doi. org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1708773 Carrington, K. (2013). Girls and violence: The case for a feminist theory of female violence. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2(2), 63–79. https://doi.org/10. 5204/ijcjsd.v2i2.101 DeKeseredy, W. S. (1999). Tactics of the antifeminist backlash against Canadian national woman abuse surveys. Violence Against Women, 5(11), 1258–1276. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780199 22183363 DeKeseredy, W. S. (2000). Current controversies on defining nonlethal violence against women in intimate heterosexual relationships: Empirical implications. Violence Against Women, 6(7), 728–746. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778010022182128 DeKeseredy, W. S. (2011). Feminist contributions to understanding woman abuse: Myths, controversies and realities. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16(4), 297–302. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.avb.2011.04.002 DeKeseredy, W. S., & Dragiewicz, M. (2007). Understanding the complexities of feminist perspectives on woman abuse: A commentary on Donald G. Dutton’s Rethinking Domestic Violence. Violence Against Women, 13(8), 874–884. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801207304806 Dobash, R. (1994). Violence against wives: A case against patriarchy. Free Press. Dobash, R. E., & Dobash, R. (1979). Violence against wives. The Free Press. Dobash, R. E., & Dobash, R. (1992). Women, violence and social change. Routledge. Dobash, R. P., & Dobash, R. E. (2004). Women’s violence to men in intimate relationships: Working on a puzzle. The British Journal of Criminology, 44(3), 324–349. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/ azh026 Downes, J., Kelly, L., & Westmarland, N. (2019). ‘It’s a work in progress’: Men’s accounts of gender and change in their use of coercive control. Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 3(3), 267–282. https://doi.org/10.1332/239868019X15627570242850 Dragiewicz, M. (2008). Patriarchy reasserted: Fathers’ rights and anti-VAWA activism. Feminist Criminology, 3(2), 121–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085108316731 Dragiewicz, M. (2011). Equality with a vengeance: Men’s rights groups, battered women, and antifeminist backlash. Northeastern University Press. Dragiewicz, M., & Burgess, J. (2016). Domestic violence on #qanda: The “man” question in live Twitter discussion on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Q&A. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 28(1), 211–229. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjwl.28.1.211 Dutton, D. G. (2006). Rethinking domestic violence. UBC Press.

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Dutton, D. G. (2010). The gender paradigm and the architecture of antiscience. Partner Abuse, 1(1), 5–25. https://doi.org/10.1891/1946-6560.1.1.5 Dutton, D. G. (2012). A case against the role of gender in intimate partner violence. Aggression and Violent Behaviour, 17(1), 99–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2011.09.002 Dutton, D. G., & Corvo, K. C. (2006). Transforming a flawed policy: A call to revive psychology and science in domestic violence research and practice. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 11(5), 457–483. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2006.01.007 Dutton, D. G., Corvo, K. C., & Hamel, J. (2009). The gender paradigm in domestic research and practice: Part 2—The information website of the American Bar Association. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 13(1), 159–177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2008.08.002 Dutton, D. G., & Nicholls, T. L. (2005). The gender paradigm in domestic violence research and theory: Part 1—The conflict of theory and data. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 10(6), 680–714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2005.02.001 Easteal, P., Bartels, L., & Mittal, R. (2019). The importance of understanding the victims’ ‘reality’ of domestic violence. Alternative Law Journal, 44(1), 11–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X1 8790040 Fiebert, M. (1997). Annotated bibliography: References examining assaults by women on their spouses/partners. Sexuality and Culture, 1, 273–286. Fitzroy. (2001). Violent women: Questions for feminist theory, practice and policy. Critical Social Policy, 21(1), 7–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/026101830102100101 Flood, M., Dragiewicz, M., & Pease, B. (2021). Resistance and backlash to gender equality. The Australian Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 393–408. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajs4.137 Goldsworthy, T. (2019, February 8). Mothers murdering their children on the rise, while fathers declining. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-08/mothers-murdering-their-chi ldren-on-the-rise-domestic-filicide/10793162 Gondolf, E. W. (2011). The weak evidence for batterer program alternatives. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16(4), 347–353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2011.04.011 Gotell, L., & Dutton, E. (2016). Sexual violence in the “manosphere”: Antifeminist men’s rights discourses on rape. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 5(2), 65–80. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.v5i2.310 Haselschwerdt, M. L., Hlavaty, K., Carlson, C., Schneider, M., Maddox, L., & Skipper, M. (2019). Heterogeneity within domestic violence exposure: Young adults’ retrospective experiences. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 34(7), 1512–1538. https://doi.org/10.1177/088626 0516651625 Hawley, E., Clifford, K., & Konkes, C. (2018). The “Rosie Batty effect” and the framing of family violence in Australian news media. Journalism Studies, 19(15), 2304–2323. https://doi.org/10. 1080/1461670X.2017.1343096 Henriques-Gomes, L. (2020, January 27). Rosie Batty ‘dismayed’ by decision to give Bettina Arndt an Australia Day honour. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/ 27/rosie-batty-dismayed-by-decision-to-give-bettina-arndt-an-australia-day-honour Hester, M. (2013). Who does what to whom? Gender and domestic violence perpetrators in English police records. European Journal of Criminology, 10(5), 623–637. https://doi.org/10.1177/147 7370813479078 Hester, M., Jones, C., Williamson, E., Fahmy, E., & Feder, G. (2017). Is it coercive controlling violence? A cross-sectional domestic violence and abuse survey of men attending general practice in England. Psychology of Violence, 7(3), 417–427. https://doi.org/10.1037/vio0000107 Hill, J. (2019). See what you made me do: Power, control and domestic abuse. Black Inc. Books. Hill, J. (2021). The reckoning: How #MeToo is changing Australia (Quarterly Essay). Black Inc. Books. Holtzworth-Munroe, A. (2000). A typology of men who are violent toward their female partners: Making sense of the heterogeneity in husband violence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(4), 140–143. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00079

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Jenkins, K. (2021, November). Set the standard: Report on the independent review into commonwealth parliamentary workplaces. Australian Human Rights Commission. https://humanrights. gov.au/sites/default/files/document/publication/ahrc_set_the_standard_2021.pdf Johnson, C. H. (2005). Come with daddy: Child murder-suicide after family breakdown. University of Western Australia Publishing. Johnson, M. P. (2006). Conflict and control: Gender symmetry and asymmetry in domestic violence. Violence Against Women, 12(11), 1003–1018. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801206293328 Johnson, H., Eriksson, L., Mazerolle, P., & Wortley, R. (2019). Intimate femicide: The role of coercive control. Feminist Criminology, 14(1), 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085117701574.doi: 10.1177/1557085117701574 Johnson, M. P. (2010). A typology of domestic violence: Intimate terrorism. Northeastern University Press. Johnson, M. P. (2011). Gender and types of intimate partner violence: A response to an anti-feminist literature review. Aggression and Violent Behaviour, 16(4), 289–296. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. avb.2011.04.006 Johnson, M. P. (2017). A personal social history of a typology of intimate partner violence. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 9(2), 150–164. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12187 Johnson, M. P., & Ferraro, K. J. (2000). Research on domestic violence in the 1990s: Making distinctions. Journal of Marriage and Family, 62(4), 948–963. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17413737.2000.00948.x Kelly, L. (1987). The continuum of sexual violence. In J. Hanmer & M. Maynard (Eds.), Women, violence and social control (pp. 46–60). Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, L. (1988). Surviving sexual violence. Polity Press. Kimmel, M. (2000). The gendered society. Oxford University Press. Kimmel, M. S. (2002). “Gender symmetry” in domestic violence: A substantive and methodological research review. Violence Against Women, 8(11), 1332–1363. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780102 237407 Little, J. (2021). Filicide, journalism and the ‘disempowered man’ in three Australian cases 2010– 2016. Journalism, 22(6), 1450–1466. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918809739 MacKinnon, C. A. (1979). Sexual harassment of working women: A case of sex discrimination. Yale University Press. Monash Deakin Filicide Research Hub. (n.d.). A brief history. https://addressingfilicide.org/hom epage/research/brief-history/ Myhill, A. (2015). Measuring coercive control: What can we learn from national population surveys? Violence Against Women, 21(3), 355–375. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801214568032 Myhill, A., & Hohl, K. (2019). The ‘golden thread’: Coercive control and risk assessment for domestic violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 34(21–22), 44777–54497. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0886260516675464 Nancarrow, H., Thomas, K., Ringland, V., & Modini, T. (2020). Accurately identifying the “person most in need of protection” in domestic and family violence law (Research report, 23/2020). ANROWS. Nelson, C., & Lumby, C. (2021). Broken: Children, parents and family courts. La Trobe University Press/Black Inc O’Hagan, K. (2014). Filicide-suicide: The killing of children in the context of separation, divorce and custody disputes. Palgrave Macmillan. Pauline Hanson lashes women ‘lying’ about domestic violence in family courts. (2019, September 18). SBS News. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/pauline-hanson-lashes-women-lying-about-dom estic-violence-in-family-courts Renzetti, C. M. (1998). Violence and abuse in lesbian relationships: Theoretical and empirical issues. In R. Bergen (Ed.), Theorizing gender in intimate partner violence research: Issues in intimate violence (pp. 117–127). Sage.

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Schwartz, M. D., & DeKeseredy, W. S. (2008). Interpersonal violence against women: The role of men. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 24(2):178–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/104398 6208315483 Scott Morrison says tackling disrespect key to reducing violence against women. (2019, March 5). SBS News. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/scott-morrison-says-tackling-disrespect-key-to-red ucing-violence-against-women Stangle, H. L. (2008). Murderous Madonna: Femininity, violence, and the myth of postpartum mental disorder in cases of maternal infanticide and filicide. William and Mary Law Review, 50(2), 699. Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: The entrapment of women in personal life. Oxford University Press. Stark, E. (2009). Rethinking coercive control. Violence Against Women, 15(12), 1509–1525. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1077801209347452 Straus, M. A. (1979). Measuring intra family conflict and violence: The conflict tactics (CT) scales. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 41(1), 75–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/351733 Straus, M. A. (2007). Processes explaining the concealment and distortion of evidence on gender symmetry in partner violence. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 13(3), 227– 232. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-007-9060-5 Straus, M. A. (2011). Gender symmetry and mutuality in perpetration of clinical-level partner violence: Empirical evidence and implications for prevention and treatment. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16(4), 279–288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2011.04.010 Straus, M. A., & Gelles, R. J. (1995). Physical violence in American families: Risk factors and adaptations to violence in 8,145 families. Transaction Publishing. Sugarman, D. B., & Frankel, S. L. (1996). Patriarchal ideology and wife-assault: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Family Violence, 11(1), 13–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02333338 Sweet, P. L. (2019). The sociology of gaslighting. American Sociological Review, 84(5), 851–875. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419874843 Tanha, M., Beck, C. J. A., Figueredo, A. J., & Raghavan, C. (2010). Sex differences in intimate partner violence and the use of coercive control as a motivational factor for intimate partner violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 25(10), 1836–1854. https://doi.org/10.1177/088626 0509354501 Walby, S. (1993). Backlash in historical context. In M. Kennedy, C. Lubelska, & V. Walsh (Eds.), Making connections: Women’s studies, women’s movements, women’s lives (pp. 79–89). Taylor & Francis. Walby, S., & Towers, J. (2018). Untangling the concept of coercive control: Theorising domestic violent crime. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 18(1), 7–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/174889 5817743541 Williamson, E. (2010). Living in the world of the domestic violence perpetrator: Negotiating the unreality of coercive control. Violence Against Women, 16(12), 1412–1423. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1077801210389162 Wolfe, N. (2019, December 6). ‘You deserve to be honoured’: Pauline Hanson pays tribute to Australian men. News.com.au. https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/you-deserve-to-behonoured-pauline-hanson-pays-tribute-to-australian-men/news-story/4f3d94b8fa3547570ab15 90a2ce9a98b

Chapter 3

A Framework for Gender-Based Violence

What’s in a Name? As the last chapter showed, calling domestic and family violence gendered or ‘genderbased’ invokes a decades-long set of debates and must be contextualised against the contested position of feminism more broadly. These debates—particularly within research and scholarship—have stimulated some fruitful distinctions and clarifications by feminist scholars about what makes domestic and family violence gendered. Drawing on these contributions, this chapter outlines what it means to call violence gender-based and presents some important distinctions and overlaps to keep in mind. As such, it offers a framework for thinking through the gendered nature of domestic and family violence, which is then applied in Chap. 4 to theorise familicide as a form of gender-based violence—including in cases that are not preceded by a history of abuse and do not ostensibly resemble other forms of intimate femicide. I tackle some of the following questions in this chapter: what is it that makes different forms of violence gender-based? Is all violence against women (VAW) gender-based? Can men be victims of gender-based violence? Can women be perpetrators? What about the violence experienced by children? In what ways, specifically, is violence shaped by gender? Asking these questions is not merely an intellectual or definitional exercise. Categories and definitions, and the connections, overlaps and slippages between them, matter. As Boyle (2019) suggests, “our words shape the ways in which it is (not) possible to understand the issues at stake, the ways they are legislated against, measured and resourced and the responses which are deemed most urgent and appropriate” (p. 20). Naming (or not naming) certain forms of violence gender-based is therefore of consequence. This is certainly the case with familicide, which as I show in Part Two is not always recognised in the media as a form of gender-based violence, with important consequences. Naming (or not naming) can contribute in complex ways to reinforcing, naturalising, challenging, and/or resisting the status quo. There is evidence that, when it comes to the meaning of gender and its role in domestic and

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family violence, policy makers and practitioners are not always on the same page (Yates, 2018). Indeed, Yates (2018) argues in relation to Australian domestic and family violence policy that “a common understanding of what gender means and its role in the problem of DFV will be important in [policy] implementation […] as the way that problems are defined has implications for the actions that are taken to address them” (p. 568). As such, this chapter seeks theoretical clarity on what we mean when we call violence gender-based. To do this, I draw on feminist scholarship and the example of intimate partner violence to clarify gender-based violence as referring to violence shaped by gender at three interrelated levels: gender identities and norms; gendered doings and interactions; and gendered structures and structural inequalities (Anderson, 2009; Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). I outline the most salient and defining features of genderbased violence, and how the concept can help us to understand domestic and family violence not only against women but against children as well. I propose that clarifying what we mean when we talk about gender-based violence, articulating the utility of a gender lens, and ensuring the concept is utilised in sociological (rather than essentialist) terms, are vital if we are to persuasively challenge the backlashes against feminist analyses of violence. In Chap. 4, I apply this framework to explore the causes of familicide, and in Chap. 5 to examine the issue of filicide. Feminist media and communications scholarship frequently identifies and critiques the silencing of gender in representations of domestic and family violence (Berns, 2004; Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017). To identify this as a silence, however, is to simultaneously make the claim that gender is indeed salient to domestic and family violence. Therefore, before interrogating news reporting on domestic and family violence through a gendered lens, we must consider what we know about gender and domestic and family violence. Similarly, a feminist analysis of news reporting on familicide requires an understanding of the phenomenon in gendered terms. This is not to make claims about one, true or correct representation, but to contextualise representations within the available discourses around the phenomenon, and to evaluate the extent to and ways in which feminist knowledge and perspectives are penetrating news media.

Defining Gender-Based Violence Gender-based violence, violence against women, domestic violence, family violence, sexual violence. These are just some of the terms that often present in relation to the very same acts of violence, the implicit but seldom explicit distinctions and overlaps between them creating a lot of conceptual ambiguity. If a woman is sexually assaulted, it is variously termed sexual violence, violence against women, or gender-based violence. When a woman is abused by her male partner, it is similarly articulated variously as gender-based violence, violence against women, domestic violence or even family violence. Then, there are those forms of violence that are seldom connected to ‘gender-based violence’, but perhaps should be. Family violence

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against children, for instance, is often termed child abuse and not framed as genderbased. Yet, there are signs that various forms of family violence affecting children are deeply gendered: the direct and indirect abuse of children in the context of intimate partner violence and coercive control, for instance, or the kidnapping and killing of children as an act of revenge on their mothers. Yet, these are not always understood as acts of gender-based violence, but as collateral damage. Acts of naming attach meaning and causality to an act of violence. The meanings connected to many of these terms are often multiple, shaped by theoretical developments and debates such as those outlined in Chap. 2, as well as by social movements and activism. Social movements and theorists can also employ terms in a way that has strategic, not just definitional, merit. For example, while Stark (2007, 2009) theorised coercive control as gendered, he chose an apparently gender-neutral term and drew on a de-gendered analogy (that of ‘torture’) to tie his theory to more recognisable forms of violence and in so doing to legitimise and make accessible his gendered analysis. This was strategic and, he said, a strategy that has been used by women’s rights groups in a variety of historical contexts (Stark, 2009). Boyle (2019) suggests that the aim of doing definitional work around gender-based violence should be less about identifying a better or more ‘correct’ or ‘feminist’ term, and more about making connections. The term gender-based violence, therefore, signals where there are gendered connections underlying what can be varied forms of violence, such as intimate partner violence, homophobic violence, and some forms of violence against children. Boyle draws on Kelly’s (1988) influential concept of the continuum of violence against women, a concept foregrounding the existence of (gendered) connections between the seemingly mundane ‘everyday’ violations women experience and more extreme forms of violence against them. Utilising this concept, Boyle argues for the need for ‘continuum thinking’ around gender-based violence. By this she refers to a way of thinking and theorising that is capable of appreciating the gendered connections between varied forms of violence, as well as distinctions between them. As she says, “the value of continuum thinking is to see connections not equivalences” (Boyle, 2019, p. 21). Accordingly, gender-based violence is an ‘umbrella term’ that refers to violence in which gender plays a central role in the perpetration and experience of that violence (Boyle, 2019). The ‘gender’ of gender-based violence is centred more on the meaning of that violence—the ‘why’ of the violence—than the sex of the victims or perpetrators. Therefore, gender as a social phenomenon is central to understanding why the violence occurs. This is important because, as Scarduzio et al. (2017) have shown, essentialised stereotypes about gender and violence significantly narrow our capacity to understand diverse manifestations of violence. As a result, experiences of violence that do not fit gender stereotypes can be dismissed as ungendered, and backlashes against feminist analyses are fuelled, since feminist analyses are regarded as inadequate to account for experiences of violence outside of male violence against women. For these reasons, it is important to articulate the dynamic role of gender (as it intersects with other factors) in shaping violence without resorting to essentialist explanations. This is what Yates (2018) calls “little g” thinking about gender, “see[ing] gender as something that is constituted by actions, that resides both in individuals and

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in societal structures, and that refers to patterns of relationships within and between sex categories”. Yates contrasts this with more essentialist, sex-based thinking around gender—that is, “big G” thinking—which “tends to be categorical, more fixed than fluid, and relates mainly to the state of being male or female” (p. 569). There will, of course, be sexed patterns that arise from gendered contexts, and therefore gender-based violence will very often present as male violence against women. This is because gender, as a social phenomenon, is premised on cultural assumptions of innate differences between the sexes, conceived of in binary terms. Social differences are therefore mapped variously onto the lives of people who occupy sex categories in patterned ways. Gender norms and structures will lead to several patterns along sexed lines. Many forms of violence that affect women disproportionately have at their core gendered elements; women are often victims of certain forms of violence because (or at least in part because) they are women and because they are women within a particular gendered and patriarchal context (Boyle, 2019). Importantly, therefore, from a feminist perspective it is not their sex alone that makes them vulnerable, but the gender ideologies attached to victims and/or perpetrators and how this is located within the matrix of existing gender relations and structures. Terms like violence against women, while often treated as synonymous with genderbased violence, are therefore not in fact the same although they overlap in important ways. Boyle (2019) provides the example of femicide, a term referencing the gendered killing of women. It is an example of an overlapping term—it references fatal violence against women that is also gender-based violence because of its gendered causation. For instance, the murder of women by partners or former partners, usually in the context of abuse, is a form of femicide. The term femicide draws specific attention to the gendered dimensions of such fatal forms of violence against women, inviting a gender lens to these killings: it not only violence against women, but genderbased as well. This can be distinguished, for example, from female homicide as a broader term that denotes the killing of women in ways that may not as explicitly be connected to gender (Boyle, 2019). For example, women killed in a bomb attack indiscriminately targeting civilians is female homicide but may not be gender-based. In some cases, the distinctions are blurry and the connections tentative: air strikes in war time, for example, would often disproportionately affect women where women constitute most civilians in many wartime contexts. It would be a form of violence against women, and indeed their disproportionate representation as civilians is a gendered phenomenon, yet women may not in this case necessarily be targeted for violence on the basis of gender (Boyle, 2019). Sexual violence of civilian women during wartime, on the other hand, has clearly been linked to gendered ideologies as they intersect with other social categories (see, for example, Henry, 2016). This would constitute a form of violence against women that is potently gender-based. This example of sexual violence during armed conflict is one that raises another important issue in relation to defining the meaning and scope of the term genderbased violence: can men be victims of gender-based violence? This is a contentious issue, because gender-based violence is understood, from a feminist perspective, as

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rooted in gendered systems of power and inequality. It is not always clear, therefore, when men who experience some of the forms of violence that many women do, if they experience it because of their gender. However, gender is a complex and dynamic social phenomenon. As Ferrales et al. (2016) show, for instance, the rape of men by other men during wartime is an example of violence against men with a highly gendered component; in their study of sexual violence against men and boys in Darfur, they argue that the emasculation of male victims operates to systematically deny victim-groups “the attributes of dominant heterosexual masculinity” and “demarcate[s] them as outgroup members” (p. 579). In this way, sexual violence against men in this context holds “symbolic meaning for communities” (Ferrales et al., 2016, p. 581) and operates to construct and uphold gendered as well as ethnic power relations. Here, while men are victims the violence is gender-based because gender underpins the cause, type, and consequences of the violence in significant ways. It is rooted in, and operates to prop up, patriarchal ideologies. Research on intimate partner violence in same-sex relationships has also revealed a gendered component, where “overall patterns of abuse are still gendered—that is, gender still matters” (Yates, 2018, p. 574). This includes higher rates of emotional and parenting-related abuse in same-sex relationships between women, influenced by women’s higher rates of caregiving responsibilities and women’s socialisation to express aggression in more non-physical terms, and higher rates of the physical and sexual abuse that has been associated with constructs of masculinity observed in same-sex relationships between men (Yates, 2018). Gender also inflects trans and non-binary people’s experiences of domestic abuse (Rogers, 2021). As Boyle (2019) has pointed out, gender-based violence can be and is committed against men, although most often by other men. We can see this in homophobic violence perpetrated by and against other men, using violence to police gender norms, punish gender non-conformity, and re-assert patriarchal dominance in the face of the threat gender non-conformity presents (for example, Mbisi, 2009; Namaste, 1996). Indeed, Boyle argues that some forms of gender-based violence can be committed by women, such as certain honour-based killings or female genital mutilation. Here, gender still plays a central role in shaping these acts of violence, with women’s violence operating to uphold patriarchal norms. While the existence of intimate partner violence in same-sex relationships has been used to discredit theories of gender and violence, “such claims rest on the implicit assumption that gender is limited to what women and men do in interactions with the ‘opposite’ sex” (Anderson, 2005, p. 856). However, gender is also salient in a range of same-sex interactions in a way that can shape patterns of violence (Anderson, 2005; Renzetti, 1998). Including men as potential victims and women as potential perpetrators of genderbased violence is not to suggest gender parity, however. In fact, Boyle (2019) emphasises the need to ensure that patriarchy remains at the centre of an analysis of genderbased violence. In asking if a violent act is gendered, says Boyle (2019), we should not only ask who committed the violence against whom, but why and who benefits. “Asking who benefits helps to keep the role of patriarchal structures in view” (p. 24), so that practices such as honour-based violence or female genital mutilation can be

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“acts by women […] used to uphold men’s privilege and support women’s inequality” (Westmarland, 2015, p. xvi cited in Boyle, 2019, p. 24). Indeed, the question may be what benefits, since the question of who benefits can raise some sticky issues in relation to individual men’s relation to and dividends accruing from patriarchy (Connell, 1995). As Hunnicutt (2009) reminds us, we need to problematise patriarchy as a system of privilege rather than males as perpetrators per say. Boyle’s point remains important here: gender-based violence is less about the sex of victims and perpetrators (although there would indeed be strong sexed patterns) and more about their gender and how it is located within broader gendered systems of power. This is what Yates (2018, 2020) calls the ‘small g approach’ to gender, where gender is understood as a range of social processes and institutions, as opposed to a ‘big G approach’ in which gender denotes fixed categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’. This has important implications for the robustness, utility, and more widespread applicability of a gender lens, and for its resilience in the face of anti-feminist sentiment and post-feminist recalcitrance around gendered analyses. As Yates (2018) has found in her research with people working in the domestic and family violence policy system, how they understand what is meant by a ‘gendered approach’ to violence influences how effective they think such an approach is. Those who take it to mean merely that women are vulnerable to male violence are more likely to be sceptical of a gendered approach, to consider it overly reliant on gender and regard it as lacking. Service providers, policymakers and other actors within domestic and family violence systems often encounter issues that introduce complexity around the role of gender, such as domestic violence in same-sex relationships or the unique experiences of domestic and family violence by children (Yates, 2018). This can put gender as an important explanatory force in doubt, an issue exacerbated by the dominance of the big G categorical approach to gender in much of public policy. Yates is worth quoting at length here: Arguably, the prevalence of big G gender in the family violence policy subsystem (and in the community generally) could be frustrating the efforts of researchers and policy entrepreneurs who want to cement (small g) gender as a crucial explanatory factor in the problem of DFV. If gender attaches only to bodies, if it means men and women, then it loses its explanatory power when violence occurs that either does not fit the pattern of male to female intimate partner violence, or is not solely explained by gender inequality. This is why we see people saying that it can not be about gender because violence occurs in same sex relationships, or that it can not be about gender because sometimes women abuse men, or children abuse parents. If we look closely and employ small g understandings of gender, gendered patterns appear everywhere (Yates, 2018, p. 578).

Mapping Gender in Gender-Based Violence To say that gender is a central driver for violence, however, can be somewhat nebulous. To have a clear and more systematic way of examining gender in relation to violence, a framework for understanding gendered systems is useful. Anderson (2009) for example, while concurring with Stark’s (2007) assertion that coercive

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control is a gendered phenomenon, argues that this needs to be systematically theorised rather than “taken on faith” as Stark suggested (2007, p. 102). To do so, Anderson draws on gender systems theory (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004), examining the relationship between coercive control as Stark theorised it and gender at three levels: the macro-level of systems and distribution of resources; the meso-level of social interaction; and the micro-level of identity. This provides a methodical and theoretically informed analysis of the gendering of coercive control. Along with Boyle’s concept of continuum thinking around gender-based violence, I draw on Anderson’s (2009) approach in this book to conceptualise gender-based violence and propose familicide as gender-based. Anderson’s framework enables a layered analysis of how and why different forms of violence may be gendered. Her work, providing a mechanism to map gender in relation to violence, aligns with Yates’ work on the “little g” approach to gender that configures the link between gender and violence in multilayered social terms. Here I will outline this approach, providing some examples of how it may relate to the knowledge on domestic and family violence outlined in Chap. 2. Ridgeway and Correll (2004) draw on a wealth of gender theory to sketch out the way gender, as a system, works at different levels that are connected by “hegemonic cultural beliefs” about gender. Certain beliefs about gender, they argue, become hegemonic insofar as they disseminate and solidify towards a relative cultural consensus about what makes a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’. While there may be some resistance to these cultural beliefs, those who resist them are nonetheless aware of and well scripted in them. As such, they become ubiquitous, colouring (through conformity or acts of resistance) how people come to see themselves and others, how they interact, and how structures and institutions are organised. For Ridgeway and Correll, these cultural beliefs about gender therefore influence life at those three levels: identity, interaction, and structure. This influence occurs, they argue, in a myriad of often seemingly minor ways. However, when added together the cumulative impacts make for a highly gendered social system. Hegemonic cultural beliefs about gender shape the formation of identity at the micro-level. Owing in large part to early gender theories of socialisation and feminist psychoanalytic approaches, “a theoretical understanding of gender as identity recognises that people are socialised to identify themselves and others with a single sex category” (Anderson, 2009, p. 1445) and to associate certain traits and roles with this. While deeply held, these gender identities can sometimes be unstable and tenuous, even contradictory across various contexts (Anderson, 2009). This observation has been made especially in studies of masculinities (for example, Connell, 1995), where the intense cultural requirement for, yet fragile nature of, a hegemonic masculine identity contributes to the need to continuously demonstrate and reinforce this identity. This leads to the second tier of the gender system, namely gendered interactions (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). This includes “patterns of behaviour at the interactional level” (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004, p. 511) that are shaped by—and reinforce— hegemonic cultural beliefs about gender. Insights into this aspect of the gender system are drawn from performative theories of gender (for example, Butler, 1990; West &

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Zimmerman, 1987). These theories hold that people act, and require action of others, in ways that are influenced by gender norms, so that gender is something that is actively and situationally practiced in interaction with others. This can include doing gender in ways that reinforce a fragile gender identity, for example, or holding others accountable for culturally ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ gendered conduct (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Gender is also present at the macro-level of social structure. Connell (1987) and Risman (1998, 2004) have been instrumental in extending feminist theories of gender beyond identity and interaction to the level of social structures. The key insight is that ideas about gender are drawn on to organise a range of institutions, systems, and practices, so that gender (and gender inequality) shapes the very ways in which these are structured. In this way, beliefs about gender structure the “distribution of resources at the macro-level” (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004, p. 511), including patterned distributions of labour, materials, and power. As Anderson summarised, through “the sexual division of labour, occupational sex segregation, unequal earnings for similar jobs, and the assignment of caregiving tasks and responsibility, society uses gender to organise daily life and to construct gender differences” (Anderson, 2009, p. 1449). To call violence gender-based, then, is to conceive of the nature and germination of that violence as shaped by gender operating at these three levels: the individual level (for example, socialised gender identities), the interactional level (for example, the doing of gender in accordance with cultural expectations), and level of structures and institutions (for example, ideological discourse, institutions, and organisation practices) (Anderson, 2005; Risman & Davis, 2013). This offers a framework to conceptualise and map the link between gender and male violence against women, as well as to recognise and better understand other forms of violence as gender-based.

Gendering Intimate Partner Violence First, it is important to reiterate that to understand domestic and family violence as a gendered phenomenon does “not mean that [it] is perpetrated solely by people of one biological sex against those of another, or that its negative effects are solely suffered by people of one sex. [Rather, it means] that patterns of perpetration, outcomes of violence, and perceptions of violent behaviour are related to gender” (Yates, 2018, p. 572). We know from Chap. 2 that domestic and family violence shows these distinct patterns of perpetration, particularly when important typological considerations are taken into account. We also know there is compelling evidence of sexed patterns in the outcomes of violence. A gender lens compels an astuteness to how these sexed patterns are driven by gender, rather than an essentialist claim about men and women. Drawing on intimate partner violence as an example, we can see how gender identity, interaction, and structure play an important role in constructing the sexed patterns we see. As shown in Chap. 2, domestic and family violence by men against women partners or former partners is far more likely to involve intimate terrorism, coercive control, and more severe and fatal forms of violence such as intimate partner

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homicide. These sexed patterns have been shaped collectively by how the gender system operates at the three levels of identity, interaction, and structure (Anderson, 2005). As Bettman (2009) argues, “domestic violence is ultimately a discursive phenomenon” with patriarchal discourse “the fount of domestic violence” (p. 15). This is manifested, first, at a personal level—the level of identity. For instance, dominant cultural beliefs about gender have been shown to underlie the personal narratives of coercive controllers (Downes et al., 2019) and cisgender men who have murdered a female intimate partner (Dobash & Dobash, 2011). Specifically, deep “investments in gender norms” underpin the violence (Downes et al., 2019, p. 267). This includes a strong adherence to dominant cultural norms about masculinity in perpetrators’ identities as men, and to cultural beliefs about the role and place of women. Notions of men as being in control, assertive, and heads of households, for instance, come out in their personal narratives of violence as part of how perpetrators experience their identity and the need to maintain its integrity through force. Despite some perpetrators expressing a belief in gender equality, Downes et al. (2019) showed that among coercive controllers, “gender operated through taken-for-granted ways of being associated with traditional masculinity: investments in being a protector, a provider and a father who was the legitimate head of the household or family” (p. 273). Dobash and Dobash similarly found that men who murdered female intimate partners tended to express beliefs about themselves that mirrored dominant cultural gender norms—that “men are in control, have authority, should be obeyed and the like” (Dobash & Dobash, 2011, p. 123). Beliefs about femininity also emerge: women as less assertive, as less selfsufficient and even deficient in certain ways—in need of masculine protection and reform—are expressed in the narratives of abusive men. For one perpetrator of coercive control, “constructing his partner as influenced [by others] to her detriment” was considered as “conferring the authority to determine who she can spend her time with” (Downes et al., 2019, p. 275). Femininity is constructed as irrational, hysterical, in need of reigning in, contrasted with constructions of masculinity as rational and emotionally controlled (Sweet, 2019). Ideas about feminine identity fortify masculine identity; gender identity is relational, and as such masculine identity is constructed and experienced as in opposition to feminine identity, and vice versa. This is particularly pronounced in the context of heterosexual relationships, where those gender identities and how they are constructed in relation to one another are felt as acutely salient. As Sweet (2019) says, “literature on the ‘stalled’ gender revolution […] suggests that intimate relationships are precisely the place to look for the ongoing animation of traditional ideologies that cast women as emotionally untethered” (p. 855). Jealously and possessiveness are common themes in research on intimate partner homicide and coercive control and have been linked to normative constructions of heterosexual romance (Downes et al., 2019). The idea of jealousy as a ‘normal’ part of intimate relationships between men and women serves to naturalise romantic jealousy as a rationale for violence. Women’s identities as bound up in their ability to nurture and successfully manage their relationships can also contribute to

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a sense of responsibility to manage their partner’s jealousy and nurture an insecure partner, adding another gendered layer of entrapment in an abusive relationship (Hill, 2019). Gender norms, therefore, play an important role in shaping men and women’s identities within intimate heterosexual relationships in ways that can justify or obscure the use of control and violence, particularly by men against women. These ‘investments’ in gender norms in the construction of personal identity help to explain why men are more likely than women to commit certain forms of violence in intimate relationships (such as coercive control) as well as why not all men do. Gender norms are, discursively, ubiquitous but various social and personal factors can shape the extent to which these are invested in at the level of identity. This is good news, because while cultural norms can be incredibly difficult to shift, there is scope for resistance and change. As Downes et al. (2019) showed, “unpicking gender norms enabled some men to recognise and reduce their use of coercive control” (p. 267). Domestic violence is also gendered at the meso-level of interaction. This draws on theoretical insights of gender as constituted through performance, in which actions are oriented to a real or assumed audience and whereby ‘performers’ are held accountable for demonstrating gender in culturally ‘appropriate’ ways (Butler, 1990; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Coercive control, for example, involves “the microregulation of everyday behaviours associated with stereotypic female roles, such as how women dress, cook, clean, socialise, care for their children, or perform sexually” (Stark, 2007, p. 5). As Anderson (2009) notes, “in theoretical terms, controllers require victims to perform a particular type of femininity” (p. 1447). This emerged clearly in the case of Hannah Clarke, murdered by her former partner along with their three children Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey. Hannah, her family later told the press, was required by her former partner to have sex with him daily, forbidden from wearing shorts or the colour pink. This microregulation of everyday action in line with gender norms is asymmetrical, done more often by men to women precisely because the control of others forms part of the performance of masculinity rather than femininity (Anderson, 2009). As such, this microregulation of conduct polices appropriate femininity and enacts masculinity in a way that is both performative and relational: “the doing of gender involves rituals that position men as dominant and women as subservient” (Anderson, 2009, p. 1448). As such, Dobash and Dobash’s (1979) theorisation of domestic violence as linked to gendered control and domination is borne out at the interactional level. A key theme in feminist scholarship on male-perpetrated sexual violence is the role of acts of sexual violence in the active production and reproduction of masculinity and gendered power, as shown in Fahlberg and Pepper’s (2016) recent review of scholarship in this area. Gender identities require constant doing through interaction to maintain, but particularly in the face of a perceived threat to normative gender identities. Context matters for interactions (West & Zimmerman, 1987), and a situation in which masculine identity is experienced as simultaneously essential and yet fragile is more likely to produce violence and control as a way to re-assert normative masculinity (Anderson, 2005). This also demonstrates how the levels of the gender system overlap: asserting

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normative masculinity is more likely to occur in a context in which it is both important to gender identity and threatened within an interactive context. So, intimate partner violence is more likely to be committed where there is both a strong cultural requirement for masculine dominance and control, and a perceived contextual threat to it. Anderson and Umberson’s (2001) interviews with domestically violent men reflect this. These men’s violence, they found, represented “an effort to reconstruct a contested and unstable masculinity” (Anderson & Umberson, 2001, p. 375). At least temporarily, this was an “effective means by which batterers reconstruct men as masculine and women as feminine” and reinforced a more traditional binary construction of gender (ibid.). Some violence committed by men against other men also has this interactional dimension, as a “compensatory method of exerting control and constructing masculinity among men who feel that their authority and masculinity have been called into question” (Anderson, 2005, p. 858). Baugher and Gazmararian (2015), for instance, reviewed extant literature on ‘masculine gender role stress’— “the experience of distress in the context of situations that an individual appraises as a threat to his masculine identity” (p. 108). They found that ‘gender role stress’ was linked to higher rates male violence against both women and gay men. Men’s violence against and control of women is also often perceived as, and therefore more likely to be, effectual (Anderson, 2005, 2009). Interactionist theories of gender hold that actions are interpreted by audiences through a cultural lens. For example, studies have shown that violence and control by women is often perceived as irrational and ineffectual, mocked even, whereas violence and control by men is more often perceived and experienced as dangerous and threatening (Miller & White, 2003). While men’s rights activists and scholars such as Dutton have pointed to such cultural stereotypes as part of their critique of the perceived minimisation of women’s violence, the conclusion cannot be that this makes gender less salient to domestic violence. Instead, these gendered interpretations of violent acts can contribute to victims’ experiences of violence, to its effects and how it is responded to. In a context in which men’s violence is understood as threatening, it is more likely to be effective in instilling fear and exacting control. For Anderson (2009), this contributes to explaining why coercive control is seldom exacted by women within a cultural context that renders women “less able to successfully use coercive control tactics than men” (p. 1449). Social context plays an important role in shaping patterns of violence at the broader, macro-level. Theorists such as Connell (1987) and Risman (1998, 2004) have articulated gender as a social structure. Gender organises a range of social institutions, composing a social structure that can enable and/or constrain certain forms of violence and people’s ability to escape it. A structuralist account of gender in intimate partner violence therefore moves beyond the realm of the individual or even of interpersonal relationships, seeing gender as “a pattern of resource-distribution and social organisation rather than as a predictor of individual behaviour” (Anderson, 2005, p. 858). So, “even when men and women do not desire to live gendered lives or to support male dominance, they often find themselves compelled to do so by the logic of gendered choices” (Risman, 1998, p. 29) provided by the social structure.

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An example of how social structure impacts on intimate partner violence includes its role at the broader institutional and cultural level in shaping gender roles within intimate heterosexual relationships—especially marriage (Anderson, 2005). As discussed in the sections above, ideas about heterosexual relationships (love, jealousy, gender roles) can work to support domestic violence. These ideas are not contained within individuals or individual relationships, however, but are articulated and institutionalised at the structural level. Marriage, for instance, is an institutionalised manifestation of cultural ideas of romantic love, monogamy, and the family, in which mothers and fathers are often seen to be playing different roles that are in turn upheld by institutions. Legal, financial, educational, and various other systems are shaped by gendered assumptions about heterosexual relationships, erecting an institutionalised framework for marriage and reinscribing its cultural norms within daily practice. For instance, parental leave policy that positions mothers as ‘primary carers’ and fathers as ‘secondary carers’ (and that resources primary carer leave more generously) reinstates gendered patterns of childcare and workplace participation even in relationships in which individuals wish to counter these orthodoxies (Baird et al., 2021). In terms of intimate partner violence, what this means is that traditional ideas about femininity and masculinity are reinscribed at the level of structure in a way that supports violence. According to Anderson (2005), social structures provide men with more opportunities and schooling around the methods of violence, from more violent schooling cultures and practices to more violent professions and sports. Here we can see that gender identity, for instance idealised masculine identity as characterised by aggression and control, are in fact supported and reified by many institutions and systems. Gendered economic inequalities also have a significant impact on women’s ability to survive outside of a violent relationship and to be controlled by money (financial abuse). Anderson (2007) reminds us that, from a sociological perspective, structural gender inequality is part of what produces different overall outcomes for women who experience intimate partner violence. This is compounded by intersectional forces such as poverty and disability. In a system in which women tend to be socialised to enter lower-paying professions, to take time out of the paid workplace to focus on child rearing, and to be paid less than men overall, economic dependency on an abusive partner is more likely to affect women (Anderson, 2005). As Stark (2007) argues, a cycle is created whereby women are structurally (rather than inherently) more vulnerable to coercive control, and coercive control in turn reinforces these structural inequalities by constraining women from experiencing autonomy and active citizenship. Some scholars have argued that these kinds of structural factors are often neglected in anti-domestic violence policies and programs in Australia, which tend to prioritise gender norms in the aetiology of domestic violence (Kuskoff & Parsell, 2019; Salter, 2016). These are just some examples of the links made through research between gender and intimate partner violence.

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Intersections and Gender-Based Violence There will of course be differences according to context, culture and a myriad of social factors such as social class, race, disability, age, migration, religion, and sexuality; gender-based violence is intersectional (Crenshaw, 1991; Hill Collins, 1993). To call it gender-based should not be taken, therefore, to mean it is only about gender or that gender manifests in the same ways for everyone. While the gender(-based violence) wars have raged largely in relation to contested understandings of the role of men and women, often silent within these debates is an examination of how gender-based violence is positioned at the intersection of a variety of social forces. Yet, as Ridgeway and Correll (2004) note, gender identities in various contexts are structured in significant ways by social categories other than gender. Individuals hold a range of ‘background identities’, the relative salience of which will vary according to the social composition and institutional frame of the context, but all aspects of identity are primed to become an axis of meaning. Intersecting social categories influence the perpetration, experience, and consequences of gender-based violence (Crenshaw, 1991; Phipps, 2009; Richie, 2000; Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005). They position some women (as well as some men and LGBTQI people) as more likely victims of domestic and family violence, and can operate to conceal, justify, and enable perpetrators. Women with a disability, for example, are more likely to be subject to domestic and family violence, and to face barriers in accessing justice and support (Maher et al., 2018). The same is true for trans women (ANROWS, 2020). Further intersections, such as being from a culturally and linguistically diverse background, can deepen this (ibid.). Race and social class significantly impact on which victim-survivors of sexual, domestic, and family violence are rendered ideal victims entitled to the resources and sympathy that accrues to this label and can distort perceptions of the likelihood of being a perpetrator (Nancarrow, 2019; Phipps, 2009; Wheildon et al., 2021). They can even impact prison sentences given to violence offenders (Jeffries & Bond, 2015). Reporting on violence against women and children from Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse communities is more likely to frame it as a ‘cultural’ or ‘religious’ issue than violence in white communities (Maydell, 2018; Patton, 2018). Gender-based violence and its consequences reflect the close interlocking of gender and other social vectors.

Gender-Based Violence and Children Given this book concerns cases of domestic and family violence involving children, it is important to consider more closely the connections between violence against children and gender-based violence. The gendered nature of familicide and filicide are outlined in greater detail in Chaps. 4 and 5. More broadly, here, I wish to make the point that violence against children is often gendered too, and deeply intertwined

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with gender-based violence against women in ways that make dealing with them separately problematic (Boyle, 2019). Violence against women and intimate partner violence—often referred to as domestic violence—have historically been treated separately from issues of violence against children (Morris, 2009; Namy et al., 2017; Powell & Murray, 2008). This is reflected in largely siloed policy, law and service systems dealing with the needs of women and children (Powell & Murray, 2008). However, violence against children and against women very often co-occur (Morris, 2009; Namy et al., 2017; Powell & Murray, 2008). Often framed through a child-protection discourse and centred around children’s ‘exposure’ to domestic and family violence, children’s experiences as victim-survivors have been largely divorced from the more gendered accounts that have characterised analyses of women’s experiences of violence. Child welfare policy and domestic violence policy in Australia have tended to conceptualise violence within the family differently, resulting in “contradictory and inadequate responses” (Powell & Murray, 2008, p. 455). This is not isolated to the issue of domestic and family violence; most child experiences of violence receive scant attention to gender. Child sexual abuse, for example, is not always recognised as linked to gender and masculinity (Boyle, 2018). According to Boyle (2018), the protracted abuse of children by the infamous UK paedophile Jimmy Savile, for instance, was in many ways “hidden in plain sight” precisely because his misogyny and known abuse of women were assumed irrelevant to his dealings with children. Yet, as Boyle (2018) points out, the same constructs of masculinity that propped up Savile’s sexism, harassment of women, and sense of entitlement to women’s bodies also underlaid his actions towards children. However, these connections were largely not conceivable to the public, allowing them to go undetected for so long. Another example of the de-gendering of violence against children can be found in most approaches to addressing bullying in schools. Here, too, a gendered analysis has been largely missing, folding highly gendered forms of violence (such as the sexual harassment of girls and gender non-conforming children) into the issue of ‘bullying’, conceived of in psychological, individualised terms (Mikel Brown et al., 2007). This has implications for understanding the unique textures of sexual and other forms of gender-based bullying and forecloses greater access of victims to the services that are available to victims of sexual violence (ibid.). Many forms of violence against children, in essence, have a gendered element that is often overlooked. Feminist scholarship has at times been implicated in these silences. As Rosen and Twamley (2018) note, “much feminist scholarship operates with a surprisingly unexamined view of children and childhood […]. As a result, childhood theorists have commented that feminism is an ‘adultist’ enterprise, rendering children largely absent from the social world and sociological consideration except as objects of socialisation” (p. 4). However, there is not an inherent or insurmountable antagonism between children’s studies and feminist studies. According to Boyle (2019), “linking the experiences of women and children has been conceptually important for feminist analysis” (p. 25). In the first instance, children are indeed gendered subjects. Regardless of their gender, they are also living in gendered contexts, where

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the “co-existence of the (domestic) abuse of women and children within the same household points to the ‘impossibility of creating mutually exclusive categories’” (Boyle, 2019, p. 25, citing Kelly et al., 1996). In many ways, understanding one requires understanding the other. There are considerable synergies between feminist and childhood scholarship: in both cases, there is a keen interest in recognising social groups, addressing their subordination, and politicising what have historically been viewed as ‘private’ issues and relationships (Rosen & Twamley, 2018). Still, there are tensions between feminist and childhood scholarship and activism, where interests may be conceived of as conflicted—for example, women’s rights to reproductive autonomy being situated as conflicting with the right to life. At the same time, there is a risk in conflating the interests of women and children—the ‘women and children’ paradigm (Enloe, 1991). This is often the case in the area of gender-based violence, where there is frequent reference to ‘violence against women and children’. While women and children can share various interests, to conflate them is to “conceal very real antagonisms and power relations between women and children [and to] negate advances in feminist scholarship which point to the intersectional character of identities and social relations, where gender and generation […] operate simultaneously” (Rosen & Twamley, 2018, p. 3). I will return to this in Chap. 5, when I examine filicide through a gender lens. The key point here is that gender-based violence often includes violence against children—not as socially disconnected objects of ‘collateral damage’ but as human subjects deeply embedded within the gender order. Only in the last two decades have children’s experiences of domestic and family violence really been ‘discovered’ in domestic violence policy in Australia and elsewhere (Powell & Murray, 2008), particularly in respect to the impacts on children of their “witnessing” of domestic violence. While this is a welcome shift in respect to foregrounding the impact on children, this paradigm has largely continued to assume children as passive and indirect victims of domestic and family violence—collateral damage in what is ostensibly gendered violence between adults. As Powell and Murray (2008) note, the ‘children as witnesses’ discourse places children at a distance from violence in the home, minimising their experiences and their more direct involvement as victim-survivors in domestic and family violence. More recently, researchers have tried to bring children’s experiences to the fore (for example, Katz, 2016; Morris, 2009). In doing so, it becomes clearer how domestic and family violence against women and against children are often interconnected, and how gender is salient to both. Children are frequently instrumentalised by abusers in their quest to harm their partner or former partner (Walklate & Petrie, 2013). This does not mean that children are incidental to the violence, however. Instead, it means they are targeted precisely because of what they symbolise within the gendered family institution. This is apparent in filicide in the context of separation and divorce, which is committed mostly by fathers (Caruthers, 2016). The murder of a child in the context of separation is often used to exact revenge on a woman, a symbol of the perpetrator’s power over everything she cherishes most. The pain inflicted is deepened by the cultural sanctity of the bond between mothers and their children and the shattering of her ability to

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enact her role in protecting them. This process, says Caruthers (2016), requires the child to be ‘dehumanised’ in the interests of an attachment to a particular gendered version of love and family. As Caruthers (2016) explains, “the killer experiences the child as an object, rather than a person, which is of significant emotional value to the other parent” (p. 31). The child is harmed not incidentally, but because of what they symbolise to perpetrators within the matrix of gendered family relations. Filicide occurs not just out of mental anguish arising from the material fracturing of the family but in connection to the symbolic and ideological fracturing of the family and the threat this represents for the construction of masculinity (Little, 2015). Because in many cases, physical violence against children is not observed in cases of abuse against mothers, this risk to the child often goes unacknowledged prior to their murder (Walklate & Petrie, 2013). Yet, the same gendered ideologies that drive the abuse and control of women can and often do drive the murder of children. Proprietary and patriarchal attitudes to women often extend to children and ‘the family’, and gendered ideologies of the in-tact nuclear family headed by the father deepen the risk to children in the context of separation or divorce (Walklate & Petrie, 2013). As Namy et al. (2017) observe, the patriarchal family structure normalises particular forms of violence, simultaneously subordinating women and children. They propose two ways violence against women and children in the family are often connected—via the male use of violence as a legitimised form of discipline for perceived subordinates, and by violence being used to express and/or reinforce hegemonic masculinity within the home (Namy et al., 2017). Children are also targeted in particular ways in domestic and family violence against their mothers, to harm their mothers and exact control over the family unit, making them both indirect and direct victims of the abuse. Children of coercive controllers report being isolated by perpetrators from their mothers, their extended families, their friends and community (Katz, 2016). They can also be recruited and coerced by abusers in the commission of abuse against their own mothers (Morris, 2009). Some abusers may tell children that their mothers ordered or sanctioned the perpetrator’s abuse of the child (for example, “she paid me to abuse you”) to break down the trust between mother and child and in so doing isolate and control them further (Morris, 2009). The same pernicious abuse exacted by abusers against children are often exacted against children. Rowan Baxter, killer of Hannah Clarke and their three children, did not just abuse Hannah leading up to their murders; he subjected their children directly to some forms of abuse, including punishing them to punish their mother and subjecting a terrified three-year-old Trey to an ice bath, posting the event to social media as a ‘joke’ (Callinan, 2022). Children in these contexts are not passive as is often assumed; they are most often actively aware of the ways in which they are being used and are engaged in a range of violence-resistant strategies (Callaghan et al., 2018; Morris, 2009). These are just some examples of ways children are not incidental to, but quite directed targeted for, abuse that is at its core highly gendered. In this sense, their abuse is also, at least in part, gender-based. Households are gendered institutions. They “circulate definitions of masculinity and create specific conditions in which gender is enacted and specific patterns of gendered behaviour [are enabled]” (Morris, 2009, p. 420), some of which puts children at risk of violence.

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Patriarchy is about more than just gender. A gendered account of children’s experience of domestic and family violence is not about putting everything down to gender, as is suggested by intractable critics of feminist analyses such as Dutton and colleagues (Dutton & Nicholls, 2005; Dutton et al., 2009). Indeed, Hunnicutt (2009) reminds us that the explanatory power of the concept of patriarchy in recent feminist work lies in its connectedness to other systems of domination. Scholars such as Hooks (1984) and Crenshaw (1991) have long shown how gender is intertwined with other systems of domination such as class and race. This is also important for what Yates (2018) calls the “small g” approach to gender—gender is conceptualised as operating conterminously and interconnectedly with other social systems. In turn, this means that the concepts of gender and patriarchy are capacious enough to account for the role of other vectors of power. So, “because patriarchal systems are bound up with other systems of domination, this concept must be situated within fields of hierarchy where old dominate young, men dominate women, men dominate men, Whites dominate people of colour, developed nations dominate developing nations, and humans dominate nature” (Hunnicutt, 2009, p. 563). Age-related inequalities, such as those between parents and children, are therefore intertwined with gender regimes in the family. Proprietary attitudes towards and power over children occur at the intersection of age and gender norms and inequalities. Children’s vulnerability to domestic and family violence is also compounded by gendered and age-related power relations at the structural level; Yates (2018), for instance, argues that both women and children are frequently victims of family violence not because they are inherently vulnerable but because “we inhabit social and economic systems in which women and children have limited choices and are constrained in their capacity to act” (Yates, 2018, p. 576).

Gendering Varied Forms of Violence In this chapter, I have aimed to show how a sociological feminist lens can help map out the multiple ways gender shapes various forms of violence. Gender identity, interaction, and structure (Anderson, 2005, 2009), and the patriarchal power relations these reflect and engender (Hunnicutt, 2009), are laced through the aetiology of not only domestic and family violence, but a range of other violence. While calling violence ‘gender-based’ can potentially stir the embers of anti-feminist backlash, a clearer articulation of a feminist sociological account can move us beyond the “big G gender” (Yates, 2018) formulations that (in part) undergird such backlashes, and towards a layered understanding of how gender as it intersects with a range of social factors shapes violence. Drawing on feminist-informed continuum thinking (Boyle, 2019), we can traverse binaries and sharp categories to see interconnections even as we acknowledge complexities and differences. This framework, I suggest, is a useful starting point for analysing forms of violence that have to date received relatively scant feminist scholarly attention, such as familicide and filicide.

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Chapter 4

Gendering Familicide

Tackling the Complexity of Familicide As I have shown, despite significant feminist scholarly and activist work to bring a gender lens to bear on domestic and family violence, and the rise of feminist-informed approaches in policy, the role of gender remains contested in broader popular culture and some corners of academia. However, feminist sociological work offers rich tools for understanding the relationship between gender and multiple forms of violence, including but not limited to the ways intimate partner violence and some violence against children are gender-based. In this chapter, I draw on the framework for gender-based violence outlined in the previous chapter to propose familicide as a form of gender-based domestic and family violence. I argue that while familicide is complex and may not always neatly resemble other forms of domestic and family violence, it is highly gendered. Certain forms of familicide look much like other domestic violence and abuse cases, while others are committed by men without a known history of violence or abuse against partners, former partners, or children (Websdale, 2010). A theorisation of familicide as a gendered phenomenon that accounts for these complexities is needed. I argue that, while there are critical qualitative differences between different forms of familicide, gender identity, interaction, and structure are ever-present underlying drivers, interconnected with relations of power and control. I draw on Boyle’s (2019) notion of continuum thinking about gender-based violence to argue that it is important to see these connections, even while acknowledging and distinguishing differences. Accordingly, I argue that even in familicide cases that do not present as typical domestic and family violence cases exist on a continuum of gender-based domestic and family violence. First, I provide an overview of the lens through which familicide has normally been examined in research, observing a scarcity of attention by feminist, gender, and sociology scholars. I then summarise what is known about this phenomenon to date. I show that, although existing research does not adequately attend to gender in sociological terms, it nonetheless suggests considerable gendered patterns and © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_4

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drivers. I then apply the framework for gender-based violence to existing research and discuss its connections to feminist literature on domestic and family violence.

The Research on Familicide: State of the Field Familicide has received relatively little research, especially in terms of studies drawing on original case data (Karlsson et al., 2021). The sparsity of research on familicide is further underscored by the fact that most existing studies that reference it are not focused on familicide specifically, having broader aims such as the investigation of murder-suicide or intimate partner homicide, of which familicide may occupy a small part of the sample or discussion (Karlsson et al., 2021). In a recent systematic review by Karlsson et al. (2021) across a range of databases, only eight research studies were found that directly and exclusively tackled the topic of familicide between 1950 and 2017. The sparsity of work on familicide can be attributed in part to the relative rarity of cases and small sample sizes, presenting methodological challenges (ibid.). In addition, legal protections around case information and, most frequently, a lack of victim-survivors to provide an account of what happened make it difficult to study (Karlsson et al., 2021; Mailloux, 2014). Compounding this, at least half of all familicides are followed by suicide (Karlsson et al., 2021), so that in many cases there are no survivors at all. The extant research on familicide comes predominantly from fields such as forensic science, psychology, psychiatry, and the health sciences. There are exceedingly low numbers of studies from the social sciences and humanities, with those that are mostly coming from criminology (for example, Frei & Illic, 2020; Liem & Koenraadt, 2008) or historical studies (for example, Barnes, 2002; Cohen, 1995). Most studies on familicide adopt psychological or psychiatric explanatory frames (for example, Cullen & Fritzon, 2019; Ewing, 1997; Liem & Koenraadt, 2008; Liem et al., 2013; Palermo, 1994; Schlesinger, 2000). Ewing (1997), for instance, suggests that a deep sense of personal failure, especially as it relates to the role of head of the family, leads familicide offenders to become “desperate, depressed, suicidal and homicidal” (p. 136). Similarly, Malmquist (2006) posits that familicide-suicide is an expression of psychotic depression, where intense anger towards the self, combined with delusional thinking, is deployed through violence against others and the self. For Schlesinger (2000), familicide is not the outcome of depression alone, but of a psychodynamic pattern of thinking. In the “catathymic process”, Schlesinger argues, intense and “emotionally charged conflicts” (Schlesinger, 2000, p. 200) build towards a fixation on the idea of harming the self and/or “someone he professes to love” (Schlesinger, 2002, p. 64). For familicide offenders, this leads the offender to experience increasingly distorted and obsessive thinking, and familicide becomes “a way of liberating unbearable inner psychic tension” (Schlesinger, 2000, p. 202).

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Other scholars provide epidemiological accounts measuring characteristics and risk factors (for example, Johnson & Sachmann, 2014; Karlsson et al., 2021; Sachmann & Harris Johnson, 2014; Wilson et al., 1995) or combine these with psychodynamic approaches. Johnson and Sachmann (2014), for example, theorise familicidesuicide as a “synergistic combination of attachment style, personality dysfunction, and hypothesised psychodynamic factors” (p. 106). Familicide offenders are characterised, they argue, by poor attachment styles reflected in an intolerance to abandonment or rejection and the tendency to think in all or nothing terms (I am all good/all bad; she is all good/all bad). They also commonly display personality dysfunctions such as narcissism (with its attendant need for respect and control) and poor emotional regulation in the face of stresses. These personality dysfunctions and patterns of poor attachment, they suggest, are risk factors for familicide. Almost all studies on familicide focus on the psychology of perpetrators or details of the crimes and avoid social context (Eriksson et al., 2016). Exceedingly little work has been explicitly sociological or feminist. While ‘gender’ is raised in many studies, this is generally used to refer to incidences of male and female perpetrators and victims; gender, therefore, is largely used to refer binary sex categories of male and female rather than gender in sociological terms. As a result, while much extant research raises characteristics of familicide that signal—quite loudly—the role of gender in social terms, these connections are often missed. In Wilson et al.’s (1995) germinal and singularly influential study on familicide, for instance, the predominance of male perpetrators with a ‘proprietary’ attitude towards women and children is highlighted. However, attributed to evolutionary biology and psychology, these patterns are largely naturalised rather than placed in social context. They write that “from an evolutionary psychological perspective it might be anticipated that in the circumstances in which a husband’s sexually proprietary mindset is activated, the children may be at risk [of murder], too” (p. 278). For the feminist sociologist, this appears an alarmingly casual acceptance of a sexually proprietary mindset towards both women and children among men. In another example, Palermo’s (1994) widely utilised work on murder-suicide posited that a sense of failure, depression, and jealousy led to murder-suicide as a form of ‘extended suicide’ where the (almost always man) kills his ‘extended self’—his female intimate partner. While gender within this work is implicit, it is not theorised. The violent dynamic of ‘extended suicide’ is, for instance, presented in mutual, gender-neutral terms, despite the one-directional nature of the violence and Palermo’s own acknowledgement that such crimes are predominantly committed by men against women. The following extract reflects this acutely. The two actors involved in the extended suicide find themselves in an ambivalent love-hate stage of their relationship. Even though they do not lose their individual psychological Self, they form a microsomal social unit and [are] probably unable to escape the pressures that group norms and misperceived societal expectations exert on them (Palermo, 1994, p. 214).

As the above passage shows, the perpetrator and victim are presented as equal agents in the murder-suicide, the locus of agency sidestepped—the “two actors

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involved in the extended suicide”, it is said, “find themselves in” a particular relationship dynamic. Murder is absent. Power is absent. While there is reference to “group norms” and “societal expectations”, how these are gendered, unequal, and connected to one actor’s violence against another is not clear. This passage is an example of the way much work on familicide is absent of robust gender analysis—despite very often acknowledging the pattern of male perpetration against women and children and obliquely referencing social issues. One notable exception to the paucity of gender analysis is the work of sociologist Websdale (2010), whose book on familicide in the United States is rare both in the extent of the data accessed for analysis and the application of a sociological lens to the issue. Drawing on data on 211 familicide perpetrators in the United States, Websdale’s analysis foregrounds the role of gender and broader shifts in the social ‘formation of feeling’ to explain familicide. He also provides a useful distinction between two broad categories of familicide—those primarily motivated by anger and coercion and those primarily motivated by suicide. Websdale’s work is both sociological and attendant to gender: he argues for the need to see familicide in its broader social context (as a feature of modernity) and argues that a sense of failure to meet gendered norms and expectations is a central theme for perpetrators. However, he also expresses deep scepticism at the utility of a feminist lens for understanding familicide. In particular, he critiques feminist analyses as generally too preoccupied with notions of male power and control, and therefore incapable of recognising and accounting for acute feelings of powerlessness that characterise familicide perpetrators. In this chapter, I will draw extensively on his work, as it provides a rich and deep exploration of familicide in gendered and sociological terms. I will, however, argue that a feminist lens is indeed important for contextualising, comprehending, and addressing familicide as patriarchal. Beyond Websdale’s work, little research looks directly at familicide in gendered sociological terms. However, there is a burgeoning body of sociological work on mass killings and murder-suicide that, I believe, offers some valuable sociological insights that can help to understand the patterns in familicide perpetration identified in studies. There has been growing attention in recent years to the fact that, like familicide (Karlsson et al., 2021), mass murders such as school shootings and other mass shootings followed by suicide are committed almost without exception by men, particularly white men with higher levels of education and/or from middleclass families. As such, the role of gender in sociological terms is receiving growing consideration in studies of mass violence in recent years (see, for example, De Silva et al., 2021; Farr, 2018; Kalish & Kimmel, 2010; Klein, 2005; Klein & Chancer, 2000; Madfis, 2014; Marganski, 2019; Myketiak, 2016; Oliffe et al., 2015; Schmuhl & Capellan, 2020; Vito et al., 2018). This broader work on mass murder-suicide is more prone to contextualise perpetrator feelings of loss, rage, and powerlessness within patriarchal power structures and norms. Mass murder (often followed by suicide) reflects significant overlaps with familicide which is, indeed, a form of mass murder. Though familicide as a sub-type of mass murder seldom receives significant direct attention in these studies, they are worth looking at for insights into the role of gender and power in driving familicide.

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Putting all this work into dialogue enables an integrated understanding of familicide as a form of gender-based domestic and family violence deeply connected to (though not solely explained by) gender, power, and control.

Familicide: An Overview Establishing accurate data on familicide is challenging. This is due in part to its relative rarity, making statistical analysis difficult (Karlsson et al., 2021). In addition, research on familicide is plagued by inconsistencies in data-gathering techniques (Whiteley et al., 2016) and definitional inconsistencies (Karlsson et al., 2021). Some studies, for instance, may include various kinds of multiple intrafamilial homicides, such as the killing of siblings and parents (for example, Fegadel & Heide, 2017). The most common definition is the killing of a spouse or intimate partner and one or more children (Wilson et al., 1995). However, when filtering research on familicide as defined in this way, the range of research and statistical data is further reduced. From the limited national data that is available, incidence by country varies between 0.07 and 1.0 cases per million people and between 1 and 2.55 cases annually (Karlsson et al., 2021). This is reasonably consistent with the familicide cases reported in the Australian media over the period of this research, with five cases of familicidesuicide in six years and six known cases of familicide when including those that did not end in suicide. One study by Liem et al. (2013) on familicide in the United States between 2000 and 2009, however, found a staggering 23 cases per year during this period, demonstrating that rates of familicide are variable across time and context, and shaped by factors such as population size and social context. Familicide is committed almost exclusively by men in their 30s and 40s against women intimate partners (Johnson & Sachmann, 2014; Karlsson et al., 2021; Websdale, 2010). In fact, the percentage of familicide offenders who are male exceeds the percentage of males perpetrating almost all other forms of family homicide (such as intimate partner homicide or filicide). It is, therefore, a quite distinctly male crime. That adult victims are mostly women also suggests it is a predominantly heterosexual crime and a form of male violence against women. Further to this, it most often happens within heterosexual marriages and relationships of cohabitation, with most victims and perpetrators being married at the time, followed in prevalence by cases in which victims and perpetrators were not married but cohabiting (Karlsson et al., 2021). Most commonly, perpetrators live with all their victims, both partners and children. However, ‘relationship problems’ are common, many cases involving pending separation (Karlsson et al., 2021). In addition, “financial difficulties” are common, particularly in cases where perpetrators suicide, which constitute about half of familicides (Karlsson et al., 2021).1 Perpetrators who suicide are more likely to be biological fathers facing financial difficulties. These financial difficulties may 1

Rates of suicide among familicide offenders vary considerably, with some studies showing up to 100% ending in suicide (Karlsson et al., 2021).

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not involve unemployment, though existing studies looking at unemployment put it at 31–41% among perpetrators (Karlsson et al., 2021). In the majority of cases, including cases involving suicide, the familicide is premeditated (Karlsson et al., 2021), challenging the notion of the otherwise loving father who suddenly ‘snaps’. Perpetrators of familicide, compared to perpetrators of filicide, tend to have a higher level of education (Karlsson et al., 2021). The above picture suggests something astonishingly prosaic in the familial and relational circumstances of familicide: it predominantly occurs in heterosexual families organised in line with a nuclear family model. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that heterosexual couples tend to have children at higher rates,2 and therefore by the very definition of familicide (murder of partner and children), same-sex couples may be less likely to be involved in familicide. However, even when accounting for this, heterosexual families are more vulnerable, with only one case of same-sex relationship familicide reported in all the studies reviewed by Karlsson et al. (2021). The culturally defined ‘normal’ family is the family most likely to experience familicide. Stepfathers, while representing a minority of cases, are proportionally overrepresented. However, families with stepfathers are also a common occurrence more broadly. Relationship and financial difficulties are significant, but also not uncommon in families. And, while mental illness was common among perpetrators in existing studies (a point discussed in more detail in Chap. 6), it is not clear whether rates of mental illness are higher among familicide offenders than the general population (Karlsson et al., 2021). As is often emphasised in media reporting, the families affected by familicide often appear quite ‘normal’. Domestic and family violence is highly represented in cases of familicide, however. In Karlsson et al.’s (2021) literature review, 39–92% of researched familicide cases involved a history of domestic and family violence. The reason for this wide range of rates lies, in part, in the relatively low numbers of familicide cases overall, making individual studies quite variable. In addition, it is not always clear— and is often inconsistent—how domestic violence is both established and measured. For instance, many studies rely on official records such as apprehended violence orders, convictions, or court and police records. Without survivors, the true rate of domestic and family violence, particularly when it is defined as encompassing non-physical violence as seen in many cases of coercive control (Stark, 2007), is difficult to establish. However, the theme of domestic and family violence is significant. Even Websdale (2010), quite wary of a feminist domestic and family violence lens on familicide, notes that domestic violence is present in a significant number of familicide cases. While the incidence of a history of domestic violence preceding familicide cases is high, it appears lower than cases of domestic femicide alone (killing of a female partner but not children) (NSW Government, 2019). In other words, the killing of a 2

In a 2019 American census, 14.7% same-sex couples had children under 18 in their households compared with 37.8% of opposite-sex couples (Taylor, 2020). In Australia, 12% of same-sex couples had children living with them, compared to the broader population figure of over 50% (Qu et al., 2016).

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female partner appears to be more likely to be preceded by a history of violence and abuse than the killing of the whole family. Because some forms of familicide have especially high rates of domestic and family violence, and other forms have lower rates (Websdale, 2010), the overall average may be lower. Still, while lower than in cases of intimate partner homicide alone, domestic and family violence is still significant in many familicides. This mirrors the patterns we see in other forms of domestic homicide committed by men such as femicide, femicide-suicide, and male perpetrated filicide, which frequently involve a history of male violence (Cullen et al., 2019; NSW Government, 2019; O’Hagan, 2014). Overall, the research suggests there is little that is ostensibly unique or particularly unusual in the characteristics of familicide offenders and their families. This extreme form of violence affects normatively ‘conventional’ families not stereotypically associated with violence in popular culture. There may be relationship or financial issues, but these are common in many families. Familicide often involves a history of domestic and family violence, though this is also appallingly common. That familicide does not always bear unique markers and attributes, therefore, may be one of the reasons it is often regarded as coming ‘out-of-the-blue’ (Buiten & Coe, 2022). As existing research tells us, however, some of the very things that make it seem ‘out-of-the-blue’—notions of the ‘conventional’ or ‘ideal family’, for instance—are core to this act of violence.

Types of Familicide Familicide has some distinct characteristics and typologies, and this section aims to outline these. As I will show, however, it is also helpful to employ Boyle’s (2019) notion of continuum thinking around gender-based violence when considering these different types. Extant research reveals there are different types of familicide: some reflect a very close relationship with broader patterns of domestic and family violence against women, while others do not involve histories of domestic and family violence but, nonetheless, exhibit important overlaps with it. Applying continuum thinking, we are able to trace the connections between familicide and other forms of domestic and family violence, while appreciating its distinct features. We are also able to recognise the connections between different forms of familicide without ignoring their differences. As part of this, we should remember that while typologies are useful, not all cases fit neatly into these typologies and that types of familicide may overlap. Scholars of familicide have employed a range of typologies to understand the phenomenon (for example, Cullen & Fritzon, 2019; Liem & Reichelmann, 2014; Websdale, 2010; Wilson et al., 1995). Most of these typologies are quite similar, however, observing a familiar set of characteristics and distinctions, and classifying them in ways that are inflected by the interpretive lens being applied. One overlapping theme across types of familicide is the notion of a perpetrator—usually, a man—whose domestic life is spinning out of control. However, two broad sub-types

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emerge within this. One involves cases in which familicide is committed by perpetrators as an act of revenge, rage, or hostility. These are usually preceded by a history of domestic and family violence perpetration and/or imminent or recent family separation (Liem & Reichelmann, 2014; Websdale, 2010; Wilson et al., 1995). This type of familicide has much in common with other forms of domestic femicide (Wilson et al., 1995)—it is generally preceded by a pattern of domestic violence and abuse, an escalation of violence preceding the murders, and often triggered by separation. Rowan Baxter’s murder of Hannah, Aaliyah, Laianah, and Trey (referred to in Chap. 1) is to me a clear example of this form of familicide. Baxter had a lengthy history of coercive control; when Hannah Clarke finally managed to leave him, his final act of control was to kill her, his three children, and himself (Siganto, 2021). The other key type of familicide involves cases in which there is usually no (known) prior history of domestic and family violence. The perpetrator is depressed, despondent, or feels a sense of intense failure and hopelessness, and the murders are committed in the wake or anticipation of some personal or familial crisis, loss, or negative life change (Liem & Reichelmann, 2014; Mailloux, 2014; Websdale, 2010; Wilson et al., 1995). Often, this includes financial troubles and/or some other imminent fall from grace. When Alan Hawe killed his wife Clodagh and their sons Liam, Niall, and Ryan in County Cavan (Ireland) in 2016, he was a respected deputy school principal facing an “imminent fall” from his position as a “pillar of the community” and the breakdown of his marriage (Feehan & Anderson, 2017). His suicide note talked of his seeming normality despite a ‘darkness’ within him and of wishing to end his own life but not wanting to leave a “mess” for his family to clean up or their sons as orphans (Alan Hawe Confession …, 2019). Wilson et al. (1995) refer to another example of this form of familicide—an American man who murdered his wife and son before attempting suicide. He later said, in explanation for his actions, “I kept thinking about the bills coming, the house taxes. Piling up, piling up in my mind … I thought everything was going to fall around my head. I know it could be a catastrophe in a short time. My son wouldn’t be able to stand the stigma, my wife wouldn’t have the things she was used to” (MacDonald, 1961, p. 222 cited in Wilson et al., 1995, p. 288). These two broad typologies of familicide have been reflected in various writings on familicide. Wilson et al.’s (1995) formative work on familicide distinguished two key types: accusatory and despondent familicides. Accusatory familicide is committed by a controlling and jealous perpetrator who is angry at his partner for leaving him or for what he perceives as her infidelities. He usually has a history of violence and blames his partner for his misery. He murders her and her children in an act of rage or with the mindset that if he cannot ‘have’ her, no one can (ibid.). Liem and Reichelmann (2014) have identified a similar type of familicide, called spousal revenge. Here, spouses and children are often subject to patterned abuse by the perpetrator, who can commonly include a stepfather. Perpetrators act “out of anger over abandonment. When his spouse threatens to leave and/or threatens to exclude him from contact with the children, the anger, jealousy, and rage against the spouse is extended to the children” (Liem & Riechelmann, 2014, p. 53). In these cases, fewer perpetrators attempt suicide (ibid.). Websdale (2010), in describing the ‘emotional

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styles’ of familicide perpetrators, classified such perpetrators as livid coercive. They often engage in coercive and controlling behaviours prior to the murders, feel intense sexual jealousy towards their partners, and, Websdale (2010) suggests, may kill as a means to “dissipate or dissolve unbearable feelings of humiliated fury”. As Wilson et al. (1995) point out, such cases are very similar to other cases of domestic femicide. Also, while the term had not come into use at that time, these descriptions are hauntingly resonant of what we now understand about coercive control (Stark, 2007) and of the devolution of coercive control into murder (Monckton Smith, 2020). The second broad type identified by Wilson et al. (1995) is despondent familicide. These are committed by “depressed”, “brooding” men faced with what they perceive as a looming personal or familial “disaster” (Wilson et al., 1995). The perpetrator sees familicide followed by suicide as ‘the only way out’ and often regards the murders as an act of ‘protection’ towards the family—protection against financial stress, the suicide of a parent or shame and humiliation (ibid.). For Schlesinger (2000), violence is not only viewed as the ‘only way out’ of the circumstances, but out of the mounting psychic tension arising from an increasing fixation on perceived failures or thwarted needs and desires. In such cases, there is usually not a known history of domestic and family violence, though Wilson et al. (1995) concede that what both types have in common is a “proprietary conception of wife and family” (Wilson et al., 1995, p. 289). Liem and Reichelmann’s (2014) typology uses a similar term, classifying such cases as despondent husband cases. Perpetrators in this category kill their families “out of pseudo-altruistic reasons, frequently instigated by financial troubles and followed by suicide” (p. 53). While the term despondent can be read as passive, however, these are not cases of depressed or mentally ill men simply ‘snapping’; indeed, 92% of despondent husband murders are premeditated (Liem & Reichelmann, 2014). This is also reminiscent of Oliffe et al.’s (2015) sub-set of murder-suicide termed domestic desperation murder-suicides. These cases usually involve a male head of household killing one or more family members and then themselves. They are usually characterised by financial struggles, mental illness, and a sense of hopelessness (Oliffe et al., 2015). At the same time, they are accompanied by a sense of power and authority to ‘solve’ the problem these circumstances present through the act of murder-suicide (Oliffe et al., 2015). Mailloux (2014) terms this anomic familicide, cases without a known history of domestic and family violence and, in many cases, not preceded by separation. However, they are usually preceded by some “drastic and sudden change or loss that negatively and significantly impacts the ability of the family to sustain their current quality of living” (Mailloux, 2014, p. 923). According to Mailloux, panic and desperation set in. Websdale (2010) classifies such perpetrators as civil reputable. They generally appear to epitomise ideal spouses, responsible and respectable citizens who, experiencing “latent discontent” (Websdale, 2010, p. 189) or a “fall from grace” (Websdale, 2010, p. 177), kill to avoid humiliation and to “spare” (Websdale, 2010, p. 107) their family their loss. Of course, not all familicide cases fit these typologies, and they tend to adhere to familicide-suicide more so than familicide-only. The widely known case of Chris Watts in the United States is an example of a familicide perpetrator who does not clearly fit in either category. Watts murdered his pregnant wife, Shannan, and two

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young daughters, Bella and Celeste (“CeCe”) in 2018, reporting them missing and appealing to the press to help find them. After he had confessed to their murders, his account of the lead up to the violence was inconsistent with letters he later wrote from prison, one of which suggested the act was spur of the moment following an argument with Shannan, the other suggesting it was planned. While motive was difficult to establish from Watts himself, there was no clear evidence of a protracted history of domestic abuse, nor of a distraught man whose life was unravelling, though financial problems and debt were indicated (Colorado: bodies …, 2018). The most likely motivation appeared to be that he wished to pursue a new life free from his family, including with a new woman he had met (Chris Watts wrote …, 2021). Watts did not attempt suicide, suggesting the aim was less to annihilate the family unit than to escape it. Still, a deep sense of gendered entitlement undergirds the case. While variation across a complex phenomenon such as familicide is inevitable, and while various terms and typologies have been developed, the extant research crystallises around a core set of distinctions between two broad types of familicide— one more overtly connected to gender-based domestic and family violence through a history of abuse and one in which a lack of a known prior history of abuse and personal struggles might lead one to regard it as an expression of mental illness or distress. As I will show in the following sections, however, continuum thinking (Boyle, 2019) enables us to recognise both types of familicide as gender-based violence. In this book, I choose to use Websdale’s proposed terms for types of familicide perpetrators: ‘livid coercive’ and ‘civil reputable’.

Continuum Thinking in Relation to Familicide When considering whether and how familicide is gendered, a clear understanding of what we refer to as gender is needed. As I have shown in previous chapters, anti-feminist and gender symmetry arguments around domestic and family violence are often based on purported evidence that women are equally violent to men and premised on a relatively simplistic and fixed notion of ‘gender’. Accordingly, whether sex categories (men or women) commit acts of violence is given primacy over the meanings and contexts of gender and gender relations in the perpetration and experience of violence (Kimmel, 2002). Violence is only considered gendered when men and women behave in different ways, or only “where sex emerges as a statistically significant and independent variable” (Anderson, 2007, p. 174). However, while such statistical patterns do usefully flag when gender may be a considerable variable, they cannot establish the gendered nature of violence in themselves. For instance, as will be shown in the following chapter, while men and women commit child murder (filicide) in roughly equal numbers, a closer look tells us not only that they do so under differing circumstances, but that the drivers are inflected by gender norms and structures (among other things). In this way, it is not helpful to think of gender-based violence simply as violence by men against women (though much/most of it is). We need a flexible but theoretically informed framework to understand it.

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The notion of continuum thinking offered by Boyle (2019) can assist with this. Boyle draws on the influential feminist concept of the “continuum of violence” coined by Kelly and Radford (Kelly, 1988; Kelly & Radford, 1990) to capture the ways women’s experiences of violence occur on a spectrum—from seemingly minor and often trivialised acts such as wolf-whistling, to those that are regarded more seriously such as rape. Kelly and Radford’s point was that while such acts are not equivalent, they are connected in both their quality and causes. Kelly and Radford’s insights, which emerged through empirical research into women’s experiences of violence, extended on the work of feminist scholars such as MacKinnon (1979) and Rich (1980) who argued for the recognition of connections between seemingly ordinary, everyday, and sanctioned acts by men and those cast as violent and abhorrent. Similarly, says Boyle (2019), we need to expand our understanding of gender-based violence by seeing the gendered connections between different forms of violence, even those that may appear quite distinct. Gender undergirds a variety of forms of violence. Here, in presenting both forms of familicide as gender-based, I am not seeking to equate all cases with each other, nor familicide with other forms of domestic and family violence; rather, I am taking seriously some of the common ways gender has influenced its perpetration even as I recognise that the motives and contexts of familicide may vary. Rage- or revengedriven familicide committed by a serial abuser may not be equivalent to familicide committed by a (to-date) non-violent father, but there are important overlaps. In the next section, I will give some illustrations of how gender systems shape the occurrence of familicide at three interacting levels: identity, interaction, and structure (Risman, 2004; Risman & Davis, 2013).

Gendering Familicide: Identity, Interaction, and Structure Familicide is an extreme manifestation of many of the ‘ordinary’ features of hegemonic masculinity (Oliffe et al., 2015) and the patriarchal family unit (Kaladelfos, 2013). Looking closely at what we know about familicide, the source of perpetrators’ simmering distress and their violent responses to it can be traced in part to a perceived betrayal of gendered and familial identity. Themes of failed masculinity emerge in examinations of both historical (Cohen, 1995; Kaladelfos, 2013) and contemporary (Websdale, 2010) familicide perpetrators, who often view familicide as an expression of familial love and of their roles as husbands and fathers. While ‘civil reputable’ and ‘livid coercive’ offenders (Websdale, 2010) may appear quite disparate, they are “not mutually exclusive”; “each evinces a different aspect of the kind of masculinity that is aptly called toxic” (Manne, 2017). In other words, while extreme, they stem in part from quite conventional gender norms, reminding us of the connection between the everyday and the abhorrent (Kelly, 1988). At the level of individual identity (Risman, 2004; Risman & Davis, 2013), familicide offenders tend to have in common an attachment to gendered notions of the male head of household, especially of men as breadwinners and decision-makers, a feature

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often reflected in perpetrators’ lived roles within the family. Particularly in the case of civil reputable familicides, they “typically involve heads of households who perceive that they no longer care for their families” (Wood Harper & Voigt, 2007, p. 305). An intense situatedness within the identity as head of house and provider contributes to their concluding that their families will not be able to cope without them (for example, De Koning & Piette, 2014; Frei & Illic, 2020). Murder preceding suicide is considered an act of protection—a final act as head of household. The traditional gendered role of male head of household in these cases is particularly wound up in a breadwinner identity (Liem & Koenraadt, 2008; Mailloux, 2014; Oliffe et al., 2015). As such, perpetrators are most commonly male heads of households experiencing financial problems (Oliffe et al., 2015), which are more frequently connected to familicide-suicides than filicide or intimate partner homicide (Liem et al., 2013). According to Oliffe et al. (2015), most “striking” it is the way “financial adversity fuelled feelings of hopelessness to the extent that [familicide-suicide] emerged as an option” (p. 480). A strong identification with “working man identities and concerns about failing to provide for family through paid work” (ibid.) are regular themes in stories of familicide-suicides. Men are often socialised to see themselves as breadwinners, and gender norms often place tremendous pressure on men in traditional heterosexual nuclear families to, by default, act as financial providers. As such, the conditions are set up for “stress–strain elements” (Wood Harper & Voigt, 2007), where personal ‘failures’ are untenable with social expectations. Connected to this, there is commonly a need for—a sense of entitlement to—the gendered markers of social status, success, and control. This is an important feature of the gendered identity of perpetrators. Familicides as acts of revenge by formerly violent men are often “attempts by failed or failing patriarchs to reassert their lost authority” (p. 748) in the face of humiliated fury (Websdale, 2010). Even familicides by seemingly otherwise non-violent men that appear to be ‘out-of-the-blue’, however, are often perpetrated by men with high standing in the community and in traditional masculine roles—military men, farming men, and men with leadership positions in the community (for example, Anderson et al., 2011). Investment in masculine status (Wood Harper & Voigt, 2007) makes failure or perceived failure incredibly deep-felt and untenable. As Websdale (2010) argues, familicide perpetrators feel a tremendous sense of failure in their gendered roles and accordingly strong feelings of shame and humiliation. Both ‘livid coercive’ and ‘civil reputable’ hearts, he argues, experience “shame and humiliation consistently [derived] from a failure to meet the restrictive and punishing standards of the gender regime and the socially and historically situated imperatives of masculinity and femininity”3 (Websdale, 2010, p. 32). Gender identities, in short, are closely tied to experiences of shame and humiliation—whether despondent or enraged—and undergird these acts of violence. They are, also, contextualised within patriarchal power relations (Hunnicutt, 2009), where shame and humiliation are intensified by gendered (and often racialised and classed) privilege (Kalish & Kimmel, 2010). Jill and Kirstie Foster, for example, were 3

Here, Websdale is referring to the minority of women who have perpetrated familicide, who he argues also experienced gendered shame at not fulfilling feminine roles and ideals.

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murdered by Christopher Foster in Shropshire, England, in 2008 when his financial circumstances collapsed. Foster was a wealthy businessman living a lavish lifestyle. Facing financial ruin, he killed his teenage daughter Kirstie, wife Jill, and himself, burning the home they lived in to the ground (Carter, 2009). Vectors of privilege can intersect in ways that strengthen humiliation at perceived failures that are deemed unthinkable, even impossible to survive. Add to this, there is commonly an over-dependence on the idealised family unit and their own roles within this for their very sense of self. As such, facing loss or separation, deep depression or rage results from a sense of fragmentation, nonexistence even (Sachmann & Harris Johnson, 2014). This over-investment in an idealised family unit—to the point where many perpetrators cannot fathom living (or their families living) outside of it—is social and historical (Kay, 2020). Cohen (1995) observes this in relation to the emergence of familicide in the early American republic which saw a heightened “intensity of the new affective ties between men and their [families]” that “may have helped transform simple [sic] suicides into mass murders” (p. 748). Websdale (2010) has also situated familicides within modern ‘formations of feeling’, in which repression of emotion and simultaneous intensity of investment in the family can be seen. Psychodynamic explanations of familicide offenders as having an over-invested sense of self in their partners and family, making separation unbearable (Johnson & Sachmann, 2014), need to be situated not only in personal biographies but within the histories that frame those biographies (Mills, 1959). These deep dependencies on the nuclear family for a sense of identity make both familicide in the face of separation and in the face of suicide more likely. The perpetrator sees himself and the family as one, his existence without them and theirs within him as impossible (Johnson & Sachmann, 2014). Often in the wake of a childhood that did not deliver this ideal, some perpetrators seek to invest heavily in a socially “idealized version of family they never experienced” (Manne, 2017, np); when it is threatened, perpetrators therefore “lack a sense not only of self-esteem but selfhood simpliciter” (Manne, 2017, np). Within a heteropatriarchal nuclear family, these intense bonds may be seen as everything, at the expense of all other attachments and solidarities (Kay, 2020). As such, the possibility of imagining individual family members surviving outside of it is culturally unintelligible, heightening the risk of ‘altruistic’ murder-suicide as well as the more vengeful/possessive forms (Sachmann & Harris Johnson, 2014). “The perpetrator views the family as a singular unit and does not differentiate between individuals” (Mailloux, 2014, p. 924). In short, gendered constructs of the heterosexual family unit and men’s identity as intertwined with this are at play. These gendered familial contours of identity mean that, when it is threatened, a profound sense of failure, desperation, and loss of control is often experienced. While writers on familicide may in some respects vary widely in their approach, a common point of agreement is that perpetrators see the annihilation of the whole family as the only solution to the shame, loss, humiliation, or loss of control brought about by some form of spiralling decline, usually in arenas associated with masculinity such as finances, social status, or family leadership—in one case, a failed DIY project

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(Schlesinger, 2000). The control they seek becomes increasingly tenuous (Mailloux, 2014; Manne, 2017) amidst a diminution in actual or perceived ability to maintain dominion over the family. This is the case whether motivated by revenge, or by suicide, deciding “not to leave this world without [their] next of kin” (Frei & Illic, 2020, p. 32). At the level of interaction (Anderson, 2005; Risman & Davis, 2013), gender as a social relationship shapes how people relate with each other, how they ‘do’ their gender in various contexts, and how they respond to tensions between gender identities and social circumstances. In all these respects, existing literature on familicide suggests gender operates keenly at the interaction level, and how this level also relates to the level of identity. As Jaffe and Juodis (2006) put it, men who kill their families and then themselves “view themselves as the core of their families, which they believe to be extensions of themselves” (p. 15). They deem themselves essential to meeting the needs of their victims. As one familicide offender reported, having survived his attempt at suicide, “I couldn’t figure any [other] way to keep my family from being hurt by my failure” (Schlesinger, 2000, p. 201). It is in the context of this identity that when the perceived necessity to protect the family is threatened, they act to reassert their role as head of the family; “the perpetrator resorts to homicide in an effort to sustain control and prevent the breakup of the family” (Jaffe & Juodis, 2006, p. 15). Despite perpetrators often communicating feelings of being out of control (Websdale, 2010), familicide is by its very nature an expression of control. Even in cases rooted in the desire for suicide, assuming the role of decider for the family is arguably a final act as head of the household. In this way, familicide involves doing gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987) and doing control. This is especially in the face of threats to gender identity; masculinity is often constructed as tenuous, unstable, in need of demonstration (Anderson, 2005, 2009). Thus, an external threat or perceived threat to its realisation may be responded to by doing hegemonic masculinity (Oliffe et al., 2015). Familicide is arguably an extremely distilled version of this practice. As perpetrators lose their grip of control amidst social, economic, and/or familial decline (Manne, 2017), family annihilation represents a way to ‘do’ their role as head of family. This is the case for the overt doing of control as revenge on a partner or former partner who seeks to escape such control (livid coercive). But civil reputable perpetrators, too, ‘do’ the role of head of household in assuming they must complete this final act of ‘protection’ of the family unit (Wood Harper & Voigt, 2007). As Robert Milne-Castilo said in his diary, discovered after he murdered his family in 2015: It’s not worth it […] We [my partner and I] have both given it our best shot over a long period of time. There is too much conspiring against us […] It is going to be too much […] it is going to be hard to see this fail […] From this point on, I need to be totally focused, forget everything else, need to source comfort from the fact […] Start cleaning stuff up (np).

Inherent in this doing of gender, however painful the emotions may be that drive it, is also a sense of entitlement to do it in this way. We may ask why some men (but very seldom women) respond to the disconnect between gendered expectations and

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lived circumstances in this way. Why, while men and women kill their children in roughly equal numbers, is it almost exclusively men who commit familicide and who commit intimate partner homicide at much higher rates? Part of the answer to this is the role played by gender (as it intersects with age) in creating proprietary attitudes (Kaladelfos, 2013; Oliffe et al., 2015; Walklate & Petrie, 2013; Wood Harper & Voigt, 2007) towards both women and children4 and the sense of entitlement to the control over them the act engenders. Kalish and Kimmel (2010), for instance, argue that mass murder-suicide is committed mostly by white, male, middle-class men precisely because they are more likely than other groups to feel entitled to respect, status, and control. They suggest that the disconnection between what perpetrators expect and what they experience leads to a form of aggrieved entitlement. Manne (2017), too, argues that familicide offenders exist on the extreme end of a continuum of ‘toxic masculinity’ seen in the United States today, representing a distilled version of ‘entitled shame’. This involves shame at failing to enact a socialised sense of identity, as Websdale (2010) points out, but also reflective of a socially produced sense of (gendered, class, racialised) entitlement that makes translating this shame into family annihilation seem reasonable to the perpetrator. A variety of scholars on murder-suicide argue that control and dominance, hallmarks of hegemonic masculinity, are reclaimed through acts of extreme violence and suicide (Kalish & Kimmel, 2010; Manne, 2017; Oliffe et al., 2015; Wood Harper & Voigt, 2007). Violence is more culturally available as a solution to reclaim masculinity within contexts adept at schooling boys and men in the arts of violence (Anderson, 2005). Scholars examining mass shootings have therefore made similar points—that killers are reaffirming or ‘doing’ gender (and race and class) in a way that reflects their aggrieved entitlement (for example, De Silva et al., 2021; Madfis, 2014; Myketiak, 2016; Vito et al., 2018) and resorts to patriarchal tools (such as violence) to do so. The final level—the level of gendered structures and institutions—works in many ways to reify and reinforce what has already been discussed. At this level, we consider the way gender is written into broader ideologies that shape identity and interaction and into institutions and institutional practices (Anderson, 2005; Risman & Davis, 2013). For instance, seemingly dated notions of male breadwinners are reinforced through the gender pay gap (Buhler & Abdel-Raouf, 2020) and the haunting of traditional gender ideologies, reproducing gender normative household arrangements and placing further pressures on men as having to be main breadwinners (Baird et al., 2021). In a context in which we have families who are, in a very material sense, dependent on a male head of house, the warped notion of protecting the family from destitution—and of having the obligation to protect through violence—is more likely to seem reasonable to would-be perpetrators. In this way, structures can serve to reinforce identities (Anderson, 2005). As already discussed, the heteropatriarchal nuclear family is also still reified both ideologically and institutionally (Kay, 2020),

4

For women, proprietary attitudes are largely limited to children, as reflected in filicide cases and as discussed in the next chapter.

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making its disruption feel scalding and, at the extreme end of the continuum, seemingly impossible to survive. At the institutional and ideological level, we know that boys and men continue to experience greater ‘schooling’ in violence, reinforcing violence as part of masculine identity and interaction (Anderson, 2005). Familicide is not solely the product of gendered identities, interactions, and structures. However, gender is there at all three levels. It layers a set of conditions that help to explain its perpetration primarily by men—and in quite patterned circumstances such as in the context of separation, abuse, or financial difficulties. It is both like other forms of domestic homicide, and unique in its own ways. It is only committed by a small handful of men, but its features and drivers bear striking resemblance to the causes of other, more common acts of male violence such as domestic homicide—as well as to everyday expressions of masculinity. In this way, familicide is on a continuum of gender-based domestic and family violence (Boyle, 2019). “Patriarchal taxes”, say Oliffe et al. (2015), “accompany many men’s quests for embodying hegemonic masculinity. In the context of [murder-suicide], it is clear that there are a multitude of ‘taxpayers’ including those who die as well as the survivors” (p. 483). We need to acknowledge the ways familicide is born, in part, of gender identities, interactions, and structures in a way that renders it such a peculiarly masculine crime. Doing this enables us to see clearly how patriarchy drives it, even in the context of perpetrators’ tremendous emotional conflict and distress (Websdale, 2010). I therefore concede what Websdale observes—those feelings of powerlessness and lack of control are common markers of familicide. However, as I have aimed to show in this chapter, these feelings are located within the social expectation and norms that men should be—and are entitled to—power and control over women, children, and the ‘family unit’. Patriarchy laces together male power and privilege with the proliferation of harms to men and experiences of tremendous powerlessness (Hunnicutt, 2009). This is particularly so when men who anticipate financial, community, and familial ‘success’ and ‘respect’ find they are unable to access it or are on the verge of being divested of it. For this reason, Hunnicutt (2009) argues we can and should understand men’s suffering and sense of powerlessness in the context of the social fact of patriarchy. As she observes, “There are labyrinths of power dynamics in patriarchal systems. Violence against women cannot be understood as a simple formula of ‘oppressor and oppressed’. Patriarchal systems must be envisioned as ‘terrains of power’” (p. 555). As such, she says, understanding gendered violence committed by men “means exploring men’s power as well as powerlessness” (Hunnicutt, 2009, p. 569) in a way that centres patriarchy as a robust conceptual tool with which to understand each. In Chap. 6, I explore mental illness and familicide, suggesting we draw on the sociology of mental health to consider the possible mental illness/distress of perpetrators in the context of gender and patriarchy. This, I suggest, enables us to account for both perpetrators’ wielding of absolute power and their experiences of powerlessness, for both patriarchal violence (with the harms it wreaks on women and children) and perpetrator distress. Before this, however, I reflect on the difficult issue of filicide. Familicide—the killing of both partner and children—is a crime committed almost exclusively by

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men. Yet, this is not the same for filicide alone—the killing of a child by a parent. In relation to this crime, relative parity in perpetration among men and women is observed (Brown et al., 2018; Dawson, 2015; Dixon et al., 2014; O’Hagan, 2014). Given the gendered analysis I have provided in this chapter, some may ask if and how a gender lens can explain this relative parity among the sexes, especially since filicide is a crime that forms part of familicide. If familicide is a gendered, patriarchal crime, how do we make sense of the high numbers of women committing such a similar crime?

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Chapter 5

Notes on Gendering Filicide

What About Mothers Who Kill? I have so far showed that familicide, while complex, is highly gendered. However, I am frequently asked about filicide—the killing of a child but not a partner or former partner—which unlike familicide is committed about as often by women and by men (Brown et al., 2018; Dawson, 2015; Dixon et al., 2014; O’Hagan, 2014). In this chapter, I reflect on what we know about filicide and gender, showing that gender is salient to understanding this form of family violence even if sexed rates of perpetration do not as clearly signal this. Familicide-suicide is the focus of this book. However, I think it is important to outline some key points on the gendering of filicide, which is often raised as an example of family violence that is committed by as many women as men and, accordingly, cited as a reason to dismiss feminist theorisations of family violence. As such, I call this chapter Notes on gendering filicide, because while I aim to provide an overview of gender and filicide, these reflections are the beginning point of what I hope will be a larger body of work in years to come. On average, one child is murdered by their parent every fortnight in Australia, making up an astonishing 10 per cent of all national homicides (Brown et al., 2019). As a public issue, little is known about it, but filicide is gaining increased recognition in research (Brown et al., 2020) as well as policy, media, and public debates (see, for example, Brown, 2019; Buiten & Coe, 2022; Gleeson, 2021). Following the release of the largest national study on filicide in Australia in 2019, drawing from data on child murders by parents between 2000 and 2012, numerous media outlets reported on the findings (Brown et al., 2019, 2020). In the wake of a series of highly publicised child murders by parents between 2018 and 2020, commentators also increasingly weighed in on the issue, drawing particular attention to filicide committed by mothers and suggesting that such cases are not often talked about when discussing domestic and family violence. In an article for The Big Smoke, for instance, family counsellor and educator Jasmin Newman (2020) made direct comparisons between the Baxter familicide and maternal filicide cases in the © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_5

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news: “It reminds me of a similar incident in 2019 when Charmaine McLeod drove her four children (Aaleyn, 6, Matilda, 5, Wyatt, 4, and Zaidok, 2) to their death north of Hervey Bay in Queensland”, she said. Newman went on to suggest that, perhaps more salient than gender, issues of family breakdown and separation are at the heart of these cases. Drawing on the national Monash-Deakin study, she pointed to the “uncomfortable truth about filicide”, that it is also committed by mothers (Newman, 2020). If filicide is committed by mothers too, it was suggested, then is it really about gender? Newman stated that a child is actually “statistically safest” from filicide in the custody of their biological father (ibid). By this, she was referencing the fact that the Monash-Deakin study found that biological mothers in custody of their children were responsible for 46% of the child murders in the study, whereas biological fathers in custody of their children committed 29% of the total child murders. However, the study also showed that 14% of victims were killed by a stepparent, all male, and 10% of victims were killed by a non-custodial biological parent—in 27 of 28 cases being a biological father living elsewhere. In other words, by presenting children in the custody of their biological mothers as the highest risk group, she was excluding, first, cases in which a biological father killed children no longer in his custody and, second, the disproportionate risk posed by stepfathers. This is further complicated when one considers that women may, on the whole, more often have custody of their biological children. The data can be further complicated when considering the number of victims versus the number of overall cases. For instance, 52% of perpetrators in the study were male, though mothers killed more children overall. This is compellingly illustrative of the ‘data wars’ that form part of what I have called the gender(-based violence) wars—the multifarious wielding of data to establish and contest the relationship between gender and violence. The gender (-based violence) data wars emerge to shape, reshape, and contest discourses around filicide. In the example given, a single study can be used and interpreted in a variety of ways to gender or de-gender the issue of filicide. In addition, the quantitative data at the heart of these debates may not actually tell us about gender in sociological terms. Newman herself somewhat sardonically remarked that if filicide were a gendered issue, we would not see the roughly equal numbers we do of male and female perpetrators. Yet, as I have argued in Chap. 3, while sexed patterns of perpetration are important signifiers of underlying gender dynamics, they cannot explain why these patterns exist. Similarly, sex parity in the perpetration of a crime may not confirm gender parity in the causes, contexts, meanings, and consequences of that violence. To understand these issues, we need to look at gender in sociological terms, or as Yates (2018) calls it, “small g gender”. In the tradition of historical ‘gender symmetry’ debates, filicidal mothers are often cited as evidence that women are equally as violent as men and that family violence is therefore not gendered. We can see this in Newman’s position, where separation processes and the family courts are identified as the main cause of filicide, and the presence of high levels of women’s violence is used to discredit a gender lens. Beyond Newman’s piece, we know there has been a strong tendency for researchers historically to focus on women who kill their children, even in the face of equal or

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sometimes greater numbers of men doing so (Brown et al., 2018; O’Hagan, 2014). Forms of violence that ostensibly challenge gendered interpretations are often subject to particular scrutiny, therefore. Filicide is certainly an outlier, as one of the few forms of violence committed by men and women in roughly equal numbers (Brown et al., 2018; Dawson, 2015; Dixon et al., 2014; O’Hagan, 2014) and perhaps the most common form of murder committed by women (Porter & Gavin, 2010). This does not make it genderless, however. The available research on filicide shows some distinct patterns in types and motives for child murders by parents. It is important to say at the outset that looking at differences in women’s and men’s motives for filicide is not intended to ‘explain away’ child murder, to minimise its horror, or to obscure any perpetrators’ agency and accountability. Indeed, I will discuss later how children’s experiences are often silenced or minimised within the research on child murders. Ultimately, each child was killed by someone they likely loved and trusted (or should have been able to). A gendered analysis does not take this away; rather, the aim in gendering filicide is to examine some factors that can help to understand (and therefore hopefully address) child murders by their parents. This is done in recognition that filicide is a particularly complex form of violence with much heterogeneity and multiple potential drivers. As such, as with familicide, gendering filicide is not about suggesting that gender is the only or always even main underlying factor—mental illness or distress, for instance, may play an important role. But, as I discuss in the following chapter, psychological and sociological forces are not discreet; they are deeply imbricated. The aim of this chapter is to specifically explore the role that gender plays in filicide by both women and men. To do this, I draw on existing research to outline some sexed patterns in the contexts and causes of the perpetration of filicide and how these may signal gendered drivers in sociological terms.

Filicide Research: State of the Field Research on filicide is sparser than that on other forms of violence located within the family, such as intimate partner violence, and comparatively little is understood about it (Little, 2021). Indeed, there is a lot of ambiguity around the causes and patterns of filicide due to a range of methodological challenges and divergent approaches (O’Hagan, 2014), making it a very complex area in which to review the literature or even to identify consistent patterns. Even less in the literature is focused on gender in sociological or “little g” terms (Yates, 2018). When gender is examined, it is most often used to reference sex: whether perpetrators (and/or victims) are male or female. Thus, while numerous studies outline highly sexed patterns in types of and motivations for filicide among men and women, why and how gender in social terms produces these patterns is seldom analysed in-depth. This has led some filicide researchers to conclude that gender is an important but little understood factor in filicide (Eriksson et al., 2016; Kirkwood, 2012; Little, 2021; Saavedra & Cameira, 2018).

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This trend can be contextualised within broader patterns of filicide research: it is most often conducted through a particular type of criminological lens that focuses on incidence and characteristics to identify patterns of risk (for example, Debowska et al., 2015; Wilson et al., 1995) or through a psychiatric lens aimed at understanding what motivates individual parents to commit filicide (for example, Barone & Carone, 2020; Resnick, 1969). As a result, the focus has for the most part been on the demographic and personal historical characteristics of offenders and victims—factors that on their own cannot fully establish the meanings of violence. Relying on psychological explanations based on self-stated motivations of perpetrators can also be unreliable and subject to incomplete or altogether missing information as to motive (Little, 2021). Very little work has attempted to examine broader social contexts and meanings of this form of violence (Saavedra & Cameira, 2018), including among feminist scholars. This reflects a wider reluctance by many feminist scholars to examine women’s violence which is more prevalent in the case of filicide (Alder & Baker, 1997). Particularly in Australia, however, there has been an emerging shift towards more sociologically informed analyses. Australian filicide research has a shorter history than that undertaken in the UK, Canada, USA, or Europe but, according to Brown et al. (2018), this has had its advantages; it has enabled Australian scholars to avoid “the overseas concentration on perpetrator motives as explanations” (p. 146–147). While they note that in Australia such research is still very popular, they argue that more Australian scholars have begun to point out the limitations for policy and prevention of focusing on psychological motivations (ibid). As a result, Australian filicide research has more frequently examined the wider context of the killings, particularly divorce, separation, and domestic and family violence which are frequently connected to cases of filicide (for example, Brown et al., 2014; Butler & Buxton, 2013; Johnson, 2005; Kirkwood, 2012). A major feature of Australian research, this has also seen a new strand emerging internationally (O’Hagan, 2014), where filicide in such circumstances is examined as an extension gender-based violence against women (for example, Saunders, 2004). The work mentioned above represents a welcome shift towards better contextualising filicide. However, work examining gender in-depth has been limited or, where it arises, has focused on certain forms of filicide. Feminist-informed work, for instance, has tended to either examine paternal filicide in the context of divorce, separation, and domestic violence (for example, Johnson, 2005; Saunders, 2004) or to challenge the pathologisation of women’s bodies and ‘hormones’ in responses to maternal neonaticide (for example, Connell, 2002; Stangle, 2008; West & Lichtenstein, 2006). There is little feminist theorising as to the causes of maternal filicide or around cases of filicide unconnected to separation or domestic violence—the gender lens remains largely trained at male violence and challenging sexist stereotypes in scholarship on women’s violence rather than theorising women’s filicidal violence per say.

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Gendered Drivers of Filicide While gender in social terms is under-researched and undertheorised in relation to filicide, some sexed patterns emerge from the extant research that suggest gender may be an important factor. Before I examine this, it is important to note some of the main typological distinctions that have characterised the field. First, while the term filicide acts as an umbrella term, there are some notable differences, overlaps, and discrepancies in definitions that can often lead to confusing or divergent research findings. Some studies may include any offspring killed by parents, including those 18 years or older, while others only look at child victims under 18 years. In some studies, neonaticide (the killing of a newborn within the first twenty-four hours of its life) is included under filicide, while in others it is treated as a distinct research category. Infanticide, which refers to cases in which an infant was killed in the first year of their life, is more likely to be included in studies on filicide, though not always. There is also a fair bit of inconsistency around whether stepparents and other guardians as perpetrators are included. This has important implications for research findings and patterns. For example, studies in which stepparents are included tend to find higher rates of filicide committed by men than studies that include biological parents only. Further, rates of maternal filicide are higher in studies that do include neonaticide, since women are disproportionately represented within this sub-type (Debowska et al., 2015). Second, it is also worthwhile noting that filicide has for some time been categorised into types by motive. One of the key areas of research has been around developing and refining typologies of filicide and examining perpetrator characteristics within each typology. Here, Resnick’s (1969) work has been most influential and continues to be used and adapted by numerous scholars. Resnick’s landmark study resulted in the proposal of five typologies of filicide: ‘unwanted child’, ‘fatal maltreatment’, ‘spousal revenge’, ‘altruistic’, and ‘acute psychotic’. In ‘unwanted child’ (Resnick, 1969) filicides, killers wish to conceal the birth of a baby or to remove the child or baby perceived as an obstacle or risk to the parent. It most often includes neonaticide and to a lesser extent infanticide. It is uncommon among older children, except in cases involving stepparents. ‘Fatal maltreatment’ (Resnick, 1969) refers to the death of a child resulting not from an intent to kill but from extreme neglect or physical abuse. ‘Spousal revenge’ (Resnick, 1969) filicide occurs most often in the context of divorce, separation, and/or custody disputes, where the killer targets the child as a way of hurting a partner or former partner. The child, in these cases, is very much viewed by the killer as an object to be instrumentalised in abuse against a partner or former partner. ‘Altruistic filicide’ (Resnick, 1969) refers to cases in which a parent believes killing the child will spare them pain or suffering. In Resnick’s formulation, this is commonly the case in parents who wish to commit suicide and kill their children out of a distorted belief that the child would suffer more if left behind to live, with some studies classifying this as a separate type of filicide, ‘extended suicide’ (for example, Putkonen et al., 2011). There are also cases in which children with illnesses or disabilities are killed because the parent(s) consider the child’s

90 Table 5.1 Filicide types by more common perpetrator

5 Notes on Gendering Filicide Type (Resnick, 1969) Most commonly committed by ‘Unwanted child’

Mothers more commonly for newborns and infants Stepfathers more commonly for older children

‘Fatal maltreatment’

Fathers most commonly, due to abuse Less often mothers, mostly due to neglect

‘Spousal revenge’

Most commonly fathers

‘Altruistic’

Unclear gendered patterns

‘Acute Psychotic’

Most commonly mothers

death preferable to their continuing to live under these circumstances. Finally, ‘acute psychotic’ (Resnick, 1969) filicides refer to those cases in which it appears the killer has been diagnosed (previously or retrospectively) with acute psychosis, having experienced a severe break from reality in the form of hallucinations and delusions, for example. These typologies have largely continued to be used to differentiate between what are quite diverse circumstances around filicide. I wish to make two main points about these typologies, however. First, while they are useful as a starting point, most cases do not fit neatly into only one category and these categories can tend to obscure the complex social and structural forces and power dynamics that underlie filicide and are often interwoven across typologies. Second, despite this limitation gender emerges as salient by the way women and men are represented across these typologies. It is this that I wish to map out in this section. As elsewhere in this book, I wish to emphasise that sexed patterns in perpetration (for example, whether filicide is committed by men or by women) are not assumed here as synonymous with gender; that is, gender is not assumed synonymous with sex. However, gender in social terms is understood as likely to produce distinct patterns across the sexes. Gender norms and structures shape the contexts, experiences, and practices of people in a way that is often most readily visible as differences in the experiences and practices of different sexes.1 In other words, sexed patterns in filicide perpetration signal to us that there is likely something to do with gender operating as an important part of the context for these practices of violence. Table 5.1 summarises what the available literature tells us about the prevalence of typologies of filicide in respect to the sex of the perpetrator. It is important to recognise that not all studies find these connections—there are, as I have outlined earlier, divergences in findings across various studies for a range of reasons. However, these are patterns that frequently emerge in the literature. I will discuss some of the research around each area and elaborate on some of the gendered dimensions of each. 1

Indeed, in the experiences and practices beyond the binary of the two-sex, two-gender distinction— for instance in relation to transgender, non-binary, gay, and lesbian persons and their gendered relationships to violence.

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Extant research suggests that social and cultural expectations around gender, as well as gendered structural inequalities, contribute to producing sexed patterns in filicide perpetration. Overall, a history of domestic and family violence and abuse is connected more often to child murders by fathers, while mothers who kill their children are more likely to kill younger children and babies in the context of an unwanted or concealed pregnancy or out of hopelessness, desperation, or psychosis (Bourget et al., 2006; Brown et al., 2018, 2019). This is not to suggest that there are no overlaps; some women do murder children out of anger and abuse, and some men in a context mental illness and an absence of a history of abuse. However, these instances are less common and there are some important patterns worth considering. In the following two sections, I tackle the most common forms of filicide committed by women and by men.

When Women Kill Their Children There are two key themes I wish to explore here. First, women are more likely than men to kill newborns and infants, cases that make up a significant proportion of filicides. Second, where women kill older children, they are more likely than men to have been experiencing acute forms of mental illness or psychosis or pseudo-altruistic reasons (or both), though rates are relatively high across both groups. Neonaticide is one of the most frequently perpetrated forms of filicide and is committed mostly by women, making up a substantial proportion of all maternal filicides (Bourget et al., 2006; Kauppi et al., 2010). Together, this suggests that the relatively high proportion of women committing filicide, compared to other forms of violent crime (Kimmel, 2002), can largely be accounted for by women’s overrepresentation in this form of filicide. Maternal neonaticide has also received the most attention in research and is perhaps the only form of maternal filicide for which there has been a greater attempt at feminist theorising (see Holloway, 2016; Saavedra & Cameira, 2018). Neonaticide offenders tend to be younger, unmarried, lacking in resources, isolated, and socially and economically disadvantaged and have tended to deny or conceal their pregnancies in the context of taboos or over-whelming pressures around unplanned pregnancy (Bourget et al., 2006; DeBortoli et al., 2013; Hatters Friedman & Resnick, 2007; Saavedra & Cameira, 2018). While there is certainly heterogeneity among offenders, in western contexts mothers who kill their newborns have tended to come from “socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds” (Saavedra & Cameira, 2018, p. 552). This must be contextualised within a gendered system that operates on the culturally and structurally reified assumption of women’s primary responsibility for child rearing, and in which women—particularly women from economically disadvantaged groups—are subject to higher levels of poverty. While the intersection of economic inequalities and gendered norms and expectations around parenthood may not be the main or only factor in these cases, they are salient to the prevalence of women in this category of filicide.

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Other common triggers for neonaticide include a fear of social or familial repercussions for the pregnancy or birth (Saavedra & Cameira, 2018). Again, cultural constructs of femininity and motherhood are important to consider. Maternal neonaticide is more common in cultural contexts where there are rigid gender norms, values or structures around pregnancy, feminine sexuality and virtue, marriage, and the sex of offspring (ibid). Looking back historically, the Middle Ages saw maternal infanticide increase sharply due to the heightened stigma attached to “illegitimacy”. In China during the Qing Dynasty, when there was a strong cultural preference for sons in wealthy families, there was a stunning rise in female infanticide (killing of female infants) in dynamistic families, a phenomenon that has also been linked to some Muslim dowry systems (Stangle, 2008). Contextually specific gendered cultural meanings around pregnancy, family, and reproduction are therefore implicated in neonaticide. In addition, as Mugavin (2008) argues, historically situated (and gendered) community and family structures play a role; within modern western societies, for instance, mothers are still chiefly assumed primary carers for young children but left largely isolated compared to traditional closer community and extended family structures. A constellation of gendered psychosocial pressures, Mugavin (2008) argues, can therefore be linked to maternal filicide and neonaticide, most frequently a combination of isolation, economic deprivation, and domestic violence. A key trigger, according to Mugavin (2008), is what she calls ‘good mother stress’—an intense pressure felt around what it means to be a ‘good mother’ that is central to offenders’ sense of identity yet structurally unattainable. As Saavedra and Cameira (2018) note, the clinical or mainstream approach to neonaticide does not adequately take these gendered cultural constructs around motherhood (gender identity) into account, preferring a mental illness frame that separates psychological from broader sociological factors. Nor do they adequately account for the influence of gender constructs or women’s material circumstances (gender structures), whether it be financial or in terms of safe options for escaping domestic violence. Cullen and Fritzon (2019), for instance, found that in Australia many women who committed filicide-suicide had been victims of domestic violence who had “harmed themselves and their children in an attempt to escape a situation perceived as hopeless” (p. 9810). They argue for a broader evaluation of the risk that domestic violence against women presents to children, whether as eventual victims of paternal or maternal filicide. Violent women have often been conceptualised in binary terms as villains or victims, leading to individualised frames of such women as either mad (mentally ill) or defective (villainous women breaching the sacred norms of motherhood) (Fitzroy, 2001). Neonaticide and infanticide, in particular, are often explained in biological terms as the result of post-partum hormonal shifts, combining discourses of the mad woman and the defective female body (Stangle, 2008). Feminist scholars have widely challenged these explanations (Connell, 2002; Saavedra & Cameria, 2018; Stangle, 2008; West & Lichtenstein, 2006), instead locating women’s violent actions within the contexts of their cultural and material oppression and gendered expectations around parenthood (Fitzroy, 2001). This is not to suggest that women are naturally

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non-violent or not capable of tremendous cruelty, but rather to situate women’s embodied experiences of motherhood and maternal violence within their gendered contexts. In the case of maternal neonaticide, while embodied experiences of new motherhood should arguably not be discounted, gendered cultural norms, expectations, and structures are important for understanding the higher proportion of women committing neonaticide. Just as feminist scholars seek to contextualise men’s use of violence, so too the aim is to contextualise women’s use of violence. Many women who kill their children experience acute mental illness (Bourget et al., 2006; Debowska et al., 2015; Eriksson et al., 2016; Kauppi et al., 2010). Sometimes, suicide is a primary motive and children are killed out of warped belief they are sparing children from being left alone in a cruel world (Holloway, 2016; Léveillée et al., 2007)—a point I will return to later in the chapter. Women who kill their children are more likely than men to be diagnosed as acutely ‘psychotic’ (Bourget et al., 2006; Debowska et al., 2015; Eriksson et al., 2016; Holloway, 2016; Kauppi et al., 2010; Léveillée et al., 2007; Resnick, 1969), especially among socalled ‘altruistic’ cases of filicide (Bourget et al., 2006; Debowska et al., 2015; Eriksson et al., 2016; Resnick, 1969). Acute psychosis has been found to be especially prominent among maternal perpetrators of filicide against older children (Lewis & Bunce, 2003), in contrast to neonaticide in which economic and cultural pressures are more prominent. Review studies have also shown significant differences in the proportion of women and men experiencing acute psychosis, though it should be noted that rates are overall high across groups (see, for example, Bourget et al., 2006). The connection between acute psychosis and maternal filicide is a thorny issue from a gender perspective. I will be addressing the broader question of gender and mental illness in Chap. 6. However, at the outset I would like to point out some considerations. On the one hand, recognising psychosis as more often linked to women’s acts of child murder helps to understand important gender differences in motivations for child murder and raises salient questions around intent which are legally (and arguably morally) relevant. However, as Connell (2002) notes, an explanation of women’s violence invested in biology—especially since women’s ‘psychosis’ is frequently assumed connected to female ‘hormones’—is both worthy of scepticism and a “double-edged sword” (p.160). While it can lead to leniency in sentencing, for instance, it is reliant on pathologising women’s bodies and driving decontextualised, biomedical accounts of mental illness and embodied distress. It also reifies notions of women’s passivity, irrationality, and lack of agency (Fitzroy, 2001; Saavedra & Cameira, 2018), making a women’s violence only intelligible if she can be pronounced ‘mad’. This reinforces cultural stereotypes and hides the cultural and structural dimensions to women’s use of violence. It is also important to remember, as will be discussed in the next chapter, that psychological diagnoses are influenced by gendered cultural constructs, which may mean that murderous women are more likely to be considered mentally ill because of existing cultural assumptions. Still, I have included research on the prevalence of mental illness and psychosis in maternal filicide because, while even ‘acute psychosis’ may be considered as produced within—and its diagnosis reflective of—social context, these patterns are

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nonetheless salient. Highlighting the discursive construction of mental illness is not intended to deny the embodied experiences of distress that sufferers feel (Guerin, 2017), nor in this case that this may sometimes involve an acute break from a subject’s everyday thinking or sense of reality. Also, considering mental illness and acute ‘psychosis’ in social context reveals some important intersections of gender that are often not recognised. For instance, research on murders committed by people experiencing a psychotic break shows they are far more likely to be committed in or near the home and against people closest to them, in contrast with other (nonpsychosis-related) homicides (Hillerberg et al., 2014). In a gendered context in which women are more likely to spend greater portions of time at home with children, often in a way that is largely isolated from the larger community or support networks (Mugavin, 2008), killings linked to psychosis are therefore presumably more likely for women than for men to be of children in the home than of other victims. In other words, women’s acts of violence in the context of psychosis are more likely than men’s to fall on child victims due to this social context.

When Men Kill Their Children In contrast, filicide by men has more commonly been linked to domestic violence and abuse (Brown et al., 2019). This issue crosscuts a range of typologies of filicide (Resnick, 1969), because while domestic violence and abuse are frequently linked to the ‘revenge’ motive for filicide—most common among men (Bourget et al., 2006; Debowska et al., 2015; Kauppi et al., 2010; Putkonen et al., 2011)—it can also be linked to a range of other types of filicide. Histories of domestic and family violence among male perpetrators of filicide help to explain higher rates of male filicide as fatal child abuse (for example, Damashek et al., 2013). It can also be linked to some cases of so-called ‘altruistic’ filicide-suicide by mothers who fear leaving a child with an abusive partner or former partner (for example, Cullen & Fritzon, 2019). As discussed in the previous chapter, themes of domestic violence and control are further detectable in research on fathers who commit familicide (a crime that includes filicide) as a violent form of control over the family. The prevalence of male-perpetrated domestic violence and abuse is therefore germane to a range of forms of filicide and a high risk factor for filicide overall. Revenge is primarily a motive for fathers rather than mothers (Bourget et al., 2006; Caruthers, 2016; Jaffe et al., 2014; Jaffe & Juodis, 2006; Kauppi et al., 2010; Kirkwood, 2012; Léveillée et al., 2007; O’Hagan, 2014; Putkonen et al., 2011). The catalyst in such cases is usually the “termination of the parents’ relationship” (Lawrence, 2004, p. 844), frequently motivated by revenge against a mother for seeking to leave an abusive relationship (Jaffe et al., 2014). Such cases often involve multiple children and end with the perpetrator’s suicide (Lawrence, 2004). O ‘Hagan’s (2014) extensive UK study of filicide-suicides in the context of family breakdown between 1994 and 2012 found that revenge against a partner or former partner was a motive for a staggering 84% of filicidal fathers and another 36% of familicidal fathers.

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Together, this meant that fathers made up 82% of the total number of filicidal parents motivated by revenge where cases occurred in the context of separation, divorce, or custody disputes. Women were motivated by revenge in 30% of such cases. Given that Australian and international research has shown that filicide in the context of separation, divorce, and custody disputes is very common (Brown et al., 2018), revenge as a gendered motive is significant. More broadly, domestic and other forms of family violence have been connected to paternal filicide. Fathers and stepfathers often kill children as an outcome of extreme physical abuse of the child (Bourget & Gagné, 2005; Kauppi et al., 2010); in contrast to women, among whom neglect is a more likely cause of filicide (Bourget & Gagné, 2005). Various other forms of domestic abuse have also been connected to paternal filicide, including direct physical violence as well as stalking and threats of violence, especially against children as a way to control and harm women (Jaffe et al., 2014). Child murders are commonly connected to domestic and family violence against their mothers (Jaffe & Juodis, 2006). O’Hagan’s (2014) UK study found that nearly half of male perpetrators of filicide had a history of domestic violence. In a 2013 study in New South Wales, a substantial 75% of child murders occurred in a context of domestic and family violence perpetrated either against a partner or children in the household (Butler & Buxton, 2013). Of these cases, men who killed their children were most commonly the domestic violence perpetrators (80%) and 59% of women who killed their children had been victims of domestic violence. This suggests that male-perpetrated domestic violence plays a particularly significant role, with abusive fathers frequently filicide offenders and filicidal mothers frequently subject to domestic abuse at the hands of men. As argued in the previous chapter on familicide, this suggests the importance of recognising the links between gendered violence against women and violence against children (Jaffe et al., 2014). As Saunders (2004) found, where domestic and family violence against women preceded filicide, the potential threat to children was often not taken seriously by authorities. Many cases had, in fact, involved fathers killing children during their court-mandated visitation time, despite a history of violence against the mother (Saunders, 2004). Saunders posited that paternal filicide often represents an extension of gender-based violence as part of a broader spectrum violence against women. Johnson (2005), who examined filicides in Western Australia, made similar conclusions. Her study found that prolonged abuse followed by separation were signs of high risk of filicide. Some women in her study had tried to leave and continued to be harassed, stalked, and abused, until their children were killed as the final, ultimate infliction of pain upon them. This, said Johnson, was intended to “annihilate” their former partner and to control or possess them forever. One man from her study was reported to have said to his wife: “You’re always mine. I’ll own you forever” (Johnson, 2005, p.67). A controlling mindset and deep sense of dependence on the family unit among men who kill their families and themselves (Ewing, 1997) speak to the role of gender in creating the conditions of paternal filicide and familicide. The gendered drivers of domestic and family violence against women can also lead to risks for children, not only as ‘collateral damage’ but as uniquely targeted because of what they symbolise

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both to the mother and as part of the ‘family unit’ (Boyle, 2019). As Boyle (2019) notes, “where the abuse of women and children overlap in this way, the abuse of children also needs to be understood as gender based: the children are targeted because of their significance within the household gender dynamics, including in cases of murder” (p. 25).

‘Altruistic’ Filicide ‘Altruistic’ filicides are a murkier area. First, sexed patterns in perpetration are not as evident as in other types of filicide, with greater variability among studies. Second, Resnick’s (1969) suggestion that some parents kill their children out of ‘love’ has been controversial—and for good reason. I share the deep discomfort of others such as O’Hagan (2014) about the term and include it critically here. As O’Hagan (2014) argues, examining the act of filicide more closely—particularly from the child’s perspective—makes it ever more difficult to argue that it could ever be considered an act of love. For O’Hagan (2014), the “emotional interactions” of the killings themselves—including the often deep and premeditated determination to follow through, the violence itself, and what many children will experience as they realise what is being done to them by someone they love and trust—“precludes love” (139), is even the “antithesis of love” (p. 141). The principle features of the killing scenario are strength and power pitted against helplessness and fragility; the desire and need to extinguish life and the child’s terror-stricken but futile attempts to hold onto life; absolute choice versus no choice (O’Hagan, 2014, p. 142).

As O’Hagan says, this is not to suggest that all parents who kill are mere monsters, nor to suggest that many parents who kill their children did not indeed love them. However, O’Hagan argues that filicide is not an act of love, as was arguably suggested by Resnick. Even calling it this makes a disturbing assumption about the nature, value, identity, and agency of the child and casts a proprietary adult shadow over their experiences. It is also dangerous; making filicide reconcilable with ‘love’, says O’Hagan (2014), can serve to justify this course of action among suffering parents. This is the limitation of a psychiatric approach to filicide that focuses primarily on making sense of the motives of perpetrators. In fact, O’Hagan argues that examining the extant literature reveals that it is most often the researcher that imposes the label of ‘altruistic’ filicide to make sense of acts that seem otherwise inexplicable. This approach cannot account for the dynamics of power between parent and child. Nor can it account for the ways deeply entrenched cultural constructs around parental ‘ownership’ over children’s lives and around the idealised identities of ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’ enter those deeply personal relationships and contribute to such acts of violence in spite (not because) of love. O’Hagan (2014) suggests that maternal and paternal filicide out of ‘love’ or ‘altruism’ should be broadly differentiated and recast. For mothers, according to O’Hagan, ‘altruistic filicide’ is most often an act of fear—for example, fear that

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children will end up in the care of someone she does not want them to. This often occurs in the context of a mother’s desire to end her life by suicide. So strong is the cultural norm that women’s children are part of them and cannot live without them, and the fears over what will become of them in a mother’s absence, that it is this fear that often drives the so-called ‘altruistic’ mother (O’Hagan, 2014). Saavedra and Cameira (2018) remind us that the “clinical/mainstream approach neglects the power of motherhood normativity and the conflicts, ambiguities and ambivalences that derive from the discrepancies between the idealised construction of motherhood and the complexities of real-life experiences” (p. 548). Maternal filicides also often occur in the context of domestic violence against mothers (Butler & Buxton, 2013; Cullen & Fritzon, 2019), potentially creating or intensifying fear and undermining her perceived ability to fulfil her most ‘essential’ role. For fathers, says O’Hagan (2014), it is more likely to be revenge or possession, professing love but blaming the partner for rejection and abandonment, for the breakdown of family love (O’Hagan, 2014). ‘Altruism’ or the desire to prevent a family’s suffering often manifests as a motive for familicide as well (Websdale, 2010). In such cases, usually without a clear previous history of domestic and family violence by the perpetrator, it is far less ‘love’ of a child and more a deep commitment to upholding a particular idea of family, fatherhood, and masculinity that undergirds these acts.2 Walklate and Petrie (2013), in summarising the academic research on filicide-suicide, argue that whether the motive is revenge or ‘altruism’, filicide-suicide is “rooted in personal or economic catastrophe reflecting dominant patriarchal discourses that underpin the presumption of male proprietorial power over women and children” (p. 269). As such, even in cases where fathers kill their families in the context of impending economic and familial ‘catastrophe’, this ‘altruism’ is premised on constructions of gender that hold men responsible for their children and partners both financially and in terms of their life trajectories. For researchers like O’Hagan (2014), therefore, these broad social forces need to be considered in cases of ‘altruistic’ filicide rather than depending on essentialist constructs of parental love to explain extreme violence.

Silencing Children and Parent–Child Power Relations As I have aimed to show, filicide is a complex but gendered issue. While there is not the same level of sex-asymmetry in filicide as there is in familicide, the available research suggests that gender is deeply imbricated in these violent acts, not only in the motives of offenders but in the social contexts of their actions. I have also begun, in the previous section, to signal some disturbing silences around children’s experiences of filicide in the theorising and research around it, for instance in the still frequently deployed typological characterisation of ‘altruistic’ filicide (Resnick, 1969). It is this I wish to say a bit more about in this section. As will be argued in 2

See Chap. 4 .

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Chap. 11, the silencing of children’s experiences and perspectives in research mirrors the media’s silencing of child victims of familicide. Children’s experiences of murder by a parent—including the lead up to it—are hardly ever considered or speculated in either media representations or indeed filicide research (O’Hagan, 2014). Instead, public and media speculation and most research centres around why the parent did it; “it is their parents who are the sole object of interest”, while children are treated as “mere appendages in the tragedy” (O’Hagan, 2014, p. 5). A lack of child survivors contributes to this, as well as a cornucopia of ethical issues in researching survivors of attempted filicide.3 But we do know in examining the information available on many child murders by parents is that the moments leading up to their deaths are usually terrifying and very often painful (O’Hagan, 2014). Threats to kill children or other statements of intent are common, often within earshot of the child or children; many see it coming. The ‘love’ angle in reporting on these events is often given so much public attention that it “detracts from the nature and extent of the suffering inflicted on children”—acting as a “balm”, O’Hagan (2014, p. 146) says, for adult readers but not much justice for children. Few feminist scholars look at issues such as filicide and familicide, and those that do often do not pay close attention to children, consider these issues from children’s perspectives, or examine the intersecting power relations that constitute children (not just mothers) as targets for violence. For instance, revenge filicide committed by men to harm women is often acknowledged, but how children constitute full and direct victims is seldom explored. Feminist work on maternal filicide is similarly often silent on children’s experiences or their structural position within the family and patriarchal societies more broadly. Saavedra and Cameira’s (2018) feminist work on neonaticide, for instance, is one of the few pieces of work that theorises maternal filicide with a feminist sociological lens. However, while they aptly consider how gendered constructs of motherhood create a bind for women which heightens the risk of filicide, children’s subordinate position of power in relation to parents in a gendered household remains unaddressed. What is remarkably silent in the literature on filicide is the way adult/child power relations may contribute to it and be further reified by the way it is represented. As established in Chap. 3, gender-based violence and patriarchy exist at the intersection of a range of systems of power (Hunnicutt, 2009). This includes power relations and social norms around parent/child relations (Rosen & Twamley, 2018). We know from the research on familicide that proprietary attitudes towards both women and children are a feature of patriarchy and implicated in these murders.4 Patriarchy, here, operates across the domains of gender as well as age. In cases in which men kill children out of revenge on their partners, filicide is instrumentalised as a weapon against women precisely because of “children being seen merely as appendages to their mother” (Walklate & Petrie, 2013, p. 268). Essentialised constructions of maternal non-violence and mothers’ assumed entitlement to oversight of the domain of ‘the children’ can also legitimise adult/child power relations 3 4

For a notable exception, see Katz’ (2013) study on abused children who survived attempted filicide. See Chap. 4.

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and maternal violence. As Stangle (2008, citing Pearson, 1997) observes, “society seems implicitly to ‘permit a maternal sphere of influence over our youngest citizens’” (p. 712), something that is assumed as safe but that a range of factors can render dangerous. The intersection of gender with parent/child power relations and ideologies may in part help to explain why familicide is committed almost exclusively by heterosexual men (Karlsson et al., 2021a), whereas filicide is committed by both men and women (Brown, 2019); as Walklate and Petrie observe, “[it] suggests that men have proprietary feelings towards their wives first and then their children, whereas women have strong proprietary feelings towards their children but rarely towards their husbands” (2013, p. 268). A conceptualisation of gender-based violence as limited to violence by men against women is not capacious enough to account for these complexities. And, as Yates (2020) has shown, when service providers encounter them, a ‘categorical’ approach is quickly perceived as inadequate and unresponsive to the unique needs of children as victim-survivors. As many service providers would attest, the discourse of children as mere ‘witnesses’ of domestic violence (Callaghan et al., 2018; Powell & Murray, 2008)—distanced from the violence, silent, and inactive—does not fit with reality. An intersectional feminist lens on filicide can accommodate these complexities (Rosen & Twamley, 2018), addressing both women’s position under patriarchy (and how this shapes women’s violence) and children’s position in family structures organised along gender-generational lines.

Disability and Filicide There is another important vector that arises in the research on filicide that is worth drawing attention to. Children with a disability are more likely to be victims of filicide. In fact, the existence of an autism diagnosis in children is particularly common in cases of filicide (Coorg & Tournay, 2013; Declercq et al., 2017). The ‘hierarchy of desirability’ that renders disabilities involving intellectual or communicationrelated impairment even less desirable may contribute to this (Palermo, 2003). Children with disabilities are often socially and structurally marginalised, leading to a higher rate of abuse (Jones et al., 2012) and filicide (Coorg & Tourney, 2013). Gender and disability also intersect in a range of ways; for instance, filicide is more likely to be committed against male children with autism, possibly because of more negative attitudes towards disabled sons stemming from notions of masculinity (Coorg & Tournay, 2013; Palermo, 2003). News media often problematically characterises filicides of children with disabilities ‘altruistic’ or ‘mercy’ killings (Palermo, 2003), reflecting the tendency to dehumanise people with disabilities (Palermo, 2003) and construct them as ‘burdens’ (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Jones & Harwood, 2009). However, the social, cultural, and structural factors that render children with disabilities more likely to be abused and killed by parents, and the experiences and perspectives of disabled children themselves, are both decidedly absent in such discourses. The intention of this chapter

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has been to begin to make visible some of these intersections—between filicide and cultural constructions of children and disability. In Chap. 11, Troubling Intersections, I examine how these intersections shaped reporting on familicide in cases involving children and people with disabilities.

Filicide as Gendered Violence While this book focuses on familicide, in this chapter I aimed to provide an outline of some of the gender dynamics germane to filicide more broadly. One of the first questions I am often asked in discussions about familicide is: what about women who kill their children? The question of maternal filicide is frequently invoked as ‘evidence’ of both the shortfalls of feminist understandings of family murder and the presumed gender-neutrality of domestic violence.5 Yet, while filicide is not as clearly marked by sexed differences in perpetration as other forms of violence, a closer look at sexed patterns in typologies of filicide and how these are shaped by gender reveals filicide, too, as a gendered phenomenon. Whether committed by mothers, fathers, or stepfathers, filicide frequently occurs against a backdrop of domestic and family violence and of abuse against women; the connections between gendered domestic violence and risks of harm to children are significant yet often underappreciated (Jaffe et al., 2014). Beyond cases involving a history of violence against women, research suggests that various forms of filicide are shaped by gender norms, expectations, and structures, as they overlap with other systems of dominance, including disability/ableism and adult/child power relations and ideologies. Violence against children, too, is gendered. Yet, as I have argued, children are seldom reflected on as direct victims of gender-based violence or vectors of age and disability examined in gendered analyses of filicide. Continuum thinking (Boyle, 2019) around genderbased violence can help to recognise the distinctions and overlaps between violence against women and violence against children, making visible the role of age and generation as part of the interlocking systems of domination that constitute patriarchal family structures. It can also help to see some of the connections between ableist violence and violence against women and children.

References Alder, C. M., & Baker, J. (1997). Maternal filicide: More than one story to be told. Women & Criminal Justice, 9(2), 15–39. https://doi.org/10.1300/J012v09n02_02

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As Gotell and Dutton (2016) argue, the argument about gender neutrality in relation to sexual and domestic violence has become a key area of focus among men’s rights activists (MRAs) in recent years.

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Kimmel, M. S. (2002). “Gender symmetry” in domestic violence: A substantive and methodological research review. Violence against Women, 8(11), 1332–1363. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780102 237407 Kirkwood, D. (2012). ‘Just say goodbye’: Parents who kill their children in the context of separation. Domestic Violence Resource Centre Australia. Lawrence, R. (2004). Understanding fatal assault of children: A typology and explanatory theory. Children and Youth Services Review, 26(9), 837–852. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2004. 02.024 Léveillée, S., Marleau, J. D., & Dubé, M. (2007). Filicide: A comparison by sex and presence or absence of self-destructive behaviour. Journal of Family Violence, 22, 287–295. https://link.spr inger.com/article/https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-007-9081-3. Lewis, C. F., & Bunce, S. C. (2003). Filicidal mothers and the impact of psychosis on maternal filicide. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, 31(4), 459–470. Little, J. (2021). Filicide, journalism and the ‘disempowered man’ in three Australian cases 2010– 2016. Journalism, 22(6), 1450–1466. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918809739 Mugavin, M. E. (2008). Maternal filicide theoretical framework. Journal of Forensic Nursing, 4(2), 68–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-3938.2008.00012.x Newman, J. (2020, 28 February). The uncomfortable truth about filicide. The Big Smoke (Australia). https://www.thebigsmoke.com.au/2020/02/28/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-filicide/. O’Hagan, K. (2014). Filicide-suicide: The killing of children in the context of separation, divorce and custody disputes. Palgrave Macmillan. Palermo, M. T. (2003). Preventing filicide in families with autistic children. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 47(1), 47–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/030 6624X02239274 Pearson, P. (1997). When she was bad: Violent women and the myth of innocence. Viking. Porter, T., & Gavin, H. (2010). Infanticide and neonaticide: A review of 40 years of research literature on incidence and causes. Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 11(3), 99–112. https://doi.org/10.1177/152 4838010371950 Powell, A., & Murray, S. (2008). Children and domestic violence: Constructing a policy problem in Australia and New Zealand. Social & Legal Studies, 17(4), 453–473. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0964663908097080 Putkonen, H., Amon, S., Eronen, M., Klier, C. M., Almiron, M., Yourstone Cederwall, J., & Weizmann-Heneliusa, G. (2011). Gender differences in filicide offense characteristics—A comprehensive register-based study of child murder in two European countries. Child Abuse & Neglect, 35(5), 319–328. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2011.01.007 Resnick, P. J. (1969). Child murder by parents: A psychiatric review of filicide. American Journal of Psychiatry, 126(3), 73–82. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.126.3.325 Rosen, R., & Twamley, K. (2018). The woman–child question: A dialogue in the borderlands. In R. Rosen & K. Twamley (Eds.), Feminism and the politics of childhood: Friends or foes? (pp. 1–20). UCL Press Saavedra, L., & Cameira, M. (2018). Deconstructing idealized motherhood: The extreme case of neonaticidal women. Feminist Criminology, 13(5), 543–559. https://doi.org/10.1177/155708511 6688779 Saunders, H. (2004). Twenty-nine child homicides: Lessons still to be learnt on domestic violence and child protection. Women’s Aid. http://familieslink.co.uk/download/jan07/twenty_nine_c hild_homicides.pdf. Stangle, H. L. (2008). Murderous Madonna: Femininity, violence, and the myth of postpartum mental disorder in cases of maternal infanticide and filicide. William and Mary Law Review, 50(2), 699. Walklate, S., & Petrie, S. (2013). Witnessing the pain of suffering: Exploring the relationship between media representations, public understandings and policy responses to filicide-suicide. Crime Media Culture, 9(3), 265–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659013493917

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Websdale, N. (2010). Familicidal hearts: The emotional styles of 211 killers. Oxford University Press. West, D. A., & Lichtenstein, B. (2006). Andrea Yates and the criminalization of the filicidal maternal body. Sage Publications. Wilson, M., Daly, M., & Daniele, A. (1995). Familicide: The killing of spouse and children. Aggressive Behavior, 21(4), 275–291. https://doi.org/10.1002/1098-2337(1995)21:4%3c275::AID-AB2 480210404%3e3.0.CO;2-S Yates, S. (2018). Power, process, plumbing: Big g and small g gender in Victoria’s family violence policy subsystem. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 77(4), 568–582. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1467-8500.12265 Yates, S. (2020). Gender, context and constraint: Framing family violence in Victoria. Women’s Studies International Forum, 78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2019.102321.

Chapter 6

Complex Connections: Mental Illness/Distress and Familicide

What About Mental Illness? Despite important qualitative differences between different forms of familicide, I argued in the previous chapter it is a form of gendered domestic and family violence. Whether committed by a ‘livid coercive’ (Websdale, 2010) perpetrator with a history of violence and abuse, or by a ‘civil reputable’ (Websdale, 2010) perpetrator without a known history of violence and ostensibly hoping to spare his family and himself suffering or humiliation, familicide is driven in significant ways by gender as identity, interaction, and structure (Risman, 2004; Risman & Davis, 2013). It is patriarchal, undergirded by a social entitlement to control over the family ‘unit’, and connected to cultural ideas about masculinity, fatherhood, and the nuclear heterosexual family. As I indicated, this does not discount the intensity and complexity of feeling that drives perpetrators, but rather highlights that feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, and despair (Websdale, 2010) appear to be shaped by patriarchal gender constructs and responded to in these cases in patriarchal terms. In this chapter, I address the often-asked question: What about mental illness? Surely perpetrators of familicide must have been driven by a deep sense of distress— or even diagnosable mental illness—especially in cases involving previously nonviolent, seemingly loving fathers? Perpetrators of family murder-suicide are, after all, also victims of suicide. What consideration might mental illness—or more broadly experiences of mental anguish or distress—warrant in these cases? The question of mental illness of perpetrators is commonly raised in media and public discussions of domestic homicide (Buiten & Coe, 2022). Still, as will be seen in Section Two, when the media raises mental illness or the personal troubles of perpetrators as a possible cause of violence, it is likely to be met with swift criticism— within mainstream and social media (for example, Quinn et al., 2019), and by feminist media scholars (for example, Buiten & Coe, 2022; Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017; Niblock, 2018). And yet, the question of perpetrator personal troubles and mental illness is a common theme emerging in reporting on cases of extreme family violence (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Galvin et al., 2021; Little, 2015; Quinn et al., 2019). I call © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_6

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this the mental illness/distress lens, where medicalised, psychological categories of mental illness—or more broadly perpetrators’ personal troubles and experiences of distress—are framed as a cause of violence (Buiten & Coe, 2022). This chapter tackles the thorny question of the mental states of perpetrators of familicide. I show that while a mental illness/distress lens (Buiten & Coe, 2022) on violence perpetration is often perceived as antithetical to a feminist-informed approach (and vice versa), it is possible to account for both the role of mental illness/distress among perpetrators and the salience of gender, power, and control in these crimes. A feminist sociological approach to the issue of mental illness/distress and its relationship to violence can work to elucidate both the social determinants of the mental distress that undergird familicide, and the way it is responded to with violence against women, children, and the self. First, I offer a brief overview of some of the connections made with mental illness in empirical research to familicide. I then provide a few short examples of how mental illness has been connected to cases of familicide in media and public debates, whether it be through the evaluation of various ‘experts’ in these cases or even family members, and some of the criticism that reference to the mental suffering of perpetrators is often met with, especially in recent years. I briefly explain some of the reasons why feminist scholars and activists might regard a mental illness/distress lens on men’s violence with deep scepticism. Specifically, I relate this to two key points of tension: the ways a mental illness/distress lens on perpetrators’ actions potentially acquits them of agency and accountability in their use of violence, and the way it individualises domestic and family violence (Pease, 2012; Yates, 2018), silencing its social and structural dimensions and casting it as anomaly rather than as a mainstay of patriarchal practice. In addition, I point to a broader sociological resistance to a positivistic understanding of conceptions of mental illness and the way mental health and illness are subsequently understood in largely binary and asocial terms. I draw on Rimke’s (2016) notion of psychocentrism to capture these critiques. To remedy to these issues, I consider how a feminist sociological approach to violence—one that draws on contributions from the sociology of health—may be capacious enough to acknowledge the role of mental illness/distress among perpetrators, while maintaining a feminist sociological lens that continues to place (unequal, patriarchal) gendered identities, interactions, and structures at the centre of the analysis. To do this, I provide some examples of how mental illness/distress is gendered, and how this relates to familicide. A feminist sociological approach to the question of mental illness and distress, I argue, can help to move us beyond the false dichotomies that are sometimes set up between feminist-informed and mental health-informed approaches to violence. I use the term ‘mental illness/distress’ in much of this discussion for a few reasons, a point discussed in greater detail later in the chapter. In short, this term signals an awareness of, and caution around, the tendency for the term mental illness to be yoked to a positivistic understanding of mental illness, constructed in binary terms as discreet from ‘mental’ health and ‘general’ or ‘normal’ difficult emotional experiences and mental states. The term has also largely been disconnected from the social contexts that produce continuums of mental distress, some of which are

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classified as mental illness and others that are not (Rimke, 2016). As such, I frequently refer to mental illness/distress to gesture towards these issues, gently disrupting the assumption that ‘distress’ and ‘illness’ are either neatly distinguishable or ahistorical.

Empirical Connections: Mental Illness and Family Murder-Suicide As discussed in Chap. 4, research on familicide is not only sparse in comparison to research on other forms of domestic and family violence, but definitional and methodological variations make overarching findings of statistical significance difficult to establish. That said, in the most recent systematic literature review on the topic conducted by Karlsson et al. (2021a), ‘mental health problems’ among perpetrators emerged as one of their key overarching findings within the existing literature on familicide. These included common issues such as depression and substance abuse, as well as rarer conditions such as psychosis or paranoia (Karlsson et al., 2021a). This resonates with work by Malmquist (2006) that hypothesised that familicide is the outcome of psychotic depression. It should be noted this work relies on a largely positivistic notion of mental illness, the presence or absence of which is often understood in binary terms as an objective, discoverable ‘fact’ independent of the impact of social context on its interpretation. Further, few of the studies reviewed by Karlsson et al. (2021a) looked directly at mental illness (only three), making the data on this topic thin. Methodologies for identifying mental health problems can and do also vary considerably. One would get, for instance, different results for a study based on contact with a mental healthcare professional than one would for data reliant on personal interviews of surviving perpetrators or retrospective analysis of the case details by a forensic psychologist. As such, the data Karlsson et al. (2021a) identify, while significant, cannot give a complete picture. Three studies reported on the mental health of the offenders. The reported prevalence of depression varied between 13% and 69%, whereas between 13% and 44% of offenders had a history of mental health treatment. According to one study, psychotic disorder and substance abuse disorder had been diagnosed in 17% and 22% of the offenders, respectively (Karlsson et al., 2021a, p. 88).

The above extract reveals mental illness may be a significant factor, but that there is tremendous variability in findings. They further note that without baseline population data to compare the data on familicide perpetrators to, it is difficult to determine the significance of these figures. Importantly, their review showed the prevalence of a history of domestic and family violence far exceeded the data on mental illness (present in a significant 39–92% of cases). While data on histories of domestic and family violence is also subject to methodological and definitional inconsistencies, this is a reminder that while mental illness may be salient, domestic and family violence is likely to be even more so—and the two may well overlap.

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While little research looks specifically at familicide and mental illness, a greater volume of research has been conducted on mental illness in relation to murdersuicide more broadly, and to filicide. Here, mental health issues emerge as common. McPhedran et al.’s (2018) study on homicide-suicide in Australia, for instance, found that contact with a mental health professional was common, a trait it shared with suicide-only cases. Homicide-only cases, in contrast, did not share such high rates of contact with mental health professionals, suggesting that mental illness is indeed more salient to homicide cases ending in suicide (as many familicides do). However, they also found that homicide-suicide was characterised by a much higher presence of domestic violence orders, departing from suicide-only in this important respect and suggesting an intersection of mental health and domestic and family violence issues. Mental illness has been strongly connected with filicide and filicide-suicide, although in somewhat gendered ways. Both men and women who kill their children show high levels of mental health problems (Bourget et al., 2006; Brown et al. 2014). As discussed in the previous chapter, however, mental illness and specifically acute psychosis are especially common among women offenders. A high percentage of neonaticides—the most common form of filicide committed by women—are linked to mental illnesses (Liem & Koenraadt, 2008; Kauppi et al., 2010), as are maternal filicides of older children (Lewis & Bunce, 2003), with psychosis being more prevalent in maternal than paternal perpetrators (Bourget et al., 2006; Lewis & Bunce, 2003). In a 10-year study on filicide in Victoria, nearly 75% of all perpetrators had been diagnosed with a mental illness, most often depression (Brown et al., 2014). Almost all female perpetrators of filicide had a diagnosed mental illness, while 30% of male perpetrators did (Brown et al., 2014). It is difficult to know how much of this difference can be attributed to the greater likelihood of women to seek out formal mental health services (see for example, Wendt & Shafer, 2016). Still, as Brown et al. (2014) conclude in their research on filicide offenders, mental health problems are a considerable risk factor in filicides, although inflected by gender, usually co-occurring and interacting with other risk factors such as domestic and family violence and family dissolution. As such, they argue, attending to mental illness is one important component in preventing filicide in addition to addressing drivers such as domestic and family violence (Brown et al., 2014). Mental illness may indeed be a factor worth considering in understanding familicide and filicide. Even for a sociologist, such as Websdale (2010), the intense emotional distress of familicide perpetrators stands out as a key finding in his work on 211 familicide cases. The powerful feelings of failure, rage, and humiliation he identifies resonate in many respects with Schlesinger’s (2000) hypothesis that familicide offenders become increasingly bound up in a web of psychic pain and tension that they seek to expunge through familicide, as it does with Johnson and Sachman’s (2014) description of familicide offenders as emotionally self-dysregulated and psychologically intolerant of rejection. However, what much theoretical and empirical work on familicide and mental illness/distress does not directly address is the way these experiences are socially and culturally situated. How we can integrate the work on mental illness and distress of perpetrators with the insights born of feminist-informed

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research is the question. How do gendered analyses of familicide intersect with and potentially help to situate the mental states of perpetrators? This is part of engaging in a critical phenomenology (Chandler, 2019) of familicide, taking seriously embodied, lived experiences of perpetrators but also its contextualisation in social structures and systems of oppression. As part of this, we must be guarded against the tendency to assume mental illness as the fall-back explanation in place of an analysis of gender and power. As Dobash et al. (2009) highlight, there is a tendency in cases where there is no known prior history of criminality to assume that intimate partner homicide can be explained by mental illness. The findings from their study challenged this assumption that intimate partner homicide is an expression of either violent criminality or, in its absence, mental illness. Nearly double the domestic violence perpetrators in the study experiencing mental health issues, for instance, also had a previous criminal history. Even more interestingly, within their study a relatively small number of men who appeared to kill ‘out-of-the-blue’ (had no criminal history) had a mental illness. Psychology is clearly important, but not sufficient, to understand violence against women and children, nor a sound default explanation for murders committed by seemingly ‘ordinary’ men. The binary often constructed between mental illness as a causal explanation and domestic and family violence as a causal explanation for family homicide needs to be disrupted. In the following section, I briefly highlight some examples of questions raised over mental illness and domestic violence in relation to cases covered in this book. While Section Two looks at news reporting around these issues in greater depth, I briefly raise some examples here to highlight the tension that exists around questions of familicide and mental illness/distress. Thereafter, I suggest how to begin addressing these tensions, moving beyond binaries via a feminist sociological understanding of mental illness/distress.

Mental Illness and Familicide: Tensions in Public Discourse When in 2014 Geoff Hunt shot dead his wife, Kim Hunt, and their three young children—Fletcher, Mia, and Phoebe—killing himself soon after, he left behind a note. It stated simply: “I’m sorry. It’s all my fault. Totally mine” (Barnes, 2015, p. 15). Geoff Hunt was known to friends and family as a mild-mannered man, and a man without a history of violence. So, in the inquest that followed, the question of mental illness emerged as a significant part of the investigation. In his findings, the coroner (Barnes, 2015) noted that both Kim and Geoff Hunt had a known history of ‘mental health issues’. Kim Hunt had experienced depression, intermittently requiring medication, and Geoff Hunt reportedly expressed suicidal ideation and displayed behaviours that some who knew him felt signalled depression. When Kim Hunt was involved in a severe car accident in 2012 that left her with a traumatic brain injury, the coroner stated that things between them had worsened. Kim’s injuries had led to changes in

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her personality and affect that, it was reported, greatly impacted Geoff Hunt (Barnes, 2015). The coroner concluded that Geoff Hunt’s actions in 2014 were reflective of the primary intention to end his own life out of a sense of desperation and hopelessness and, believing that his family could not cope without him, chose to take their lives too. He contrasted the Hunt familicide with other family murder-suicides, arguing that unlike other cases where “the deaths are preceded by custody disputes and sometimes a history of family violence” (Barnes, 2015, p. 17), this was not the case for the Hunts. The coroner’s finding for the inquest aligned with the forensic psychologist’s assessment as follows: In [the forensic psychologist’s] opinion, the children were likely killed because Geoff believed they could not cope without him. These distorted beliefs may have included that he was ending Kim’s misery, particularly given that her recovery [from the car accident] was believed to have reached its maximum expectation. Therefore, [the forensic psychologist] concludes that Geoff’s primary intent was suicide, and his decision to kill the remaining members of his family had a pseudo ‘altruistic’ motivation. His distorted thinking resulting in this action was likely associated with symptoms of depression and feelings of hopelessness for his and his family’s situation (Barnes, 2015, p. 17).

One of the only two recommendations to emerge from the inquest, along with suggestions to better manage media reporting on the facts of such cases, was for “mental health training of disability support workers” (Barnes, 2015, p. v24) such as those who had been working with Kim Hunt after her traumatic brain injury. It was suggested that the danger posed both by Geoff Hunt and to his mental health had not been identified because the focus of the disability support had been on Kim Hunt. The terms ‘depressed’, ‘depression’, ‘depressive’, and ‘anti-depressants’ featured twenty-five times in the Coronial Inquest report (Barnes, 2015). This included three times in which these terms were applied to the state of the family as a whole, six times in reference to Geoff—who was also characterised as experiencing a deep sense of “hopelessness” (Barnes, 2015, p. 17) and “suicidal ideation” (Barnes, 2015, p. 5)— and sixteen times in relation to Kim Hunt. Terms such as ‘violence’ or ‘violent’, in comparison, were used six times, mostly in the context of pointing out an absence of a history of domestic violence in the family, and only once to refer to Geoff Hunt’s actions indirectly as a “violent unforeseen incident” (Barnes, 2015, p. 18). The coroner and forensic psychologist agreed that familicide was primarily the result of depression and was principally an act of suicide, murder being a misguided but not central part of Geoff Hunt’s decision-making. In this case, experts as supported by the witness testimony of family and friends suggested that mental health issues lay behind the familicide, rather than gender, power, or control. As I discuss more in Section Two, family and friends of perpetrators—or even family of victims—sometimes seek to make sense of familicide through the explanation of mental illness or distress. A family member of Kim Hunt testified at the coronial inquest that she believed that it was the “mental health system” that had failed the family by neglecting to adequately support Geoff Hunt’s mental health (Begley, 2015c). When Peter Miles killed his wife, Cynda, his adult daughter, Katrina, and four grandchildren, Taye, Rylan, Arye, and Kadyn in 2018, friends spoke of his

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battle with “mental illness” and use of anti-depressants (Anonymous, 2018g). When Fernando Manrique killed his wife Maria and children Martin and Elisa in 2016, the family arranged a combined funeral and were reported as saying they hoped the key message from the funeral would be to raise awareness of the “economic, social and psychological stresses posed to families” raising children with complex disabilities (Benny-Morrison, 2016h). The framing of violence as caused by mental illness or other psychological factors often comes, in part, from those closest to the victims, making an analysis of these framings especially complicated. At the same time, the implication of perpetrator mental illness or personal distress as a driver of familicide is often subject to fierce critique. For instance, gender-based violence reporter Nina Funnell made the following statements in relation to media coverage of the Hunt case referencing mental illness: Most people with mental illness do not choose to kill others. People with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators of it. We also know that domestic and family violence is far too prevalent in society and that it happens in every class, culture and community (Funnell, 2014).

For Funnell, framing mental illness as a central driver for violence denies perpetrator agency in the act of control that is killing and silencing the experiences of those on the receiving end of violence by focusing on the mental distress of perpetrators. Feminist commentator Clementine Ford argued in relation to news portrayals of the Miles familicide, “the framing of criminal acts like these as being somehow the result of depression or financial struggles or just a lack of appropriate emotional support cannot help but infect the circumstances with an air of sympathy and understanding” despite their being a “horrific act of violence” (Ford, 2018). Yet, she said, when it came to the Hunt familicide “feminists were urged to consider the plight of mental health and not to use this as a way to demonise men” (Ford, 2018). For Ford (2018), “if refusing to discuss domestic homicide as anything other than an incomprehensible act of violence with no excuse is ‘demonising men’, then we have a long way to go”. Harvey (2016) of The Daily Telegraph also explicitly denied a link to mental illness in the Lutz-Manrique case: “This is not mental illness. This is domestic violence”, she said. The tension around this issue has become even more apparent in news commentary in recent years. Following the familicide perpetrated by Rowan Baxter in 2020, a veritable media storm was prompted when a Queensland Detective Inspector on the case made comments to the press inferring that Baxter may have been “suffering” mental anguish and that the possibility of this as a driver for his actions was being explored by police. “Is this an issue of a woman suffering significant domestic violence and her and her children perishing at the hands of the husband” he asked, “or is this an instance of a husband being driven too far by issues that he’s suffered, by certain circumstances, into committing acts of this form?” (cited in Powell, 2020). This comment, like the one made by Harvey (2016), positions the matter in binary terms: is it domestic violence by an abusive man, or the result of mental illness or personal distress? The Detective Inspector making this comment soon removed himself from the case following “intense criticism” over his comments (Powell,

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2020).1 Specifically, public condemnation surrounded the perceived insinuation that Rowan Baxter, rather than those he had killed, was a victim in the case. Others argued that invoking mental illness obscured Baxter’s agency, representing him as passive “passenger” to his distress rather than an active and choosing abuser, and that it perpetuated the stigmatising assumption that mental illness is a cause of violence (Jepson, 2020). The influence of feminist perspectives on domestic and family violence has swelled in recent years, and in turn, mental illness as an explanatory frame has often been more forcefully rejected as seen in some of the commentary above. However, concerns have been raised from other corners that a wholesale dismissal of the role of mental illness over-simplifies the issue. For instance, Binoy Kampmark (2020) has argued that feminist criticisms of mental illness frames—and their insistence on the primary role of gender in such cases—tend to “[fall] into that classic analytical trap: the either-or school of reference”. In relation to feminist reporting on the Baxter case,2 Kampmark remarked that “Presumption dictates all: [Rowan Baxter] could not have been mentally ill [..] but was ‘gendered’ in his approach […]. The point that [Baxter] might have been mentally unstable and misogynistically muddled is simply a step too far” (Kampmark, 2020, emphasis my own). Yates (2018) has also shown that, within the domestic violence sector in Australia, there is often a tension between advocates who seek psychological explanations for violence, and those who take a feminist-informed approach focused on gender and power.3 This, she argues, can lead to an impasse and weaken opportunities for a more nuanced discussion that considers how the two may be related (Yates, 2018). Positioning familicide in binary terms as either the outcome of mental illness or patriarchal power and control can therefore feed into anti-feminist backlash and undermine the richness of feminist analysis. I agree with Kampmark that there are dangers in constructing a strict distinction between the social problems of gendered domestic and family violence and mental illness. However, I do not believe that a feminist approach to gender and violence necessarily needs to—or indeed always has or does—do this. Nor do I think the critiques of mental illness as an explanatory frame are not warranted. A feminist sociological approach to these issues can work within the space between the denunciation of the salience of mental distress altogether and the assumption that mental illness causes violence.

1

This is discussed in more depth in Sect. 2. Kampmark wrote an opinion piece on the issue of domestic violence in which he responded to some of the arguments I had made in The Conversation about the tendency to represent such cases as ones of mental illness at the expense of an accounting of gender and power. I include reference to his critique of my article here because I believe his concerns warrant attention in the context of this chapter. 3 See also Pease (2012). 2

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Feminist Resistance to Psychocentrism There is often a guardedness among feminist scholars and activists around psychological-based explanations of domestic and family violence. Work in this area, as I have discussed in previous chapters, has centred largely on the role of gender norms and power relations in producing, supporting, and perpetuating patterned violence by men against women and children. While scholarly and public debates about the gendered nature of domestic and family violence may persist, the domestic violence sector in Australia has largely been built on a feminist-informed model of power and control (Yates, 2019). Within this model, psychologically based explanations for the perpetration of domestic and family violence are often regarded with caution; rather, when it is raised, mental illness is identified as an outcome for victim-survivors of abuse (Aitkin & Munro, 2018; Humphreys & Thiara, 2003). Psychoanalytic approaches to gender and masculinity in the 1970s and 1980s popularly examined the personal pain of men as a basis to challenge patriarchal gender relations (Hill, 2019). In this research, knowledge of men’s gendered distress was mobilised not so much to deny patriarchy as to encourage men’s investment into a change in the gender order, regarded as hurting both women and men (Hill, 2019). However, according to Salter (cited in Hill, 2019), these psychoanalytic approaches to masculinity have been largely “excoriated as ‘anti-feminist’” within contemporary approaches to domestic and family violence (p. 109). Jess Hill (2019) has argued that a largely antagonistic contemporary view towards psychological explanations for violence exists within the domestic and family violence sector in Australia. A glance at contemporary feminist scholarship on domestic and family violence also appears to support this observation. When it comes to work on ‘mental health’ and domestic and family violence, the impacts on victim-survivors are thankfully receiving greater attention (for example, Humphreys & Thiara, 2003). There is also some work examining mental distress in the perpetration of bidirectional violence within same-sex relationships (for example, Lewis et al., 2015). However, such work seldom seeks to explore ‘mental health’ of male perpetrators in relation to their use of violence against women.4 Of course, this reluctance is to be expected. Anti-feminist men’s rights activism has often deployed sympathy for men’s personal struggles to discredit feminist claims of the existence of patriarchy and to undermine feminist analyses of male violence against women (Messner, 2016). Further to this, there are other important underlying factors to do with conflicting ways of conceptualising social problems. Here, Yates’ (2019, 2020) work is especially useful in explaining some of the central points of contention that may shape feminist antipathy to ‘mental health’ framings of domestic and family violence perpetration. Yates’ research exploring the framing of domestic and family violence during the first, historic Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence between 2015 and 2016 examines the ways competing narratives around family violence were presented by diverse participating 4

Though some work has looked at the connection between mental health, masculinity, and violence in nuanced ways, for instance River and Flood (2021).

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parties. Her work therefore highlights some of the key sites of friction arising in public policy debates about domestic and family violence. One such point of tension arose between feminist experts and advocates, on the one hand, and those from the alcohol and other drugs (AOD) sector, on the other (Yates, 2020). What she found is instructive in understanding some of the tensions that also exist between feminist and ‘mental health’ accounts of domestic and family violence. Yates notes that while a growing body of evidence makes the role of AOD in domestic and family violence increasingly “difficult to ignore”, this is “challenging to reconcile with dominant feminist analyses” centred on gender, power, and control (2019, p. 258). In particular, the central question—of whether AODs cause domestic and family violence—is a hot potato issue within policy discussions around domestic and family violence. In making sense of this, Yates argues that the contestation emanates from a divergence in the “treatment philosophy” (p. 258) that underscores each of the two sectors, as well as the historical struggles of each to meet their intended aims. The AOD sector, much like the mental health sector, tends to focus on the problem of addiction and substance abuse at the individual level, adopting a largely medical approach that positions addiction as a disease of the body and mind (Yates, 2019). This is in part connected to one of the major historical challenges facing the sector, of reducing the stigma and shame experienced by people with addictions and substance abuse issues, so that they can be encouraged to seek support (and the state encouraged to provide it). To achieve this reduction in stigma and shame, replacing blame on sufferers with biomedical discourses of addiction as illness was important. Similarly, there has been a concerted effort in the mental health sector over the past few decades to tackle the stigma and shame associated with mental illness (Holland, 2012), normalising mental illness as something that can happen to anyone, that sufferers are not personally responsible for, and that they are entitled to support for. As with the AOD sector (Yates, 2019), this was largely accomplished by subsuming mental illness within biomedical discourses of health and illness (Rimke, 2016). Biomedical discourses, through an appeal to inherent traits and biochemistry, work to discharge blame away from sufferers and onto the illness itself (Rowe et al., 2003). As an illness of the body and mind, addiction—like mental illness—is therefore usually presented by advocates in individualistic, “gender-neutral” terms (Yates, 2019, p. 262). This in turn constructs a largely ahistorical and asocial account of addiction (Yates, 2019), distancing it from social explanations in a similar way that biomedical models of mental illness do (Rimke, 2016). This approach made sense in the context of the challenges the mental health and AOD sectors have aimed to overcome in recent decades. It is, however, at odds with the objectives of the primarily feminist-informed domestic and family violence sector. The domestic and family violence sector in Australia, as elsewhere, emerged from the coalface of working with women and children seeking safety from male violence (Yates, 2019). As Kimmel (2002) points out, while the role of gender in intimate partner violence has for decades been the subject of scholarly and public debate, for those working at the frontline of domestic violence shelters, the question of gender and the disproportionate impact of male violence on women and children has never been in question. For the domestic and family violence sector, the role

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of gender is very much in sight every day and advocating for recognition of this is regarded as vital. Further, the domestic and family sector has sought for decades, through research and advocacy, to achieve recognition of it as a public issue (Murray & Powell, 2011). Notions of domestic and family violence as a private ‘family matter’ (Murray & Powell, 2011) has for some time scaffolded the reluctance of the state and law enforcement to intervene, whether by prosecuting perpetrators or supporting those affected by violence. Reconstituting domestic and family violence as a public issue has been one of the greatest challenges—and accomplishments—of the sector in the last few decades (Murray & Powell; Yates, 2019). Within this, explanations of male violence against women and children as an act of gendered power and control have been central, with advocates working to locate “modern violence against women within a history of systematic male power and privilege” (Hill, 2019, p. 109). Individualistic approaches to domestic and family violence undercut this. Finally, the domestic and family sector needed to push against victim-blaming discourses that located the cause of violence against women in women’s behaviour. From the 1940s, victim-blaming theories of women who experienced domestic and family violence were fostered, including the notion of battered women as masochistic. While the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s worked to achieve a widespread debunking of such overt victim-blaming theories, psychological approaches to women experiencing violence have continued to cultivate a focus on the assumed psychopathology of victim-survivors (Berns, 2004). Why, it is often asked, do women not leave abusive relationships? As journalist and author Jess Hill (2019) notes, a “dangerous logic of victim-blaming” has persisted (p. 52). When coupled with the historical tendency to deny, minimise, justify, or excuse men’s violence against women (Dragiewicz, 2011), feminist activists have sought to shift the focus away from women’s presumed deficiencies and onto men’s choice to use violence. Placing the perpetrator and their actions in view has therefore been crucial to feminist advocacy in this area, making explanatory models that deflect responsibility from perpetrators of violence problematic. Medicalised approaches that aim to reduce stigma and treat individual sufferers of AOD or mental illness are thus regarded as problematic within discussions of domestic and family violence for two main reasons: they shift responsibility for violence off of perpetrators (and onto their ‘disease’); and they tend to produce more apolitical, individualised responses that are not capable of challenging the gender norms, power relations, and social structures regarded as at the heart of domestic and family violence (Yates, 2019). The (rightful) concern is, therefore, that perpetrator mental illness or personal distress as a causal explanation can downplay or render to the margins the public issue of systemic and gendered violence (Little, 2015). Advocates from the mental health and domestic and family violence sectors share a common concern, however. When it comes to the news media’s traditional tendency to connect the perpetration of violence with the suffering of mental illness (Blood et al., 2002), the mental health sector may well be concerned with such media portrayals as reproducing stereotypical assumptions about people experiencing mental illness (Little, 2015; Marganski, 2019). By positioning mental illness

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as a cause of violence, stigma can be reinforced in other ways, even if done in a way that is ostensibly ‘sympathetic’ to sufferers. Framing mental illness as a cause for fatal domestic and family violence risks reinforcing the notion that people with mental illness are violent. Further, the existence of suicide in such cases should not be taken as an unambiguous marker of mental illness alone; suicide and mental illness are not interchangeable concepts. While the link between certain forms of mental illness/distress and suicide is marked, not only do many people experiencing mental illness/distress not suicide, but suicide can have multiple meanings and be mobilised in various ways (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022). Assuming suicide in homicide cases to equivocally and singularly signal mental illness/distress can deepen stigma around mental illness by positioning violence, suicide, and mental illness as a natural trifecta.

Sociological Approaches: Beyond Positivism As I have argued, feminist scholars and advocates have reason to approach the question of perpetrator mental illness with caution, especially given the weaponisation of men’s personal struggles against feminist domestic and family violence movements. More broadly, however, the concept of mental illness warrants a critical approach. Despite the modern reification of the concept as a scientific truth, from a sociological perspective mental health as both concept and phenomenon has been subject to some deep questioning. I wish to point to three main issues here: sociological concerns over positivistic constructions of mental illness; challenges to binary constructions of mental illness and mental health; and arguments about the failure within mental illness discourses to adequately account for the social determinants of mental distress—and how it is responded to. These features are well captured within Rimke’s (2016) critique of psychocentrism, “the view that human problems are due to a biologically-based flaw or deficit in the bodies and/or minds of individuals” (p. 5). According to Rimke and colleagues, psychocentrism as a hegemonic discourse and set of practices emerged out of the medicalisation of morality that occurred in the nineteenth century (Rimke & Hunt, 2002), shaped in part by a “hybridization of Christianist morality and Enlightenment positivism” (Rimke, 2016, p. 6). More recently, argues Rimke, psychocentrism has been reproduced in and through neoliberal cultures of individualism and consumer responsibility (Rimke, 2016). It reduces the source of mental distress to the bodies and minds of individuals and essentialises mental distress as a sign of an inherent (rather than socially produced) set of characteristics (ibid). The dominance of psychocentric understandings of health and illness has (re)produced a largely positivistic understanding of mental illness among the matrix of experts aligned with the field of mental health. This approach, says Rimke (2016), “largely rests upon the epistemological prestige of positivism derived from the prominence of natural sciences” (p. 8). It involves the assumption that a discrete and objectively determined set of characteristics can be identified and applied to classify

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individuals as experiencing (or not experiencing) particular mental ‘abnormalities’. As Rimke (2016) points out, however, these classifications are reliant on the “dubious scientific validity” (p. 5) of definitions of mental illness. Indeed, they often rely on tautological definitions; certain behaviours and affects are characterised as pathological, and pathology is identified by recognising these behaviours and affects in subjects (Rimke, 2016). This ignores the historical and cultural contexts in which notions of ‘health’ and ‘illness’, ‘normality’, and ‘deviance’ are constructed (Rimke, 2016), and cultural contexts that account for the way classifications of mental illness have changed over time. Indeed, there is a strong history of scientific notions of mental illness and disorder being used to police ‘deviance’ from social norms and to pathologise people’s responses to social oppression (see for example, Cohen, 2016; Ussher, 2011). Mental illness is also assigned differentially to subjects along gender (Ussher, 2011), sexual (Spandler & Carr, 2021), and racial lines (Duxbury et al. 2018). A healthy sociological scepticism should therefore be maintained when talking about mental illness: both defining and diagnosing it occurs within an evolving social context. These ideas have also spread beyond the social sciences; within psychiatry there is a growing resistance to the assumption that categories of psychopathology are natural (Galasinski, 2008). Instead, some in the field now regard psychiatric categories not as diseases that “naturally occur in the world, but [as] practical categories which help describe and deal with distress” (Galasinski, 2008, p. 3). Mental illness, as it has come to be understood through ‘psy-discourses’ (Rimke, 2016), has also tended to be viewed as a discrete category constructed in binary terms with mental health. This silences the existence of a complex, varied, and temporally dynamic continuum between intense distress and well-being. There is no denying that human beings experience a range of painful and distressing emotions ranging in intensity, type, and duration, and which affect their day-to-day living to varying degrees. Whereas mental illness or disorder may refer to “clusters of symptoms officially recognised as diagnoses by psychiatric classification systems” (Ridge et al., 2011) and provide the “practical categories” that Galasinski (2008, p. 3) describes, the term ‘distress’ captures experiences that may fit within these as well as those that do not. This is one of the reasons I prefer to employ the term mental illness/distress; it captures experiences of mental distress, cognizant of the fact that they may or may not currently be classified as ‘mental illnesses’. This is in many ways reflective of continuum thinking (Boyle, 2019), moving beyond positivistic approaches reliant on discrete, presumably ‘objective’ either/or categories to consider a range of different yet interconnected and overlapping emotional experiences. Third, sociologists have often pointed out that the concept of mental illness has largely been applied in a way that overlooks the tremendous and complex role of social determinants in shaping people’s mental and emotional experiences. Not limited to experiences of diagnosable mental illness in medicalised and positivistic terms, sociologists are interested in a range of affective experiences—including pleasurable as well as painful ones such as shame, failure, and despondency—showing how these are intertwined with social conditions and contexts. Sociologists “recognise that emotions are reflections of macro-societal processes as well as individual psychology” (Pease, 2012, p. 127). As such, Rimke (2016) has argued that mental

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and emotional distress is in fact a “social justice issue” (p. 4). Mental distress, she argues, is generated in large part by the social conditions in which people live. Treating it, therefore, in individualistic or biomedical ways cannot account for the depth and breadth of the social determinants of mental distress. This is another reason I prefer to use the term mental illness/distress; it highlights human distress more broadly as a valuable site of analysis of social conditions that reduce human flourishing. In thinking about how we may approach the question of mental illness/distress and familicide, considering these sociological critiques of dominant psy-discourses (Rimke, 2016) of mental illness can allow for a more nuanced and socially attuned approach.

A Feminist Sociological Approach to Mental Illness/Distress There is reason to be concerned about the use of gender-neutral, positivistic mental illness discourses to frame men’s violence against women. However, a feminist sociological approach can attend to mental illness/distress among perpetrators of violence while emphasising the role of gender and power and placing patriarchy at the centre of the analysis (DeKeseredy, 2021; Hunnicut, 2019; Pease, 2012). My argument in this section is that it is possible to move beyond the “divide between those who focus on the complex stories of individuals”, as represented in the traditions of psychiatry and psychology, and “those who seek scientifically robust generalisation”, as in the field of sociology (Scourfield et al., 2012, p. 466). It is possible to take men’s emotions in the context of their violence seriously, without “psychologising men at the expense of sociological understandings of men’s social power” (Pease, 2012, p. 125), by examining how men’s emotions are connected to patriarchal privilege. As Pease (2012) argues, profeminist activists and theorists have often sidestepped questions of men’s emotions that may divest discussions of issues such as violence against women of the central role of gender and power. However, men’s emotions, as they are situated within patriarchal structures—and particularly “their emotional attachment to privilege”—are implicated in the perpetuation of gendered violence (Pease, 2012, p. 126). Future research on familicide, murder-suicide, and domestic and family violence more broadly could, I believe, benefit from approaches that integrate a critical consideration of structural contexts and power relations, as well as lived experiences of distress (Chandler, 2019). Existing research on murder-suicide suggests that it cannot be seen as just one (murder) or the other (suicide) (McPhedran et al., 2018). Domestic and family violence, and mental illness/distress, often co-exist in such cases. Intimate partner femicide, in particular, is associated with both mental illness and previous domestic and family violence (Cullen et al., 2019). This being the case, we need to recognise the suicidology of familicide-suicide and other forms of murder-suicide, as well as the violence against others they engender. Yet, as McPhedran et al. (2018) argue, homicide-suicide is often interpreted either through the lens of suicidology

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or through the lens of criminology as violence against others. Making connections across these lenses could make for more nuanced understandings of murder-suicide. Feminist sociological scholarship offers two kinds of insights here. First, it has shown how the existence and form of mental distress and illness are shaped by gendered structures and cultural norms. Depression, anxiety, and suicide, for example, are highly gendered phenomena, located within systems of power (see for example, Fitzpatrick et al., 2022; River & Flood, 2021; Jaworski, 2016; Pease, 2012; Rogers & Pilgrim, 2014). The existence and type of mental illness/distress people experience are shaped, among other things, by the impact of gender on people’s identity, their interactions, and the way they are positioned within social structures. Second, feminist work has helped to theorise why some experiences of emotional distress are responded to with violence (especially though not exclusively violence against women), and why it is that men are more likely to respond in this way (for example, River & Flood, 2021; Pease, 2012). A feminist sociological approach compels us to ask: why violence as a response to mental distress? Indeed, when it comes to murder-suicide, we could trouble the assumption that suicide is necessarily only an expression of, for instance, depression. The question can be: what are the meanings and uses of violence against the self in this context? In the following sections, I will tackle each of these in brief: the way the existence and experience of mental illness/distress are gendered, focusing on depression and suicide, and the way violence as a response to it (and often, the dual deployment of violence against others and the self through suicide) is gendered.

Gendering Mental Illness/Distress Gender is a major, albeit not the only, social force that lays contours around people’s lived experiences in the world—including difficult or painful experiences such as loss, failure, unworthiness, stress, and overwhelm. There is a tendency towards essentialist and biological determinist talk about men and women’s mental health (Galasinski, 2008), invoking biological sex differences and other presumed innate sexed characteristics. However, to talk of gender and mental health in sociological terms is to recognise its social dimensions. These can be cultural or material— whether it be the impact of normative constructions of the ‘ideal man’ and the ‘ideal woman’ on people’s identities and interactions with others, or the impact of material conditions arising from the gendered distribution of labour, resources, and rights (Risman, 2004). This is not to deny altogether the role of biology, nor the very real embodied experiences of mental illness/distress. But as Galasinski (2008) argues, “whether biological or not, depression is also social” (p. 5). Sexed differences in rates and types of mental illness among men and women often signal the role of gender in social terms. In other words, sex-based patterns in male and female rates of different types of mental illness or distress are a good litmus test for detecting a range of possible underlying social causes to be investigated as well. For example, highly differentiated statistical rates of suicide among men and women

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have spurned research uncovering gender in suicidal practices (Chandler, 2019). Also, while diagnosable ‘depression’ rates are higher overall in women, heterosexual men are more likely to experience depression if unmarried while heterosexual women are more likely to experience depression’ while married (Galasinski, 2008). This can tell us much about differential gendered experiences within heterosexual marriages. Men are more likely than women to suicide (Galasinski, 2008), with a startling 75% of people dying by suicide in Australia being men (River & Flood, 2021). However, while completed suicide is higher among men, attempts at suicide and deliberate self-harm are more common in women, suggesting something gendered about the operationalisation of suicidal behaviour (Chandler, 2019). Many researchers have argued these differences are not about innate biological traits but more about gendered “emotional practice” (River & Flood, 2021). For instance, depression and suicide in men have been connected to the inability to align with cultural expectations of manhood. Various scholars have found that this is often tied to the sense of failure associated with thwarted aspirations of hegemonic masculinity (Chandler, 2019; Cleary, 2012; Scourfield et al., 2012; Scourfield, 2005; Valkonen and Hänninen, 2013). The pressures associated with pursuing and maintaining these hegemonic ideals—the pressures of masculine duty, stoicism, repeated demonstrations of dominance and success, for example—also shape ostensibly hegemonically masculine men’s depression. Accordingly, Valkonen and Hänninen (2013) conclude that “depression could be seen as a consequence of both realised and unattained hegemonic masculinity” (p. 160). How depression is experienced and responded to is also gendered. In contexts in which rates of suicide in men are high, gender norms foster a view of painful or distressing emotions as weak and unmasculine (Cleary, 2012; Galasinski, 2008). Dominant constructions of masculinity in these contexts therefore operate to dissuade men from disclosing painful emotions and vulnerabilities or seeking help (Cleary, 2005, 2012; River & Flood, 2021). Instead, they are more likely to engage in practices more commonly associated with masculinity—such as the use of alcohol and drugs (Cleary, 2012) or violence (River & Flood, 2021)—which can in turn worsen their distress and progressively narrow their options for coping until suicide is considered the only viable response (Cleary, 2012). Importantly, Cleary (2012) emphasises that because it is gender in social terms that drives these responses to painful emotions, higher rates of suicide among men are not attributable to any inherently masculine characteristics, but rather are crafted by the specific models of masculinity that are offered within the contemporary culture. As such, she concludes that “binary notions of male and female emotions lack substance”; instead, higher rates of suicidal practices among men reflect “that the expression of emotions is gender-specific and constrained in some social localities”. This importance of gender within context is also effectively shown in Bryant and Garnham’s (2015) study of Australian farmer suicide. Suicide in this context, they found, is strongly tied to an inability to meet normative expectations of Australian farming masculinity, a particular construction of masculinity with deep historical roots in Australia. In the wake of recent neoliberal farming reforms, the gendered

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cultural expectations of farming masculinity have collided with structural conditions that deny their attainment, producing a deep and seemingly irrevocable sense of shame (Bryant & Garnham, 2015). It is, therefore, a combination of gendered cultural expectations and structural barriers to achieve them that drives farmer shame and suicide as a response to it. Traditional agrarian discourses constitute the subjectivities of farmers as ‘Aussie battlers’ where virtues such as self-sacrifice and battling to survive are coupled with masculine pride. Pride is also attached to traditional constructions of the ‘farmer’ as being producer of food for the common good of the nation. However, the pride and self-worth derived from these traditional subject positions are being eroded by the political economy of neoliberalism which threatens farm economic viability through withdrawal of agricultural subsidies and supports. When farm viability is threatened and farmland degraded through drought or economic pressures, farmers experience shame and an ‘undoing’ of masculine subjectivity that constitutes a desubjugation of their farming identity” (Bryant & Garnham, 2015, p. 78),

Bryant and Garnham (2015) offer a compelling illustration of the context-specific dialectic between gendered identity and structure in producing mental distress and constructing suicide as a perceived legitimate response to it. Rather than viewing painful emotions such as shame from a psychocentric lens as located within the body and mind of the individual (Rimke, 2016), they remind us that these painful emotions are socially produced and responded to in a way that is informed by culture. Experiences of intense shame and powerlessness which can undergird men’s use of violence against women (Websdale, 2010) exemplify “the way in which powerful structural social relations are felt” (Bryant & Garnham, 2015, p. 72). Indeed, as Chandler (2019) reminds us, considering the “embodied, felt, ‘lived’ experience” (p. 1351) of mental distress and suicide can and has been a growing part of sociological studies. It is possible, and important, to take people’s lived experiences of mental distress and self-harm seriously, while situating them within “intersecting structures of power which shape social identities and practices” (Chandler, 2019, p. 1351). Emotions are in part produced through gendered power relations and can operate to reproduce them (Pease, 2012). The gender order, therefore, can lead men to become emotionally invested in their relative gendered power and privilege (Pease, 2012),5 using domination or even violence to reassert existing power relations. Violence and aggression can, in other words, be both a response to distress and a means to “maintain men’s privileged subject position” (Pease, 2012, p. 132). As Chandler (2019) argues, in engaging in a critical phenomenology of male suicide, we must avoid positioning men “as the ‘new victims’ in a way which does not attend simultaneously to [their] privileges—and privileged expectations” (p. 1362). Gender intersects with a range of other social forces, of course, and these will have a significant bearing on experiences of mental illness/distress (Chandler, 2019). For instance, in the UK much higher rates of suicide exist among men experiencing socio-economic disadvantage or by LGBTQI + men (Chandler, 2019). In the US, 5

As Pease (2012) notes, this power and privilege is not experienced homogeneously by men, due to a range of intersecting factors. However, patriarchal power relations do ensure that all men benefit in some ways from patriarchy, even if they may experience oppression along other social vectors.

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the highest rates of suicide are among white men, though followed closely by Indigenous and Native American men (Chandler, 2019). In contrast, in Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities experience substantially higher rates of suicide than white populations, especially among young people. In 2019, 5.7% of deaths among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were a result of suicide, compared to 1.9% of the non-indigenous population (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2021). Again, rates among men in all these cases are much higher than among women, but gender is clearly not the only salient factor in suicide rates; class, race, sexual and gender identity, and national context all play a role. In short, experiences of mental illness/distress are produced in and through intersectional gendered contexts.

Gendering Mental Illness/Distress in the Context of Violence As shown, the existence of mental illness/distress is gendered. The second key question we should ask in relation to familicide is: why this form of violence as a response? First, it is important to remember that just as mental illness/distress is socially produced and mediated, so are suicidal practices. While suicide is strongly associated with mental illness and distress, suicidal practices are not homogenous, and suicide is not always necessarily or singularly an expression of distress. Further, suicide in the context of mental illness/distress should not always be assumed as a non-agentic act. Research on the suicidal practices of men has shown, for instance, that suicide—much like violence against others—can be mobilised as a social practice in ways that can be deliberate (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022). To contextualise this, a significant percentage of men who die by suicide had also engaged in violence against female partners and former partners, especially forms of abuse resembling intimate terrorism (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022). In fact, the more severe the violence men perpetrate against women, the greater the risk appears for it to correspond with suicide. Women seeking help for domestic violence commonly report threats of suicide and suicide attempts as part of their abusers’ repertoire of control (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022). Some suicide—whether threatened, attempted, or completed—can be used to exert control over victim-survivors of abuse, to punish them, or to cause them distress (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022). More broadly, Chandler (2019) suggests that—just like domestic and family violence—suicide can be an act of control in the face of “jarring” disruptions to life experiences to which certain perpetrators feel entitled. In this respect, too, continuum thinking is useful. Rather than assuming suicide to be positioned solely as an act of mental distress (existing simultaneously with but causally separate from acts of violence against others), continuum thinking would encourage us to see the fluidity between experiences of distress and deliberate practices of control. Further, the experience of mental illness/distress is not sufficient to account for why it is responded to with not just violence against the self, but violence against (multiple) others. This is a point worth maintaining, because to situate violence

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against others as caused by mental illness/distress is to mistakenly paint these as inherently violent states. As River and Flood (2021) explain, “emotions are not merely personal feelings, but are also mobilised in social relations” (p. 911). Experiences of distress are not just felt but are materialised into social practices. Yet, often lacking from public discussions about mental illness or the personal struggles of perpetrators of murder-suicide is how and why those feelings are acted upon through violence (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Kalish & Kimmel, 2010). The link between distressed masculinity and the use of violence is often naturalised and unquestioned (Buiten & Coe, 2022). Writing on a case of paternal filicide-suicide as reported in the Australian news, McPherson (2016) captures this gap in thinking. [The perpetrator] may well have had a mental health issue, or an anger management issue, or some other kind of issue. Mental health issues should always be taken seriously and acted upon. However, the more pertinent question is why this man’s predicament manifested in the particular behaviour of killing children… The question we must ask is, whatever the reason prompting his behaviour, why was this the behaviour he engaged in (McPherson, 2016).

As she further points out, by not asking ‘why’ of violent social action in response to mental distress, violence is normalised and rendered invisible. By not asking ‘why’ of violence, our lens pivots from the undeniably widespread and systematic use of gendered violence against women and children to the topic of mental illness in a way that fails to see the connections. If we conceive of murder-suicide merely as a case of an otherwise ‘good man’ overcome by mental distress, we can forget that his actions in response to that distress are manifestly patriarchal and “take place in a broader patriarchal culture” (McPherson, 2016, n.p.). Psychiatric explanations of familicide seldom examine this wider context. For example, while an accumulation of psychic tension and distorted thinking (Schlesinger, 2000) and a deep sense of personal failure and despondency (Ewing, 1997) may well undergird familicide, we may ask: why is the murder of women and children the way in which this is sought to be expunged? So, the second key contribution a feminist sociological lens on mental illness/distress can make is to encourage us to investigate the space between feeling and action. What are the social conditions that can lead some experiences of distress to be translated by some people into violent or aggressive actions (River & Flood, 2021)? This, importantly, also challenges the stigmatising assumption that mental illness is the cause of violence (Blood et al., 2002). As River and Flood (2021) observe, masculinity can be constructed by mobilising painful emotions in ways that increase masculine standing, for example, through violence and aggression against women and other men. As discussed in the previous section, if painful emotions are regarded as incompatible with the pursuit of hegemonic masculinity, more masculine ways of discharging emotional pain and gaining a sense of control over their distress may be pursued. As the use of alcohol and violence, for example, are culturally inscribed as masculine (rather than vulnerability and disclosure), this renders men more likely than women in some cultural contexts to manifest their mental distress by engaging in these practices (River & Flood, 2021). Referring back to the study by Bryant and Garnham (2015) exploring suicide and farming masculinities in Australia, we can see gender constructions that link mental

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or emotional distress and violence. Constructions of farming masculinity and the way they have been threatened by economic restructuring in rural farming areas, as Bryant and Garnham have shown, undergird rising mental illness and distress among farming men. At the same time, Pease (2010) has shown that the same features (constructions of farming masculinity and economic restructuring) often undergird and exacerbate violence against women in rural Australian contexts. He has also pointed to men’s emotional attachment to patriarchal privilege as an important factor for understanding some men’s use violence; patriarchal privilege is part of what produces and feeds the emotion, and violence as a response to it is part of maintaining it (Pease, 2012). This expresses the ways gender threads across the dimensions of mental distress and patriarchal violence.

Familicide and the Gendered Production and Mobilisation of Distress Looking at work on familicide, we can see the gendered production and mobilisation of emotional distress. Research suggests that men who commit familicide feel a deep sense of failure and shame as men (Ewing, 1997; Websdale, 2010). They also respond to this sense of failure and shame in hegemonically masculine terms— through violence and through control in determining the fate of wives and children. Both emotional distress and the wielding of power and control are salient. In their work on perpetrators of familicide-suicide in the context of separation, for instance, Johnson and Sachman (2014) remind us that control and domination co-exist with deep mental anguish in these cases. A potent sense of hopelessness, abandonment, depression, and emptiness exists along with humiliated rage and a narcissistic desire for control over their emotions and the lives of their partner and children. Perpetrators’ mental distress is therefore responded to with violence, in the pursuit of “omnipotent control” over “life and death” (Johnson and Sachman, 2014, p. 109). In familicide cases in the context of separation, they argue, The lethal solution emanates from a retaliatory motivation, where the rage is expressed in murdering the children, to cause the maximum pain to their mother who at this time is experienced as ‘all bad’ … [T]here is also a simultaneous depression with strong suicidal elements that emanates from the feelings of rejection, loss, and emptiness (Johnson & Sachman, 2014, p. 109).

While Johnson and Sachman explore these dynamics through a primarily psychocentric lens, drawing from “attachment theory, personality dysfunction and the neurobiology of trauma”, when read alongside sociological insights on gender and violence an appreciation of the mutual significance of mental distress and gendered power and control can be gained. Oliffe et al. (2015) also found that a common theme cutting across mass murder-suicides, including familicide, is perpetrators’ “acute and chronic mental and psychological distress […] entwined with idealized masculinity” (p. 482) which is pursued through the controlling act of murder-suicide.

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Websdale’s (2010) familicide study, explored in previous chapters, is an interesting text through which to explore the question of mental illness and distress among perpetrators. Websdale, as discussed in Chap. 4, aims to move beyond what he perceives as a simplistic feminist power and control model, while maintaining a sociological lens. He urges readers to move across the discipline boundaries of sociology, psychology, and history to understand the emotions of intense distress such as shame and humiliation that drive familicide. Websdale’s proposition is that male power, control, and entitlement are not sufficient to understand offenders, who usually experience strong feelings of powerlessness and lack of control. Referring to feminist perspectives on power in the context of domestic and family violence, Websdale (2010) argues that his point is “not that these perspectives are incorrect as much as it is that they do not take us far enough” (p. 35), and that we need to attend to the “the hidden workings of shame and humiliation and the central role these emotions play in these mass interpersonal killings” (p. 35). As discussed in Chap. 4, Websdale is critical of what he perceives as a feminist inclination to consider primarily the “ostensible” workings of privilege and power (often focusing on physical violence), at the expense of an accounting of the “frailties of power, and its contested deployment” (Websdale, 2010, p. 35). He therefore draws on the works of feminist psychoanalysts, along with sociological theory on the workings of modernity, to suggest that men’s gendered and historically situated social disconnection and shame helps to explain their over-representation as familicide offenders Failure to achieve normative masculine standards undergirds their shame and humiliation, as does the repression of feeling that arises from modernity, making the “figurations of feeling” (p. 67) that drive familicide gendered but not fully describable through male dominance. Familicide is for Websdale (2010), therefore, explained by “contingent, relational, and contested” (p. 264) power relations wherein “it was the diminution or evaporation of a feeling of power that seems central to understanding the familicide” (p. 264). The insights gained from Websdale’s extensive study remind us that those who wield absolute power and engage in acts of extreme violence, even cruelty, can feel tremendously painful and self-negating emotions. At the same time, however, I am concerned that Websdale at times implicitly conflates a feeling of an absence of power with its actual absence, not attending enough to the existence of social and material power even in the absence of a recognition of such power by those who hold it. Greater weight needs to be given in an analysis of familicide, I believe, to the role of socially produced and structurally supported sense of entitlement to power and control in these cases in coming to the ‘solution’ these killers do. An unrealised sense of entitlement shaped by multiple vectors of privilege can influence the decision to act both homicidally and suicidally (Chandler, 2019). As discussed in Chap. 4, the feeling of entitlement to act in this way on behalf of all in the family is gendered, as well as classed, racialized, and generational. Still, I consider Websdale’s attention to working through the complexities around simultaneous feelings of emotional distress and expressions of intense and unadulterated violence extremely valuable. For me, there is great benefit in unpacking the gendered nature of mental and emotional distress, and its role in violence, provided we do not lose sight of the patriarchal

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nature of this distress and how it is responded to. Familicide-suicide can involve both rage and the desire to control his partner, and hopelessness and depression (Sachman & Harris Johnson, 2014). Looking back at the case of Geoff Hunt, while the shame and humiliation might have been intense—and the note he left behind, “It’s my fault, all my fault”, suggests this—the sense of ownership and entitlement woven into his acts is evident. In writing this—as we consider the mental and emotional distress of perpetrators—I am reminded that his eight-year-old daughter, Mia, was sitting upright in bed, against the headboard, when he shot her at close range in the forehead (Barnes, 2015). It was not her decision, nor that of her brother, sister, or mother. The spilling over of pain, humiliation, and shame was not alone in that room—present too must have been a determination to go from room to room to complete each murder, to exert control and incontestable power over the lives and futures of every individual—and the family as a whole. The coroner said, it was not malice that motivated Geoffrey Hunt, but the “self-image of his position as the head of the family” (Barnes, 2015, p. 22). To point out the control and entitlement embedded in acts of violence is not, I would argue, just to focus on the overt expression of power or a failure to acknowledge the complexities of power as Websdale suggests. Overt expressions of power are, after all, also connected to a deeper, subtler, more socially reified, and diffuse sense of entitlement to power—one that may not always be expressed so cruelly, but is part of the workings of everyday patriarchy. Considering feelings of powerlessness among perpetrators is important—essential, even, if this is one of the most consistent features of familicide offenders (Websdale, 2010). However, this sense of powerlessness must be considered in the context of the social fact of patriarchy. As Hunnicutt (2009) argues, the concept of patriarchy is both highly salient to understanding men’s violence against women and flexible enough to account for experiences of powerlessness. While earlier feminist theorisations of male violence against women “evoked a dichotomous ‘us versus them’ social arrangement, where men consciously used violence as a tool for the social control of women”, there is growing recognition that the reality is more complex than this. There is more than one vector of inequality in people’s lives, and men disenfranchised in some ways “may use violence to reinforce quite possibly the only position of domination available to him” (Hunnicutt, 2009, p. 560). It could be argued that the deep shame felt at not achieving hegemonic masculinity is deepened by its connection to structural power and privilege, and the cultural assumption that such power and privilege should be men’s (and in the case of familicide, often middle class, white men). Very real experiences of disenfranchisement, anguish, and powerlessness can accompany violence, but this does not divest it of its connection to power.

The Patriarchal Contexts of Mental Illness/Distress People do not commonly experience or think about their own lives through vectors of ‘gender’ and ‘power’ and, as Websdale (2010) shows, those enacting gendered

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power through violence may not see it that way. However, their experiences of distress cannot be disconnected from the omni-relevance of gender. As Rimke (2016) notes, “the cumulative pain and suffering due to inequalities takes its toll on individual minds, hearts, bodies, communities” (p. 9). In gendered terms, this cumulative pain and suffering presents “patriarchal taxes” (Oliffe et al., 2015), the costs of patriarchy that include and extend beyond perpetrators of violence to their victims and those who survive their violence. We should care about the mental distress of violent men, insofar as it presents clues as to the gendered causes of violence and a threat to the safety of women and children (as well as other men). We can do this in a way that does not lose sight of its connection to gender and power, and in a way that avoids the pitfalls of psychocentrism by engaging with mental health and the social practices of violence against the self and others from a feminist sociological lens.

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Part II

Familicide-Suicide in the News

Chapter 7

The Cases

Familicide-Suicide Cases Under Analysis The aim of this chapter is to provide information on what was publicly known about the familicide-suicides that were reported on in the media in Australia between 2014 and 2020. Outlining what was known about each case helps to provide the background for exploring the complex dynamics of representation in the remainder of the second part of this book. For each case, I will provide a summary of the information about what happened (as it was publicly known at the time) as well as the major themes and information that were focused on in news reporting, at this point without an attempt to make sense of these patterns. In presenting these cases, it is important to tread carefully. We will never know the full details of what happened in the moments leading up to the murders. We will not know what the people in these stories felt and experienced. Even to call them ‘cases’ seems hollow, so removed from the fact that those involved were full people with stories, experiences, and lives of their own. This book looks at how such horrific events are represented in the hope of advancing a better understanding of gender-based violence in its various forms and how it can be more carefully and meaningfully represented in the news. However, it cannot claim to represent the truth of people’s experiences of this violence. These stories are heartbreaking and infuriating. Like many other researchers, part of what drives the work I do is sadness and anger—that these things continue to happen and that they continue to be portrayed in ways that silence, minimise, or condone the loss of people’s lives to violence. For many, myself included, these cases are especially sad and angering to look at because they also involve children— children as full human beings deserving of respect, love, safety, and a voice. Yet, children’s experiences, as I will show in this book, are often obscured. Part of what I hope comes from this work, therefore, is to grant children in such cases greater visibility and attention. To bring children to the fore of the discussion, however, is confronting.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_7

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It also necessarily comes with some level of uncertainty. Because familicidesuicide seldom leaves direct survivors, there is so much we cannot know about the specifics of each case. We cannot always know with certainty, for instance, whether domestic and family violence occurred in families prior to the murders. So much domestic and family violence goes unreported, even unknown to close extended family and friends, particularly more subtle forms of coercion or control. We do not— and will not—know what it was really like to be the children in those families. Nor will we know what the adult victims and perpetrators experienced in their most private moments, in their homes, away from extended family, friends, and neighbours. The picture will necessarily be incomplete. The information presented here may capture much of what happened, but it cannot capture the most intimate facts, nor fully convey those experiences. This is especially so for victims. While work such as Websdale’s (2010) has managed to explore surviving familicide perpetrators’ emotions in detail, such depth is not available on the experiences of victims, most of whom do not survive to tell their stories. With these limitations in mind, it is nonetheless important before embarking on an analysis of representations to provide a summary of what was known in each case. There are two main sources of information about the events and what may have preceded them that I have drawn on. One is the news media. As has been noted in research on filicide and familicide, without extensive public records on these crimes much of the information available comes from news media itself, which is therefore often used as a basis for research on these topics (O’Hagan, 2014). This is particularly difficult in the context of a book analysing media representations—the representations, themselves, come to be relied on for certain descriptive information around the cases. This source of information is, of course, selective and incomplete, already framed. While journalists are required to adhere to factual reporting, what facts are sought and included contributes significantly to how meaning around an issue is constructed. As such, I proceed here with caution when drawing on news reports themselves for information. It is not my intention to suggest that this information provides a complete picture of these cases—far from it. However, it does tell us about the range of available information that was sought by and/or provided to journalists, information at their disposal to report on. The second main source of information is coronial inquests, where these have occurred. The table below outlines where coronial inquests into reported cases had taken place at the time of writing and where findings were made publicly available. This becomes relevant later in the book, as we shall see, since testimony at and findings of coronial inquests can have an important impact on news reporting on these cases. Like the news media, coronial inquests are not ideologically free processes. Whose ‘expert’ or ‘lay’ testimony is drawn on, how they each perceive and frame the issue, and how this collection of information—including deeply personal accounts by friends and family members testifying at the inquest—is then interpreted by and presented in a report by the coroner is culturally invested. They are representations and, as Bacchi (2009) reminds us, all representations involve interpretations and choices. Coroners’ reports, however, can provide some extended contextual (and more carefully fact-checked) information than may have been available in many

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news media reports. As such, I draw extensively on coronial inquest findings in this chapter, where these are available. As a note on terminology, I have chosen to name cases after the person who committed the murder-suicide. Using the last name of perpetrators as a shorthand for cases was motivated by two considerations. First, in practical terms, victims’ last names often differ not only from those of perpetrators but from each other. This makes referring to cases by victims’ last names difficult. Second, as situated within a body of feminist work, I wish to ensure that this book centres the agency and responsibility of perpetrators. In doing so, I also hope to emphasise that the deaths are not a collective tragedy of the family but the outcome of perpetrators’ actions. While this is my rationale for using perpetrator last names, one of my concerns in doing so is to inadvertently minimise or erase the identities of victims in the process. As such, victims’ first names are referenced often throughout the book, reminding myself and readers of the people at the centre of these events who lost their lives. As a final note, I have also aimed to remove direct reference in the book to the names of family members, friends, and other witnesses with close ties to the cases. Though their statements to the media are accessible in the public sphere, I do not wish to draw undue attention to their identities here. I do, however, reference the names of social and political commentators, those who proffer editorial content and state coroners (Table 7.1). Table 7.1 Available coronial inquests (2015–2020) Case

Year

Coronial inquest available

Findings of

Coroners’ court Findings released

Baxter familicide

2020

Noa

n/a

n/a

n/a

Miles familicide

2018

No

n/a

n/a

n/a

Manrique familicide

2016

Yes

Deputy state coroner E. truscott

Coroners court of new south wales

17/06/2019

Milne familicide

2015

Yes

Coroner david day

Coroners court of new south wales

15/07/2016

Hunt familicide

2014

Yes

NSW state coroner magistrate Michael Barnes

Coroners court of new south wales

9/10/2015

Total and sex

5 (5 men)

a

A 2022 coronial inquest had not yet been completed at the time of writing

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2014: The Hunt Familicide Kim Hunt, Geoff Hunt and their three children, Fletcher (10 years old), Mia (8 years old) and Phoebe (6 years old) Hunt lived on their family farm, Watch Hill, near Lockhart in New South Wales. On the afternoon of the 9th September 2014, a Disability Support Worker visiting their home found Kim’s body lying on the ground outside the house, a man’s jacket over her head. When she removed the jacket, she found that Kim had a severe head injury and rushed inside the house to call emergency services. She also noticed Geoff Hunt’s utility vehicle a few hundred metres away, parked next to the farm dam (Barnes, 2015). When the police arrived, they drove down to the dam and found Geoff’s car with the keys in the ignition and shotgun shells lying on the front seat, but did not find Geoff. On returning to the house, they discovered the bodies of Mia, Fletcher, and Phoebe, each in separate rooms in the house, in bed wearing their pyjamas. Each had a single gunshot wound to the head that, it was later determined, was fired at close range (Barnes, 2015). Mia had been found sitting partially upright on her pillow, suggesting she was probably awake at the time of her death. Divers searched the dam the next day, on 10 September 2014, and found Geoff Hunt’s body with a shotgun injury to the roof of his mouth (Barnes, 2015). When the news first broke, Geoff Hunt’s body had not yet been found. The media reported that a “manhunt” was underway (Anonymous, 2014). The following day, it was reported that Geoff’s body had been found and the case was confirmed a murdersuicide. A note written by Geoff Hunt found in the house, revealed to the public during the inquest, read: “I am sorry. It’s all my fault. Totally mine” (Barnes, 2015, p. 15). Kim Hunt’s sister, as reported in the media, expressed deep sadness at the loss of all family members and did not in early reporting express any anger towards her brother-in-law. Her words were shared in various media reports. “All that can be felt is an indescribable numbness and all encompassing, heart wrenching sadness with losing my sister, brother-in-law, nephew and nieces… My most beautiful, spirited sister, Kim, whom I idolised and adored; my dear brother-in-law, Geoff, who was incredibly generous and kind-hearted; my beautiful nephew and nieces Fletcher, Mia, and Phoebe, who I cherished and thought of as my own children’” (Partridge, 2014a). During the coronial inquest, it was suggested that “in contrast to other cases of family murders and suicide where the deaths are preceded by custody disputes and sometimes a history of family violence”, this was not the case for the Hunts. Instead, as outlined in Chap. 6, the forensic psychologist presented her opinion that Geoff was primarily motivated by suicide, killing his family because he “could not contemplate separating from Kim or his children” and believed they “could not cope without him” (Barnes, 2015, p. 17). A key point of focus in the coronial inquest as well as media coverage was the impact on the family of a traumatic brain injury sustained by Kim Hunt in 2012. According to the coronial report, “in 2012 Kim had a very serious car crash that had a major impact on all family members and indeed is likely to have been pivotal in their deaths” (Barnes, 2015, p. 4). According to witnesses, the injuries sustained by

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Kim Hunt during the car accident affected her personality and mood and curtailed her ability to “filter” what she said (Barnes, 2015, p. 8). As a result, she was described post-accident of being “disinhibited in her criticism of others” and “persistently, stridently and vociferously critical of Geoffrey” (Barnes, 2015, p. 11). In the media, even before the coronial inquest, it was also reported via family and friends that the “strain” of Kim’s injury was central to understanding Geoff Hunt’s actions (Partridge, 2014b). While some reported that prior to the accident Kim and Geoff Hunt had a happy marriage, others testified at the hearing that there had been troubles in their marriage for some time (Barnes, 2015). Both Kim and Geoff Hunt were variously described as suffering from depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues over the years, and as having expressed suicidal thoughts (Barnes, 2015, p. 5 and 7). Kim had expressed shortly before her death that she did not love Geoff (Barnes, 2015, p. 10), and Geoff had indicated at some points that he did not have faith their relationship would last (Barnes, 2015, p. 5 and 11). The coroner indicated he believed that pre-existing tensions within the marriage and mental health issues had been severely exacerbated by the car accident and that Geoff had kept the extent of his emotional troubles well hidden over the years (Barnes, 2015). The night before the bodies were discovered, it appeared that Geoff had “made plans for the following day and had made the children’s school lunches” (Barnes, 2015, p. 21). However, there had been observed tensions between himself and Kim. The coroner indicated, however, that he believed that “clearly the deaths were not premeditated” (Barnes, 2015, p. 21). The coroner concluded as follows in respect to motive: I accept the evidence of the forensic psychologist that Geoff’s primary intention was to end his own life. It is well recognised that people at risk of suicide frequently act impulsively, with little planning or premeditation. For some reason, that night Geoff came to act on the view that he could not go on, that his life was not going to improve and that he was better off dead. Because of his emotional dependence on his wife and essential self-image of his position as the head of a family that he believed was dependent upon him, his distorted logic led him to conclude that the children and his wife would not cope without him. He then set about systemically and cold bloodedly killing each of them, before killing himself (Barnes, 2015, p. 22).

While indicating sympathy for Geoff Hunt and emphasising his belief that Geoff’s motives were not ones of malice, the coroner criticised the familicide as “inexcusable; the absolute worst of crimes” (Barnes, 2015, p. 22), saying that it was “unfathomable why Geoff Hunt would not have actively explored [options for facilitating a marital separation from Kim] before taking the outrageous actions he did” (Barnes, 2015, p. 22). Mia, Phoebe, Fletcher, Kim, and Geoff Hunt were buried side by side in a combined memorial service (Carswell, 2014).

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2015: The Milne Familicide On the 1st of February 2015, Darren Milne drove a car containing his wife, Susana Estevez Castillo, and his two sons, Liam Milne (11) and Benjamin Milne (7) into a tree at the side of a strip of road in northern New South Wales. Susana, Liam, and Darren Milne died at the scene. Susana, it was revealed, was 29 weeks pregnant at the time of the accident (Day, 2016). Benjamin, aged seven, was evacuated to hospital. He suffered severe injuries and was placed in an induced coma. His aunt flew out from the United Kingdom to be with him. Three months after the accident she reported Benjamin was recovering well and able to walk again (Bastians, 2015b). Of all the cases covered in this book, the Milne familicide received the least news coverage. When the story emerged, it was reported as a “horror car crash” (Keene & Mullany, 2015) that had killed three family members and left one fighting for his life. Soon after, however, suspicion was raised that the accident may have been deliberate, with witnesses observing the car had been travelling on a straight, level road at high speed and showed no signs of swerving, loss of control or brake lights when it drove off the road and collided with a tree (Day, 2016). Once these suspicions were reported in the news, the story faded from the media as investigations took place. It took a coronial inquest, and the findings released in 2016 (Day, 2016), to confirm the car crash had in fact been an act of murder-suicide. The coronial inquest was dominated, unlike the Hunt inquest, by police expertise. Rather than aiming to establish in detail the motives for murder-suicide, the concern in the coronial inquest was to deduce whether Darren Milne had acted intentionally in crashing the vehicle. Witnesses spoke of seeing the car collide with the tree in a way that appeared deliberate. A leading senior constable testified that, within the car’s engine bay, two metal canisters filled with fuel were found, elaborately installed. The coroner stated that “the fuel canisters were set in such a way as to ignite upon creation of a short circuit which would have loaded the wiring with an Amp load sufficient to melt those canisters and cause ignition” (Day, 2016, p. 6). While it had not worked, the coroner deduced that the aim had been for the fuel to ignite upon impact with the tree. A Dashcam was also retrieved and examined. It showed what appeared to be a series of test-drives along the strip of road where the accident took place (Day, 2016). A photo of the crash scene taken by Daren Milne two days before the car crash was also found (Day, 2016). Notes were found on his iPad, dated a few months prior, that suggested the plan had been made then. In it, he appeared to reference their children’s diagnosis with a genetic condition, Fragile X Syndrome, as part of the motive. It’s not worth it, neither of us have the skills to make it work. We have both given it our best shot over a long period of time. There is too much conspiring against us. G got the calculation wrong, it’s that simple. L and B are both happy, B doesn’t know it yet, it is a good time to go. It is only going to get tougher as time goes on. We have been completely S’d over, maybe we can stop it from happening to someone else. They are going to have to manage ADD and diabetes, it is going to be too much. They need to exercise and manage their health, it is going to be hard to see this fail. Things are going to get progressively harder for Ben, he hasn’t seen any malice or bullying yet but it is coming. From this point on I need

2016: The Manrique Familicide

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to be totally focussed, forget everything else, need to source comfort from the fact. See if A bags can be disabled. Finalise medical records, disks and leave copies. Letter to HGA, correspondence. Start cleaning stuff up” (cited in Day, 2016, p. 6–7).

A second document was found. It read much like a to-do list for implementing his plan: Take DVR out of car as to not raise suspicion. Carry out recon after daylight savings, full day on RDO. Look at Old Pacific Highway to Central Coast. Stay until dark. Practise at least ten times. Memorise all markers, learn the road backwards. Copy all work, personal stuff to portable disk. Start taking personal stuff home. Leave credit cards well in credit. Leave enough money to pay next phone (cited in Day, 2016, p. 7).

The sons’ medical conditions did not form a major part of the coronial inquest, a point that was criticised by some parents from the Fragile X community (as will be discussed in Chapter Eleven). However, the coroner noted that the two children, Liam and Benjamin, were on the autism spectrum and had been diagnosed with Fragile X syndrome (Day, 2016). It was testified that Susana and Darren had gone through a series of IVF treatments in order to conceive a child without the condition and that Susana was nearly 30 weeks pregnant at the time she was killed (Day, 2016). Darren’s psychologist testified he had been treated for depression in the past, discontinuing his treatment shortly before he penned the notes detailing his plans. However, the psychologist said suicidal or homicidal ideation had never been expressed (Day, 2016). The coroner’s concluding remarks, while acknowledging the context of the sons’ conditions, were critical of Darren Milne. I quote them here at length. It is unusual for a Coroner to comment on the conduct of a person who has taken their own life. Two other lives were taken by him and the actions of Darren Milne should attract more than the usual disapproval attached to murder and suicide. He made assumptions about the quality of the boys’ lives. He disregarded the boys’ fundamental human rights. He disregarded potential advances in medical science potentially beneficial to the boys. He assumed successful execution of his plan without regard to the possibility that the front seat occupants, he and Susana may not survive, but that one or both the rear seat passengers would survive, terribly injured, severely disabled or otherwise, or worse, be conscious , trapped inside the cabin when the car caught fire. His [sic] disregarded the excellent services available to persons contemplating self-harm. He had a psychologist. He dropped out of treatment. The telephone directory book lists many registered psychologists in practice who could assist him and others contemplating suicide. [...] Further the National Fragile X Chromosome Association of Australia offers support for parents and those with the condition. [...] Suicide is a preventable death, and in this case, the deaths of Liam and Susana were preventable. I close this inquest (Day, 2016, p. 10–11).

2016: The Manrique Familicide Maria Lutz and Fernando Manrique immigrated from Colombia in 2000 (Truscott, 2019). They settled in the suburb of Davidson, Sydney, and had two children, Elisa and Martin. On the 17th of October 2016, a friend of Maria called police when she did not turn up at the school canteen, in which she volunteered, and could not

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be contacted. The children, Elisa and Martin, were also not at school and Fernando Manrique was not answering his phone. Police went to her house to conduct a welfare check. On receiving no answer and noting both cars were in the driveway, they conducted a search of the perimeter and saw through a slightly open window Maria lying in bed, unresponsive to their calls. They forced entry into the house and found the body of Fernando Manrique lying face down on the floor of the house. They found the body of Martin, ten years old, in his bed, and the family dog Tequila on the floor of his room. The bodies of Maria and Elisa, eleven years old, were found lying side by side in Maria’s bed (Truscott, 2019). The media reported there were ‘no signs of violence’ (Anonymous, 2016a, b; Benny-Morrison 2016d; Brennan & Patterson, 2016). However, it was soon established that the likely cause of death was poisonous gas and that its circulation had been deliberate, a fact reported on in the media. Upon further inspection of the house, police had found two cylinders of carbon monoxide gas behind the house, connected with hoses that ran up into the roof. The house had been rigged to pump lethal gas into the bedrooms of Maria and Martin (Truscott, 2019). Some early media reporting insinuated that it may have been a joint act of murdersuicide by both parents (for example, Brennan, 2016). A focal aspect of the reporting was on the assumed or speculated role that Elisa and Martin’s disability had played. Both children had autism (Truscott, 2019). This came to define much of the media narrative around the case. Neighbours soon revealed they had seen Manrique working alone on the roof of the house in the days before. During the coronial inquest, it was concluded that Fernando Manrique had acted alone and that he had been planning the deaths of his family for some time. It emerged that Maria had told him that their marriage was over in August 2016 and that he had moved into a hotel sometime in September. While staying in the hotel, he opened an account with a gas supply company (Truscott, 2019). The coroner pointed out that the familicide therefore appeared to have been planned soon after Maria had expressed her intention to end the marriage (Truscott, 2019). While at the hotel, Fernando Manrique begged Maria to allow him to stay back in the family home again for a while until he found another place to stay, to which she agreed. He returned to the family home two days after opening an account with the gas company (Truscott, 2019). While staying at the family home, he continued with his plan, arranging the gas canisters and making sure to conceal the real intentions for their use1 (Truscott, 2019). According to a friend, Maria was surprised at how helpful Fernando Manrique was at this time, cooking dinner and helping with the children. She described Fernando as acting like “father of the year” (Truscott, 2019, p. 14) on his return home. During the coronial process, it was discovered that Fernando had been having an affair for some time with a young woman in the Philippines, who he met when she was 17 and to whom he transferred some money shortly before the murders (Truscott, 2019). It emerged that Maria had found out about the affair some time 1

Part of what the coronial inquest sought to establish was how he managed to access the lethal gas.

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before, though she had already considered their marriage over (Truscott, 2019). The coroner also noted that Fernando displayed a “possessive attitude” (Truscott, 2019, p. 40) towards Maria. Fernando Manrique had reportedly told a friend that while their marriage was effectively over and he was having multiple sexual relationships outside the marriage, he would consider it wrong for Maria to do the same. This “possessive” attitude resonated with an incident that occurred soon before he killed his family— though the coroner noted it likely had no bearing on his decision which had already been made—when Elisa took off her clothes and went swimming somewhere in public. “Fernando was apparently very upset by this, particularly the fact that people had seen his daughter naked” (Truscott, 2019, p. 15). While media reports, as I will discuss, focused much on the issue of the children’s disability, friends said that Maria was looking forward to the future (Kolovis, 2019). An art exhibition featuring their work—which showed tremendous potential for their age—was arranged after their deaths.2 The coroner dismissed the notion that Maria would not have coped without Fernando had the divorce gone through or he ended his own life: [Friends of Maria] make it clear that [she] and the children would, if left to live, have been more than happy on their own; indeed, they would have likely prospered. Maria was accustomed to managing the children on her own regardless of Fernando’s whereabouts and contributions. She had secured her TAFE Certificate 3 qualification to work as a teacher’s aide, and she had the supportive network of community. Maria and the children had everything to live for (Truscott, 2019, p. 39).

2018: The Miles Familicide The last two cases are summarised without the benefit of completed, public coronial inquest investigations to draw from. The Miles familicide is particularly difficult to write about. A variety of information was made available in the news media, emerging from sources such as friends and neighbours, social media accounts, and the children’s grieving father. These do not always sketch a clear or consistent picture of the context of the killings and have not gone through a formal investigation—at least not one that was made publicly available.3 As such, I present some of the details as communicated in the news media, cognizant of the fact that we do not have an official, publicly available investigation to draw from. On the 11th of May 2018, police received a phone call from a “male person” connected to a rural property in Osmington, Western Australia, at about 5am (Young et al., 2018). The nature of the call has never been clarified in the press, but it was 2

See this article on the exhibition of their work: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/ hornsby-advocate/elisa-and-martin-manrique-remembered-in-art-exhibition-one-year-after-theirdeath/news-story/abcda7a7239eb9063a242e097071170f. 3 The father of the four children killed in this case by their grandfather has repeatedly requested an in-depth, public coronial enquiry. This was not delivered, though media reports suggest there was a brief report prepared that was not made publicly available.

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enough for police to urgently attend the property, where they found seven bodies, dead of gunshot wounds. These included the bodies of four children—Taye Cockman, 13 years old; Rylan Cockman, 12 years old; Arye Cockman, 10 years old; and Kadyn Cockman, 8 years old. They also included the body of the children’s mother, Katrina Miles, and her mother, Cynda Miles, and father, Peter Miles. It quickly emerged that the shooter was identified as Peter Miles. In the early hours of the morning, and using a rifle registered to him, he had shot Katrina Miles and her children Taye, Rylan, Arye, and Kadyn in their beds, then his wife Cynda in the living room of the main house, before calling the police and taking his own life on the front porch (Cormack & Whitbourn, 2018c). He left a scrawled suicide note, indicating that the contents of the house should go to his grandchildren’s father (Dye, 2018). Katrina Miles had been living with her children in a converted shed of their parent’s property, having become estranged from her husband, the children’s father (Taylor, 2018). It appeared that in the time leading up to the killings, the Miles family had been involved in difficult and costly family court proceedings in respect to separation and custody issues (Dye, 2018). The children’s father later became a public advocate around the family court, which he argued played a key role in the killings by imposing undue financial and personal stresses on families and deepening family divisions (Dye, 2018). Questions over a history of domestic and family violence were raised but not clearly established. The children’s father said that the Miles family had a history of mental illness and violence, specifically that Peter Miles’ own father had once tried to kill him and that another member of the family (not involved in the killings) had burnt down part of the property during an argument and later died by suicide (Berkovic, 2020). Journalists published a poem written by Katrina Miles in 2014, four years before she was murdered, that she posted on an open social media site, the Facebook Page of the RED HEART Campaign against domestic violence.4 The poem seemed to suggest some personal experience with domestic violence after having children, referring to three sons and one daughter. Whether or not the poem was autobiographical, and who she was referring to, has not been definitively established. Sherele Moody of the RED HEART Campaign said of sharing the poem in the news, “Katrina is dead now and basically I feel as if the kids, Cynda and her are becoming forgotten in this discussion. […] The poem is just so sad and it’s distressing. I speak to a lot of women who could probably write the exact same poem. Katrina is speaking beyond the grave. I hope her death will be something that will turn the light on domestic violence in Australia” (Wolfe, 2018b). I include the poem below as it appeared in news reports. Including it here raises many ethical tensions for me; she is not alive to ask for permission. However, in the absence of a public coronial inquest to investigate the circumstances of her death,5 it is a way to offer some of her own voice in sketching this context. While no conclusions can be drawn from it, it is what remains of her voice within the public sphere. 4

https://www.facebook.com/TheREDHEARTCampaign/. In 2021, Taye, Rylan, Kadyn, and Arye’s father, Katrina’s former partner, said he was still waiting for a full inquest into the murders (Zadvirna, 2021).

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I’m battered not broken By Katrina Miles, 22nd October 2014 “I stare into the depths of my worries The crease between the frown The hollowness of my cheeks is an echo My stomach beats to the litany of my hurts I stare and stare and stare Hoping for salvation Hoping hoping hoping All peace is lost, fragmented, worn I glare myself into submission The shrieks of my children The echo of my shouts The thump of my dignity slammed against a wall The odour of stale beer has a name called fear The creak of a door The sound of a petrol ute Stiffens our shoulders, hurtles our spines uptight Paste those fake smiles, quick hurry quick hurry quick hurry Shh shh child Please Please Please be good Be calm, be still Make it easy, Oh the shame Make it easy How can I be five places at once How can I save my family from open handed fists, from cruel, persistent words Obey, Obey, Obey, Obey How I hate that world, that word Obey Obey Obey obey How can I break free There is no freedom for me I stare, I stare, I stare I fear I am lost. But my children my children my children My children, my children, my children They are not lost They are not lost! And so nor am me I shout, I shout, I shout No No No No I leave, I come, I leave, I come I have left …. In my head I am there Here I am suspended

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Save my children, save, save, save them In my head I am there The walls echo with the thump of my body The fists in the doors The creak of a beer bottle being opened The shame behind our doors. I look in the young eyes that still love me I ask myself, so ashamed How can my children still love me I stayed so long, so long I am battered My cells echo with his words ‘No one would want you’, ‘worthless’, ‘nutcase’, ‘problem’, ‘your the problem’, ‘your fault’, ‘bad mother’, ‘look at your family history’, ‘I love you’, ‘bitch’ ….. The agony is a death to my soul, pin pricks in my skin I asked God to save me and he was there I asked myself to save me and yet I could not I look into my only daughter’s eyes, I look into my three son’s and I can I am battered, I am not broken I am strong, I am fragile I am bruised so deep I ache I ache I ache I ache I am battered, I am not broken” (Chambers, 2018).6

2020: The Baxter Familicide On the morning of Wednesday 19th of February 2020, Hannah Clarke and her three children—Aaliyah (six years old), Laianah (four years old), and Trey (three years old)—were headed to school. Rowan Baxter, Hannah’s estranged husband from whom she was separated, approached the vehicle, doused the inside with petrol, and set it alight (Craw, 2020). Hannah, in flames, tried to drive the vehicle forward to escape him. Rowan Baxter grabbed a knife and tried to prevent onlookers trying to help from intervening (Layt, 2020). When Hannah managed to escape the vehicle, neighbours attempted to extinguish the flames by hosing her down, as Baxter tried to stop them. She was heard yelling “he poured petrol on me” (Anonymous, 2020b). Rowan Baxter then took a knife and stabbed himself. Her children had perished in the fire, strapped into their car seats. Later, it emerged, before Hannah Clarke was sedated to be taken to hospital, she said she knew her children were dead and that she did not want to survive (Crockford, 2021). She died in hospital later that day, after telling police what had happened. 6

The article in which the full poem appears did not form part of the main data set for this study; where it appeared in the data, extracts (often lengthy ones) were conveyed but not the full poem.

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It soon was reported that Hannah had been seeking safety at her parents’ house, having left Rowan Baxter in December of the previous year after years of severe emotional, sexual, and financial abuse and control (Gearing, 2020). He had also punished her children when she did not acquiesce to his wishes, to further punish her, by withholding enjoyable or meaningful activities from them for example. There had been a domestic violence order (DVO) against him issued earlier that month (Anonymous, 2020a). Just before the killings, Baxter “made public declarations of love for his children on social media that carried the implication he was an aggrieved father” (Smee, 2020) despite Hannah Clarke’s attempts to meet a custody settlement that he had refused (Anonymous, 2020c). The case animated an already bubbling discussion in Australia about the criminalisation of coercive control. As Hannah Clarke’s friends later said, while she knew Rowan Baxter was abusive and controlling, she had not for some time realised it was domestic violence because “he didn’t hit [her]” (Wuth & Crockford, 2020). The case highlighted the tremendous dangers to women and their children of coercive controllers, especially post-separation. Hannah’s parents, determined that her death not be in vein, soon fronted the media to advocate against domestic and family violence and highlight the dangers of coercive control and flaws within the system to protect women and children from it. They started the Small Steps 4 Hannah Foundation,7 an anti-domestic violence organisation. The media soon reported that Rowan Baxter had an extended history of abuse against multiple women and children, including threatening to kill his former partner (Anonymous, 2020d). His son from a previous relationship attested to his history of violence (Anonymous, 2020d). In many ways, the deaths of Hannah, Laianah, Trey, and Aaliyah epitomised the patterns of abuse so many women and children face, the dangers of coercive control, and the failings of systems to protect even those who had fled, having sought the protection of the state and a supportive family. Hannah Clarke had been fearful of Rowan, reportedly saying to her parents she feared he may kill her. She was also excited and hopeful about a future outside of the relationship (Crockford et al., 2020b).

References Anonymous. (2014, September 10). Manhunt as wife, three children found shot dead. Daily Mercury. Anonymous. (2016a, October 17). Family of four ‘gassed’ in their own home. The Daily Mercury. Anonymous. (2016b, October 19). Sydney family were gassed in murder-suicide, police believe. The Guardian. Anonymous. (2020c, February 21). Attacker was scum, monster, say family. The Canberra Times. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre. Anonymous. (2020d, February 21). Killer who torched his family was a ‘master manipulator’, victim’s parents say. News.com. Anonymous. (2020i, February 22). Rowan Baxter was in counselling weeks before murdering his family. News.com.

7

https://smallsteps4hannah.com.au/.

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Anonymous. (2020q, February 28). Rowan Baxter: Hannah Clarke’s killer plotted to murder expartner and son. News.com. Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be? Pearson Education. Barnes. E. (2015). Loving with a vengeance: Wieland, familicide and the crisis of masculinity in the early nation. In M. Shamir & J. Travis (Eds.). Boys don’t cry? (pp. 44–63). Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/sham12034-004. Bastians, K. (2015b, May 13). Ben Milne, 7, on the road to recovery after horrific crash that claimed the lives of his parents and brother. Daily Telegraph. Benny-Morrison, A. (2016d, October 19). Police believe ducted gas used in family murder-suicide. The Canberra Times [also appears in Sydney Morning Herald]. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre Berkovic, N. (2020, May 23). Six shot dead: ‘red flags’ missed on killer grandfather Peter Miles. The Australian. Brennan, R. (2016, October 19). Davidson deaths: Was it all too much for tragic parents? The Daily Telegraph [also appears in news.com]. Brennan, R. & Patterson, I. (2016, October 18). Davidson deaths: Police investigate murder-suicide at horror home where family of four were killed. The Daily Telegraph. Carswell, A. (2014, September 23). Buried together: Lockhart family and the father who killed them. The Daily Telegraph. https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/buried-together-lockhartfamily-and-the-father-who-killed-them/news-story/fc76c2b93ab5c3aee8b17b3360ed7c5f. Chambers, J. (2018, May 15). The chilling poem about domestic violence Katrina Miles wrote four years before her murder. Mamamia. https://www.mamamia.com.au/katrina-miles-poem/. Cormack, L., & Whitbourn, M. (2018c, May 14). ‘He’s been trying to hold it together’. The Age. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre Craw, V. (2020, February 20). Hannah Baxter dies after suffering burns in horrific Brisbane car fire. News.com. Crockford, T. (2021, December 7). Inquest hears details of Hannah Clarke’s haunting last words. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/national/inquest-hears-details-of-hannah-cla rke-s-haunting-last-words-20211207-p59fes.html. Crockford, T., Lynch, L., McElroy, N., & Wuth, R. (2020b, February 20). Hannah was ‘excited’ for 2020b with her kids. They only got 50 days. Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age]. Day, D. (Coroner) (2016). Inquest into the deaths of Susana Estevez Castillo, Liam Milne and Darren Milne (Report number 2015/00031540; 2015/00031518; 2015/00031516). State Coroners Court. Dye, J. (2018, June 17). Suicide note left for Aaron Cockman a final message after years of strain. The Age [also appears in Sydney Morning Herald]. Gearing, A. (2020, February 29). Coercive control and domestic abuse: What might have saved Hannah Clarke and her children? Guardian. Keene, N., & Mullany, A. (2015, February 1). Three family members die in horror car crash at Berkeley Vale, on NSW Central Coast. Daily Telegraph. Kolovos, B. (2019, April 8). Sydney dad in affair before killing family. The Canberra Times. Layt, S. (2020, February 20). A nation mourns innocents lost in suburban streets. Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age]. O’Hagan, K. (2014). Filicide-suicide: The killing of children in the context of separation, divorce and custody disputes. Palgrave Macmillan. Partridge, E. (2014a, September 11). Kim Hunt’s sister Jenny Geppert speaks of ‘heart-wrenching sadness’ over family tragedy. Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age]. Partridge, E. (2014b, September 12). Strain mounted after wife’s car crash. Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age & The Canberra Times & Sydney Morning Herald]. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre. Smee, B. (2020, February 22). ‘Failure in our system’: After Hannah Clarke and her children’s murder, experts call for action. Guardian. Taylor, P. (2018, June 18). Massacre grandad a threat to family, says grieving father. The Australian.

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Truscott, E. (Deputy State Coroner) (2019). Inquest into the deaths of Maria Claudia Lutz, Elisa Manrique, Martin Manrique, Fernando Manrique (Report number 2016/00310113; 2016/00310114; 2016/00310115; 2016/00310084). Websdale, N. (2010). Familicidal hearts: The emotional styles of 211 killers. Oxford University Press. Wolfe, N. (2018b, May 15). Mum’s chilling poem before death. Daily Mercury. Wuth, R., & Crockford, T. (2020, February 21). A conversation about her husband’s abuse led to Hannah Clarke’s fresh start. Brisbane Times. https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/a-conversation-about-herhusbands-abuse-led-to-hannah-clarke-s-fresh-start-20200221-p5433j.html Young, E., Hedley, K., Fox Koob, S., & Begley, P. (2018, May 12). Mass shooting: Police on the hunt for motive. Sydney Morning Herald. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre Zadvirna, D. (2021, May 11). Margaret River massacre: Aaron Cockman still waiting for inquest after murder of his four children. The West Australian. https://thewest.com.au/news/crime/mar garet-river-massacre-aaron-cockman-fighting-for-answers-over-murder-of-his-four-childrenng-b881868271z.

Chapter 8

Journalistic Complexities: Framing, Interpellation, and Talk-Back

‘They Printed What?!’ Reckoning with the Complexities of News Framing On the 14th of May 2018, the following words appeared in the Daily Telegraph in reference to the shooting murders of Taye, Rylan, Arye, and Kadyn Cockman, their mother Katrina Miles, and their grandmother Cynda Miles, all at the hands of their grandfather, father, and husband, Peter Miles. I still love who Peter was […]. It’s not some random guy off the street who’s taken them away from me — he gave them to me and now he’s taken them away […]. If it had to happen, there is no better person than that. […] All the kids died peacefully in their beds. How the hell Peter did that, I still can’t figure out. He did a good job. He did a really good job. […] He thought, ‘I can’t live anymore, so this is it for me. But I need to take out everyone because that will fix the whole problem’ and he’s fixed the whole problem (Staff Writers, 2018).

To characterise the method of killing six family members “a good job”, the decision to murder them a “fix” to the problem of suicide, and the perpetrator “no better person” to have “taken [the victims] away” was, understandably, subject to some intense backlash. Referencing this passage, much of which appeared in newspapers across a range of news providers, feminist writer Clementine Ford had the following to say in The Age. Listen. Peter Miles and those like him are not Good Blokes, and they have to stop being described as such. […] Perhaps it’s just the dogmatic feminist in me speaking, but I feel like slaughtering your whole family has to be where we draw the line at being honoured with that title (Ford, 2018).

Where did this ‘honour’ come from, however? The passage above was clearly problematic in many ways. However, it was drawn directly from an unscripted interview given to the press by the grieving father of Taye, Arye, Kadyn, and Rylan, just two days after their deaths. Members of the press had gathered in Osmington that day to report on the shooting deaths of seven people when they were informed that the child victims’ father was about to give a press statement. When he emerged and © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_8

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gave the statement he did, many journalists and editors would have worked quickly to condense, package into news, and swiftly publish what was a lengthy and complex statement by the children’s father. The pressure to report in detail on this statement, to use his voice to make sense of the violence and produce content on a highly ‘newsworthy’ case, would have been intense. As noted in Crikey, Imagine being in an Australian newsroom [the day of the Miles familicide]. News breaks of several bodies discovered at an idyllic rural property in WA. Editors throwing away the playbook for the day, journalists jumping in company cars and on flights to a town outside Margaret River. Most would know no one in the town, have very little context for the crimes and are told only what the police are willing to reveal. They also face pressure to capture the biggest mass shooting in Australia since the Port Arthur Massacre1 […]. For most of the over-worked, under-resourced reporters sent out on stories like this, the competition is fierce and the information vacuum is vast (Puvanenthiran, 2018).

According to Puvanenthiran (2018), within this “information vacuum” on one of the largest news stories of the year, the words of a surviving family member, when they emerged, had a significant effect on the framing of the case among numerous news outlets. His version of events, as articulated on the day of the press conference,2 came to “[dominate] the news cycle” (Puvanenthiran, 2018). This was problematic from the perspective of journalistic ethics, Puvanenthiran reported, but not unsurprising. Journalists were, after all, merely reporting on the father’s own words (although it is worth noting that many news outlets chose not to publish some elements of the interview, signalling that journalists and editors had some choice in what information they used and how). As the father of Arye, Rylan, Taye, and Kadyn, he represented a much sought-after ‘insider’ on the case for news publications. As a grieving family member, his voice and perspective could surely not be ignored. Other contributions to the ‘good bloke’ characterisation of Peter Miles as critiqued by Clementine Ford and others also came from common news sources rather than the words of journalists—neighbours and close family friends. As such, it is worth asking how and through whom various news framings on cases come about, and what it says about the role of journalists and the wider community in framing the news. News media framing is inevitable, it matters, and journalists work to craft it in important ways. However, news media framing is a complicated and dynamic phenomenon, influenced by more than the choices of journalists and editors. Available sources—or as Carvalho (2008) puts it ‘social actors’—have a significant role to play. Particularly influential are highly ‘credible’ sources or ‘primary definers’ (Hall et al., [1978] 2013)—those with notable authority or expertise in a given area, or key witnesses such as surviving family members (see Hawley et al., 2018; Simons & 1

Arguably the most infamous mass shooting in Australian history, the Port Arthur Massacre references the 1996 shooting by Martin Bryant in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which he killed 35 people. Following the massacre, strict gun control laws came into place and mass shootings declined. The Miles familicide was the largest shooting massacre since then, a period of 22 years. 2 In later interviews between the children’s father and the press, the tone and focus shifted; it became more squarely focused on the role he suggested the family court process played in producing financial and personal stresses for the family. However, this initial press conference, so soon after his children’s deaths, had a significant effect at the time.

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Morgan, 2018). Journalists and editors are required to work within certain journalistic parameters, with a finite pool of available information and resources, and with a historically situated set of cultural narratives through which to render newsworthy events intelligible (Buiten & Coe, 2022). Despite their position and ethical responsibilities as members of the fourth estate, journalists and editors are also people, enculturated into the same social environment on which they report daily. In this chapter, I will introduce some key themes around the complexities of news framing that shaped reporting on familicide as discussed in subsequent chapters. First, I briefly introduce the idea of news framing and its relationship to Bacchi’s (2009) notion of problem representations. I then discuss the concept of interpellation—the ways journalistic practices are positioned within a wider discursive environment that shapes the framing possibilities available to journalists, editors, and other social actors on which they rely (Little, 2021). I focus on the role of news sources in framing, considering their role as social actors in constructing meaning through the news. This, I agree with Carvalho (2008), is an often-neglected dimension in critical discourse analysis of news texts, albeit one that is enjoying closer attention in recent years (see for example, Cullen et al., 2019; Simons & Morgan, 2018). As I will show, issues around the use of news sources are particularly fraught in reporting on familicide, with some of the most disquieting news frames constructed through a reliance on news sources with significant experiential or expert authority. I also note in this chapter the increasingly influential role being played by what I call ‘talk-back’ news pieces, editorial content that directly challenges dominant news framings. The existence and proliferation of ‘talk-back’ pieces, especially in online news, contributes to a dynamic news space, working to constitute news on familicide as a dynamic process of contested meaning-making.

Framing in News Representations In this section, I sketch my approach to the concepts of representation and framing in news, suggesting that news representations must be considered in context, within the push and pull of multiple social forces. I also wish to emphasise, before undertaking an analysis of themes in familicide reporting in subsequent chapters, that seeing news representations within this context is important because it moves us beyond a critique of journalistic practices to a consideration of wider cultural forces in (re)producing and contesting dominant news frames. Media representations involve the production of meaning around a particular event, phenomenon, or issue (Bacchi, 2009). Representations are not insular; they are influenced by (and in turn influence) a range of social, historical, and political processes (Avraham & First, 2010). Further, they are not neutral; all representations of social problems, as Bacchi (2009) argues, involve interpretations. That is, the way social problems are represented, whether it be in policy, law, or media, necessarily suggests a particular interpretation of the causes and therefore potential solutions to that problem (Bacchi, 2009). These interpretations are situated within

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an evolving temporal discursive context, shaped by and in turn shaping social movements, historical events, political shifts, and changes in cultural attitudes. For Bacchi (2009), therefore, no representation of a social problem can be divorced from the wider social environment. News media research often draws on a related concept, that of framing. This refers to the way news or other media representations present events or issues from a particular perspective, a process that is inevitable (Gill, 2007). News articles pertaining to an event must, after all, be presented to readers in a way that ‘makes sense’ to readers, even in cases involving the bizarre and unusual. The story, therefore, must be framed for the reader in a way that suggests a coherent, recognisable, and intelligible explanation (Avraham & First, 2010). This is achieved by emphasising “some perspectives, details and voices over others” (Hawley et al., 2018, p. 2308). Even in cases where ‘merely facts’ are presented, the inclusion and exclusion of a range of available information and how they are structured and presented in a news piece will necessarily produce a framing. The way issues are represented (Bacchi, 2009) also tends to produce a certain range of common news frames; that is, “framing is the outcome of modes of representation, and vice versa” (Avraham & First, 2010, p. 482). Journalists will often quite explicitly choose an ‘angle’ for their stories in a way that can directly cast a particular frame around it; however, framing within a representation does not require explicit or conscious intent. Indeed, “[j]ournalists cannot avoid framing because the process begins the minute a reporter starts to make sense of an event” (Hawley et al., 2018, p. 2308). The framing process is influenced, often unconsciously, by the range of circulating discourses that are available to journalists and editors to ‘make sense’ of a story—both for themselves and for their readers. Specific narratives around events are more likely to be intelligible to readers, for instance, when they reference already-existing discourses within the culture that have some authority and/or are repeated over time. A news frame is more ‘successful’, therefore, if it is “consistent and credible enough to endure through multiple reiterations and contestation” (Hawley et al., 2018, p. 2308). As dominant narratives emerge and are repeated over time, their credibility becoming more and more ‘common-sense’, “the media carry out their role as an ideological institution by shaping, distributing, and reproducing the limits of legitimate discourse” (Avraham & First, 2010, p. 482). This is not to suggest that media representations are static; representations of issues such as domestic and family violence certainly shift over time (Bacchi, 2009). However, a total break from dominant discourses is unlikely; change is likely to be gradual, as news stories continue to draw on familiar interpretive repertoires to remain intelligible to readers even as counter-discourses emerge. Studies of media and journalism have, over the past thirty years, shifted away from more in-depth study of the news production environment and context and towards a greater focus on the products of news media—news representations (Cullen et al., 2019; Gill, 2007). Recognising that framing is inevitable, is ubiquitous, and plays an important social function, critical discourse analysis of news has proliferated over the past few decades (Gill, 2007). This critical focus on media products is important. However, what has been somewhat lost in the focus on news outputs

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is the dialectic between media production and wider social, cultural, and even legal contexts (Blatchford & Morgan, 2020; Carvalho, 2008). This has, at times, positioned critical media and cultural studies research in an antagonistic position in relation to journalists and other media practitioners, with journalists and editors identified as ‘to blame’ for problematic news framing (Blatchford & Morgan, 2020). Changing news representations, from this perspective, is the responsibility of journalists, editors, and other news media practitioners. However, given the role of wider social, cultural, and legal forces in shaping news, a focus on ‘the media’ may not be enough. Media practitioners—and more broadly, journalistic practices—are deeply embedded within social contexts. The development of a given text is attributable to “multifarious”, interlocking factors in a way that makes understanding its genesis quite complex (Carvalho, 2008). For this reason, Carvalho (2008) suggests that “journalism intersects with all fields of society” (p. 162). Each “discursive event”—such as the production of a piece of news—“is dialectically tied to society insofar as it both constitutes and is constituted by social phenomena” (Carvalho, 2008, p. 162). Given this dialectic relationship, analysing the news is—or should be—about analysing the evolution and contestation of discourses as they are produced across a variety of locations and by a variety of social actors. This is something that Bacchi’s (2009) approach seeks to do, by asking where discourses in a given text come from, and in what other spaces beyond the text they are produced, disseminated, defended, and challenged. This approach leads to an emphasis not just on specific texts and their producers, but how various social actors and processes influence news framings (Carvalho, 2008). In short, we cannot analyse and critique the media in a vacuum—we need to account for how interpretive possibilities around news events are constituted.

Those Who Represent the World Are Part of the World Here, the concept of interpellation is useful. This refers to the ways cultural representations are internalised and naturalised as part of the identity and perspective of social actors who shape the news, whether journalists, editors, or their sources. Those who represent the world are, after all, part of the world they represent, constructing meaning from within a specific social and cultural location. As Little (2021, drawing on Althusser 1971) has put it: Journalism is always interconnected with other cultural representations, and journalists are also interpellated by the processes that form individual identities and social groups. […] Every individual is ‘hailed’ by a particular ideological routine, constructs their identity through it and does so unwittingly (p. 1451).

This process of interpellation shapes the interpretation of news events by journalists, editors, and news sources. This is not just happening at an individual level, but at a collective level too. Journalists—as well as other ‘experts’ and sources on which they rely—constitute part of an “interpellative community” (Little, 2021, p. 1451) through which interpretive routines are fostered around social issues such as domestic and

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family violence. Examining patterns in news framing arising from this interpellative community therefore involves considering how news framings are unfolding over time. It is for this reason this book has dedicated such a substantive first section to considering the evolving and contested nature of discourses on domestic and family violence in Australia and international research. The rationale behind this approach is that the boundaries between these broader processes of discursive evolution, on the one hand, and the interpretations and practices of journalists and their sources, on the other, are quite porous.

Familicide Representations in Context A lot has happened in Australia over the last few decades in terms of how genderbased violence is understood. Contestations for discursive hegemony at the interface of sociological/feminist, psy-discourses, and anti-feminist discourses of domestic and family violence are reflected and played out in news representations. As such, the way familicide is represented reflects processes of interpellation of both journalists and news sources within this context. This has meant, for instance, that a gendered feminist lens on familicide emerges in some news, influenced by the sustained work of feminist scholars, activists, and advocates over the last few decades. At the same time, the hegemony of psy-discourses (Rimke, 2016) continues to render a mental illness/distress framing of familicide (Buiten & Coe, 2022) appealing, especially in cases that do not recognisably map onto mainstream narratives of domestic and family violence. As such, “‘culture makes available’ only a finite number of ‘narrative formats’” (Powell et al., 2018, p. 414). Representations of familicide tell us much about which narrative formats are available to interpret family violence; an analysis of representations of familicide is about mapping sites of ‘ideological closure’ that constrain when and how familicide can be understood as gendered.

Non-journalist Social Actors and the Framing of News As the example at the beginning of this chapter shows, sources are a central component of constructing a news frame. “The success of any particular frame”, write Hawley et al. (2018), “depends upon journalists finding sources that will ‘sponsor’ or endorse a frame” (p. 2308). Outside of editorial content, traditional or ‘hard’ news generally requires a fact-based reporting approach that presents information without openly stating opinion. Yet, framing is inevitable, and sources are crucial here. One might consider, for example, how the murder of Taye, Rylan, Arye, Kadyn, Cynda, and Katrina would be variously framed had the ‘primary definers’ (Hall et al., [1978] 2013) in reporting on this case been domestic and family violence advocates, psychologists, or gun control lobbyists. In each case, depending on the extent to which the journalist drew on this source and how their contributions were positioned in the

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news text, the framing would be remarkably different. Yet, as Carvalho (2008) has argued, the role of news sources as social actors with an influence on news framing is often neglected in critical discourse analyses. The ‘frame’ is often identified without due consideration of how social actors outside of the news media industry actively contribute to constructing it. This influence of social actors on news framing is both direct and indirect: the use of various social actors as sources of news is the more direct influence, but indirectly journalists’ interpretive paradigms will have been developed in an ongoing process of exposure to, and engagement with, a variety of social actors as news sources (Carvalho, 2008). Social actors, whether they be advocates, ‘experts’, or political commentators, can sometimes quite strategically exercise their agency in constructing truth-claims in a way that will influence media narratives. The media representation of social issues seems to very much be a function of the initiative of social actors to organise their claims and to project attention to ‘happenings’ and problems […]. The media’s depictions of social problems will […] necessarily build on the ways other social actors construct issues in their multifarious discourses (Carvalho, 2008, p. 164).

For this reason, closer attention to the role of news sources is needed in critical discourse analysis of news (Carvalho, 2008). In the example given at the opening of this chapter, for instance, this would mean acknowledging that a sympathetic news portrayal of a perpetrator of familicide was not only a journalistic choice (though it was this, too); it was also indicative of the pervasiveness of cultural discourses around perpetrator distress as a cause of violence and of the complexity of ethical sourcing decisions in respect to grieving family members. As I move through the following chapters, I aim to pay attention to these dynamics: the existence of competing truthclaims and how different sources contribute to the contested discursive milieu around familicide.

Defining Sources in the Coverage of Familicide The news coverage of familicide showed some important defining sources emerging. In this section, I will highlight some key themes here, which will be explored in relation to representational themes in subsequent chapters. A clear, and particularly complex, set of news sources around familicide were grieving family members. Public statements and appearances by surviving extended family members in the familicides by Geoff Hunt, Peter Miles, and Rowan Baxter became central definers for coverage of these cases. In the Baxter familicide, reporting that shared the views of Hannah Clarke’s family was central to framing the case as one of a culmination of domestic abuse by a “monster” (Sutton, 2020). In the case of the Hunt and Miles familicides, reported statements by close family members of victims sometimes supported sympathetic coverage of perpetrators. At times, reporting on family sources shaped the presentation of the deaths of Peter Miles and Geoff Hunt by suicide as part of the same tragedy that was the murders

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of their victims. The news reported, for instance, that the families of the Hunts and Lutz-Manriques held joint memorial services for all those who had died, memorialising Geoff Hunt and Fernando Manrique alongside their victims. This contributed to shaping the coverage of the cases as family tragedies rather than family murders. The press sometimes directly quoted family members expressing the desire to avoid judgement of perpetrators (McCallum, 2016) or for perpetrators to be remembered as loving husbands and fathers, and their violence as a tragic and misguided expression of love (Mollard, 2014). This raises thorny ethical questions around reporting on such cases in a way that does not eulogise perpetrators, silence violence, or frame it as ‘out-of-the-blue’ while being sensitive and responsive to surviving families. The below extract from reporting on the Manrique familicide exemplifies this tension. Headline: “Relatives of dead family say there is no need for blame or judgement.” First paragraph: “‘There is no judgement, no blame, the families are in this standing together as one’. This is the message that the Colombian families of Maria Claudia Lutz Pena and her husband Fernando Manrique have delivered to Wahroonga parish priest […] amid speculation about how they and their children Elisa 11 and Martin 10 died last week” (McCallum, 2016).

Sympathetic portrayal of perpetrators of family homicide is a common theme, and point of criticism, in feminist scholarship (Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017). Yet, this extract reveals that the existence of such portrayals can be a complicated matter. On the one hand, there is warranted criticism of reporting that deflects blame and accountability away from perpetrators or that infers that domestic homicide is an outcome of a mentally distressed and out of control perpetrator (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017; Galvin et al., 2021). At the same time, some family members may wish to avoid blame or may make sense of familicide through a mental health lens—especially when it appears unexpectedly. The responses of extended families and friends to these events are necessarily raw, complicated, and impossible for those who have not experienced them to understand. As Gilmore (2018) noted in respect to the father’s words to frame headlines on the Miles murders, “I know it isn’t easy for journalists to report something like the public statements made by [the children’s father]. A grieving father who wants to tell his story should not be ignored, but it’s also impossible to believe that he has had time to process the murder of his ex-wife and four children only a few days ago” (np). Looking back, it is worth remembering that when domestic violence survivor and advocate Rosie Batty faced the press the day after her son Luke’s murder by his father, she too talked about her former partner as a loving father affected by mental illness. “No-one loved Luke more than Greg, his father. No-one loved him more than me,” she said. “What triggered this was a case of his dad having mental health issues […]. He was in a homelessness situation for many years, his life was failing, everything was becoming worse in his life and Luke was the only bright light in his life” (Spooner et al., 2014).

On this basis, the opening section of an article on Luke’s murder in The Age stated: “nobody could have expected the horrific events that would unfold in those final minutes between an 11-year-old boy and the mentally ill father who loved him, a distraught Rosie Batty said” (Spooner et al., 2014). This news framing in

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The Age mirrors representations critiqued in feminist scholarship, “[highlighting] factors that may be somewhat outside of an abuser’s control, such as mental illness or sudden financial woes” (Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017, p. 6). However, the framing produced in The Age in the above example drew from the words of a victimsurvivor, one with the unfathomable courage to stand up to address the issue of family violence one day after her son was murdered. In another example, in the immediate aftermath of an Irish familicide in 2016 in which brothers Liam, Ryan, and Niall and their mother Clodagh Hawe were brutally killed by Alan Hawe, the extended families buried and commemorated all members of the Hawe family together. The Priest at the service said: “We all are trying to cope with a tragedy beyond our understanding” (Cavan deaths …, 2016) and spoke of Alan Hawe in similar ways to Clodagh, Niall, Liam, and Ryan. The family played an amazing part in the life of their school as teachers, held in the highest regard by colleagues, parents and children, respectful of all in their care and so co-operative in every possible way. [I remember on Christmas] Clodagh with her scones, red jam and mug of coffee, Liam, Niall and Ryan busily, like budding engineers, building all kinds of Lego… Alan standing with his back to the kitchen sink totally at ease enjoying the antics of unspoiled and respectful sons (Mourners told …, 2016).

Mourners were encouraged to donate to a suicide charity (Cavan deaths …, 2016), reporting on which contributed to framing Alan Hawe’s violence as the outcome of mental illness (Quinn et al., 2019). It is impossible to imagine what close friends or surviving family members might experience in such circumstances. When their words and actions are drawn on, it can have a powerful framing effect. As reactions unfold and further details come to light, a different set of perspectives may also begin to crystalise, making such early reporting even more ethically knotty. As Rosie Batty’s activism following the death of her son Luke progressed, the focus of her platform was not on mental illness but on patterned family violence with a strong and committed emphasis on the accountability of perpetrators (Hawley et al., 2018). She spoke of Greg Anderson’s violence, his desire to control and punish her, and the failings of the system in assuming he was not a threat to his son. While Rosie Batty’s early statement referencing mental illness also named Luke’s killing as an act of family violence (Spooner et al., 2014), beyond the earliest days of shock a more tightly focused message of gendered family violence emerged (Hawley et al., 2018). Members of Clodagh, Liam, Niall, and Ryan Hawe’s family, too, became increasingly active in lobbying for the case to be investigated as part of patterns of domestic and child homicide, criticising the assumption that the murders had resulted from mental illness. A letter to the Irish Minister for Justice by Clodagh’s mother and sister in 2019 read: These murders were premeditated and meticulously planned and we believe it is wrong to suggest they can be explained away as a violent, murderous act caused by depression. It is wrong for society to see mothers and children being murdered by their husband and father and conclude it happens solely because of mental illness (Bray, 2019).

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In 2017, Clodagh’s family requested that Alan Hawe’s body be exhumed so that he could be buried separately from his victims, a request that was granted by his family (McMahon, 2017). Clodagh Hawe’s mother and sister went on to say, in interviews, that Alan Hawe had a controlling nature. “There was a control element” to Alan Hawe, her mother said, “He had this silent presence […] He could stand five feet away but you would know that he was in control” (Full transcript …, 2019). In his engagement with the media, the father of Taye, Rylan, Arye, and Kadyn later also shifted his focus, following the deaths of his children. From his first public appearance where he talked of love for Peter Miles (as well as the role of the family court), later appearances and statements focused more squarely on the role he suggested was played by the family court, and his concerns about the violent past of the Miles family (Berkovic, 2020). Reporting that relies on the still patently raw grief of surviving family members may make for compelling and seemingly authoritative journalism, but it might not reflect how families make sense of what happened in the longer term. Families grieving for the people they knew and loved, especially in the early days after the deaths, have often expressed the desire to suspend analysis to enable this grief and loss to be felt (Riches, 1998). This was seen in the memorial delivered for Maria Lutz, Fernando Manrique, and Elisa and Martin Lutz-Manrique. As people streamed into the [church] to farewell the Lutz-Manrique family, their grieving relatives wanted judgments left at the door. […] The deaths of the much-adored family were seen as a ‘deliberate act’ with a trail of planning extending back to Mr Manrique buying carbon monoxide weeks prior. Despite this, the victim’s families wanted the collective funeral for the mother, father and children […], one without recrimination or analysis. ‘Today is not a day for judgment, it is not a day for analysis,’ [the priest] told mourners. ‘Today is a day to mourn the loss of four people whom we loved and who loved us.’ (Benny-Morrison, 2016a).

News media is—as it should be—held up to scrutiny in terms of how it portrays domestic and family violence. At the same time, the families and friends of victims (and perpetrators) have their own experiences, needs, and perspectives that are deeply private and personal. Balancing this with the requirement to report on domestic and family violence in a way that places it within a broader social context is a difficult task, one that is insufficiently acknowledged in research on news representations of domestic and family violence. While there is often criticism of the framing that results in the news media’s over-reliance on sources such as police, who tend to forward an incident-based account devoid of social context (Bullock & Cubert, 2002; Simons & Morgan, 2018), or acquaintances and neighbours who are more likely to frame domestic and family violence as an isolated incident (Gillespie et al., 2013; Taylor, 2009), how journalists do or should manage grieving families as sources in terms of news framing remains largely unaddressed. Within the domestic and family violence sector, the imperative to harness the voices of survivors of domestic and family violence is of growing concern. It has been noted that survivors of domestic and family violence are seldom incorporated into the news, which is usually written from the perspective of neighbours and friends, or through the lens of the perpetrator, focusing on their motivations and mindset rather than the experiences, perspectives, and agency of victims and

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victim-survivors (Blumell & Huemmer, 2017; Sutherland et al., 2019). In Australia, projects such as Voices for Change have aimed to challenge this by foregrounding the voices of domestic violence survivor-advocates in media and political debates (Domestic Violence NSW, 2018). They note there is a need to “recognise the importance of women’s voices and ensure that the voices of survivor-advocates are heard” (Domestic Violence NSW, 2018). Having survivors’ experiential knowledge of domestic and family violence recognised and drawn on as a form of expertise, in ethical and empowering ways, is tremendously important. Within this, the right of survivors of trauma to direct the narrative has been highlighted as significant (Wheildon et al., 2021). In the case of family murder-suicide, however, there are seldom direct victimsurvivors (Mailloux, 2014); victims’ experiences are usually filtered through the perspectives and experiences of law enforcement, neighbours, friends, and extended family. Given that so much domestic and family violence goes unknown, even at times by extended family and friends, a lack of direct survivor perspectives is particularly problematic in terms of news framing. The news media’s preference for reporting on fatal cases of domestic and family violence (Sutherland et al., 2019) is implicated here; without more coverage of survivors’ experiences, the complex workings of domestic and family violence will remain obscured within the news (Sutherland et al., 2019). In rare cases in which there are survivors of familicide, and those survivors access the media, much can be learned. Luke and Ryan Hart were adults working abroad when their father, Lance Hart, shot and killed his wife, Claire, and his nineteenyear-old daughter, Charlotte, and himself in Lincolnshire (Warren, 2017). Claire and Charlotte had just recently moved out of the home they shared with Lance Hart after years of “emotional abuse and psychological control” (Warren, 2017). When news of shootings in the area reached Luke and Ryan, Luke reported a strange sense of knowing. “Part of me knew, and at the same time part of me didn’t believe anything. I saw it, but then I felt like my life was a video game, like I had changed planets in that moment and suddenly nothing was real” (Warren, 2017). While they had not anticipated this specific set of actions, having known more intimately the history of abuse, the possibility of their father committing murder seemed less ‘out-of-theblue’ than it may have to those who had not lived with it. Importantly, they expressed a powerful rejection of some news media framing of their father’s violence as “a twisted act of love” or the outcome of a “money issue” (Warren, 2017). ‘You’re reading it and thinking, “This is bollocks,”’ Ryan says. ‘But you know people around the country are also reading it, and those ideas are being driven into their minds. It reinforces in the abuser’s mind that what they’re doing is OK’ (Warren, 2017). ‘They kept saying this was a money issue,’ Luke adds of the news stories. ‘It wasn’t about money. That’s what made me really angry. Sometimes news is just entertainment. They couldn’t have known our history, but it was weird: in the absence of information, they chose the side of a terrorist who committed murder’ (Warren, 2017).

They were especially concerned with the way they felt news portrayals normalise men’s violence against women and children, rationalising it as ‘understandable’ and in turn legitimising such violence among would-be offenders.

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What the brothers see as the normalisation of their father’s actions in the press concerns them. They have asked themselves: what if other men search for articles about men who murder their wives? And what if they come across the sympathetic articles about Lance? (Warren, 2017, np).

Victim-survivors of familicide are, however, rare. Victims’ friends and extended families are more often available and relied on for reporting, situated and interpellated within a cultural context that offers a limited set of narratives through which to make sense of a devastating family murder-suicide that they may not have seen coming. A mental illness lens or a feminist-informed domestic violence lens may be among the most available, dominant lenses through which to make sense of the events (Buiten & Coe, 2022). Yet, in many cases of familicide, these frames seldom fit clearly with people’s experiences. As I discuss more in Chap. 10, feminist-informed media narratives of gender-based violence often emphasise perpetrator accountability, patriarchy, and patterns of abuse and control. However, constructions of perpetrators as patriarchal and controlling may not map clearly onto friends’ or extended family members’ experiences or knowledge of perpetrators, who they may have known as loving and non-violent. Not only are patterns of abuse not always known to those outside the immediate family, but research on familicide shows that while gender and control are deeply implicated, these do not always manifest as overt control or violence within the family preceding the killings (Karlsson et al., 2021; Websdale, 2010). For some families, therefore, a feminist-informed domestic violence narrative simply may not fit their experiences. At the same time, a mental health frame offers limited understanding. As details of the circumstances of the murders emerge—for instance of lengthy premeditation by perpetrators (Karlsson et al., 2021), of the brutality of the murders themselves, or of secrets perpetrators had kept—extended family and friends may find a mental health explanation increasingly lacking. The coronial inquest into the deaths of Maria Lutz and Elisa and Martin Lutz-Manrique, for example, revealed much about the context of Fernando Manrique’s actions that must have been difficult for the surviving extended family to contend with (Truscott, 2019). The family had at the memorial expressed a desire to create greater awareness of the plight of families living with disability in response to their deaths (Benny-Morrison, 2016b). The coronial inquest findings, however, suggested that this had little if anything to do with the familicide as was initially thought (Truscott, 2019). It exposed a range of details about Fernando Manrique’s life that may have cast doubt on initial assumptions about his motive— for instance, that he had been having an affair and had planned the familicide on hearing Maria planned to leave him (Truscott, 2019). The early tendency to make sense of extreme and often unexpected actions through mental illness may, therefore, shift in complex ways. Beyond extended families, some other key sources emerged as significant in the framing of familicide. Coroners and the experts commissioned to testify at coronial inquests shaped reporting on the cases in noteworthy ways. Of the five cases of familicide during this period, three have been subject to a completed coronial inquest at the time of writing (the Hunt familicide, the Manrique familicide, and the Milne familicide). Expert testimony at coronial inquests was often reported in the news

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and tended to include primarily forensic and psychiatric expertise. This shaped news representations in ways that will be explored in subsequent chapters, with ‘forensic journalism’ (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998) and ‘psychocentric’ (Rimke, 2016) news frames predominating as a result. Experts speaking to social context, such as domestic and family violence researchers and advocates, were not favoured in these coronial inquests, contributing to the relatively marginal position of discourses that socially contextualised familicide in news reporting. Interestingly, coroners themselves often used their platform to emphasise the accountability of perpetrators of familicide, despite the focus on psychiatric and forensic expertise. The coroner for the Manrique inquest described Fernando Manrique has “possessive”, and underscored that, while Elisa and Martin’s deaths were “painless and quick” and Fernando Manrique had taken his own life, it was nonetheless an act of “family violence” (Truscott, 2019, p. 40). The coroner in the Milne case emphasised the violation of the children’s “fundamental human rights” (Day, 2016, p. 10) and firmly rejected the suggestion that mental distress or altruism could explain or mitigate Darren Milne’s actions. “He disregarded the excellent services available to persons contemplating self-harm”, he said, listing numerous mental health and disability services for which details, he said, could “easily” have been obtained (Day, 2016, p. 10). Similarly, while acknowledging the likely presence of mental illness and stress for Geoff Hunt, the coroner in this case called the murder-suicide “inexcusable; the absolute worst of crimes”, conducted “systematically and cold bloodedly”, and referenced control and ego as a fuel for Geoff Hunt’s crimes (Barnes, 2015, p. 22). Coroners themselves, therefore, also had a role to play in how cases were reported. Coroners represent a particularly authoritative source, commenting with conviction and from a position of institutional power on the meanings and motivations of the violence in question. As will be discussed more in later chapters, the incorporation of coronial findings in news was important in the constitution of familicide in the news. Finally, disability advocacy and support groups played a marked role as news sources in the framing of at least two cases involving victims with disabilities. As I will discuss in more detail in Chap. 11, four of the five familicide cases covered involved victims with disabilities (the Hunt, Manrique, Miles, and Milne familicides). In two of these cases (the Manrique and Milne familicides), disability advocates and support services were quoted significantly in news reporting and contributed in important ways to the framing of these cases. What was surprising, however, was that their contribution to the framing of these stories was often to fortify an explanation of fatal family violence as caused by perpetrator mental distress arising from the assumed ‘burdens’ and worries of raising children with disabilities. In relation to the Manrique familicide, for instance, the Sydney Morning Herald spoke of how “the heartbreaking deaths of a family of four this week show the enormous burden carried, quietly, each day by carers in our community” (King, 2016). Members of the “autism community” were quoted as saying the case had opened up discussions around the difficulties of raising children with autism or other forms of disability. The case became a catalyst for a discussion on the experiences of caregivers, an issue that clearly resonated with the lived experiences of a number of readers. One such

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reader, as quoted in The Daily Telegraph, wrote: “These terrible deaths have given people [raising children with disabilities] an opportunity to talk about any of their dark thoughts” (Cross & McCallum, 2016). Representatives from autism support services and advocacy associations were quoted as encouraging struggling parents to reach out and get support or talk about their feelings (Cross & McCallum, 2016). As with the case of families as sources, this presented a tough set of issues. The tendency to frame family violence as caused by mental illness or distress of perpetrators (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Little, 2015; Quinn et al., 2019) was, here, supported by those with experiences raising autistic children. While the findings of the coronial inquest later squashed the suggestion that the children’s disability was a central motive, in the early stages of reporting this case clearly resonated with many readers in and connected to the disability support sector. As discussed in Chap. 11, it had the unintended effect of representing the killing of disabled children as understandable. Sources from the disability support sector, therefore, were drawn on in ways that reified problematic accounts of disability. In all these examples—the role of surviving family and friends, coronial inquests, and disability support services—legitimate news sources were drawn on to render problematic patterns of news reporting on familicide.

‘Talk-Back’ in the News Carvalho (2008) urges those engaged in critical discourse analysis to be astute not only to dominant discourses but to the various counter-discourses that circulate in news. News representations of familicide reflected this complexity, with critical responses to some of the dominant news framings identified in this book playing a vital role in challenging these narratives. Specifically, what I call ‘talkback’ pieces were common and influential in destabilising common news frames and suggesting alternative interpretations of familicide. ‘Talk-back’ pieces were presented predominantly via opinion stories, constructed around the author’s view and utilising information to persuade readers of a key argument (Littau, 2016). Editorial content in the news coverage of familicide regularly drew on a pool of social commentators with expertise in particular areas such as gender, violence, and disability, who challenged—at times excoriated—existing media representations around the cases. I term these ‘talk-back’ news pieces because, as the name suggests, they talked back to prominent news frames. They directly challenged other news content—not only from rival publications, but often from within their own publication. Editorial or opinion content is becoming more common, particularly online (Littau, 2016). In reporting on familicide, this made for a rich and contested news environment internally to ‘mainstream’ news itself, in a way that I would argue is not always fully explored in critical analyses of the news which tend to focus primarily on dominant news frames.

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‘Talk-back’ pieces are important to consider. They can introduce counterdiscourses and diversify the interpretation of events in a way that weakens the tendency for syndicated news to coalesce around a unitary narrative of domestic and family violence (Sutherland et al., 2019). Of course, ‘talk-back’ pieces are, like other news pieces, discursively bounded by processes of interpellation (Little, 2015) and the availability of a contextually constructed range of discourses (Buiten & Coe, 2022). As such, while they challenge dominant media narratives they are also telling of the discursive limits (Bacchi, 2009) around problem representations of familicide. Paying attention to these discursive limits, however, is also helpful in tracing the evolution of discourses around issues of gender and family violence. As such, in the following chapters I highlight not only dominant narratives but frequently the role of ‘talk-back’.

Not an Easy Thing In this chapter, I have aimed to highlight some of the tensions that emerged in examining news representations of familicide from a feminist sociological lens. Representations matter; they have effects (Bacchi, 2009). Yet, some of the most influential yet contentious discourses around familicide emerged from unexpected sources: from surviving family members and friends, from coronial inquests, and from parents’ disability support advocates. These do not always align with the kinds of news frames that feminist scholars, researchers, and advocates have endorsed in relation to stories of domestic and family violence. As I will discuss further in Chap. 11, representations of familicide involving people with disabilities reflected some disquieting discourses around violence against people with disabilities at the hands of their carers, discourses that were sometimes supported by advocates for greater support to families living with disability. While feminist critiques of an overreliance on police sources, neighbours, and acquaintances in portrayals of domestic and family violence have been identified in the literature, largely absent is work tackling the role of other sources in constructing and supporting particular news frames around fatal cases of domestic and family violence. The role of a fuller range of social actors, I argue in agreement with Carvalho (2008), needs to be more fully considered. The ways these social actors shape news representations also need to be understood in the context of wider discourses that render particular frames more culturally intelligible (Buiten & Coe, 2022). Doing this will require feminist media scholars to confront some difficult ethical and theoretical questions about the role of voice, perspective, lived experience, and other forms of expertise in shaping news. I have also suggested in this chapter that, while identifying dominant themes is important, sites of contestation are of tremendous value for unravelling how discourses are made and remade over time (Carvalho, 2008). In the following five chapters, I tackle key themes in representations of familicidesuicide in the news, taking care to pay attention to sourcing and talk-back as I do. In the following chapter, I highlight the tendency in early reporting to rely on ‘forensic’

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journalism (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998), framing cases of familicide as mysterious murders devoid of a patterned social context.

References Avraham, E., & First, A. (2010). Combining the representation approach with the framing concept: Television news coverage of the Arab population in Israel during conflict. Journalism, 11(4), 481–499. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884910367594 Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be? Pearson Education. Barnes, M. A. (NSW State Coroner). (2015, October 9). Inquest into the deaths of Geoffrey Francis Hunt, Kim Jeannine Hunt, Fletcher Austin Hunt, Mia Isobel Hunt and Phoebe Amelia Hunt (Report no. 2014/267678, 2014/266683, 2014/266621, 2014/266598, 2014/26634). State Coroners’ Office. Benny-Morrison, A. (2016a, November 1). Judged not: Tragic family farewelled. Sydney Morning Herald. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre. Benny-Morrison, A. (2016b, October 31). Family and friends farewell Manrique-Lutz family after suspected murder-suicide. The Age [also appears in Sydney Morning Herald]. Berkovic, N. (2020, May 23). Six shot dead: ‘Red flags’ missed on killer grandfather Peter Miles. The Australian. Blatchford, A., & Morgan, J. (2020). Making violence against women (in)visible? Restrictions on media reporting of intervention orders. Monash University Law Review, 46(1), 228–255. https:// www.monash.edu/law/news-and-events/publications/monulr Blumell, L. E., & Huemmer, J. (2017). Silencing survivors: How news coverage neglects the women accusing Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. Feminist Media Studies, 17(3), 506–509. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1304714 Bray, J. (2019, February 28). Murdered woman’s family seeks Minister’s help to get information. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/murdered-woman-s-family-seeksminister-s-help-to-get-information-1.3809780 Buiten, D., & Coe, G. (2022). Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility: Familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news. Crime, Media, Culture, 1–19. https://doi.org/10. 1177/17416590211009275 Bullock, C. F., & Cubert, J. (2002). Coverage of domestic violence fatalities by newspapers in Washington State. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 17(5), 475–499. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0886260502017005001 Carvalho, A. (2008). Media(ted) discourse and society: Rethinking the framework of critical discourse analysis. Journalism Studies: Language and Journalism, 9(2), 161–177. https://doi. org/10.1080/14616700701848162 Cavan deaths: Family of five found dead in house to be buried together. (2016, August 31). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37236554 Chesney-Lind, M., & Chagnon, N. (2017). Media representations of domestic violence. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/978019026 4079.013.103 Cross, J., & McCallum, J. (2016, October 19). Autism community urges people to seek help after suspected murder suicide of family-of-four. The Daily Telegraph. Cullen, P., Vaughan, G., Li, Z., Price, J., Yu, D., & Sullivan, E. (2019). Counting dead women in Australia: An in-depth case review of femicide. Journal of Family Violence, 34(1), 1–8. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10896-018-9963-6 Day, D. (Coroner). (2016). Inquest into the deaths of Susana Estevez Castillo, Liam Milne and Darren Milne (Report number 2015/00031540; 2015/00031518; 2015/00031516). State Coroners Court.

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Domestic Violence NSW. (2018). Voices for change. https://www.dvnsw.org.au/about/voices-forchange/ Ford, C. (2018, May 14). The problem with the ‘good bloke’ narrative. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/the-problem-withthe-good-bloke-narrative-20180514-p4zf6r.html Full transcript of Clodagh Hawe family’s harrowing interview with RTÉ’s Claire Byrne. (2019, February 26). Irish Independent. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/full-transcript-of-clo dagh-hawe-familys-harrowing-interview-with-rtes-claire-byrne-37858401.html Galvin, A., Quinn, F., & Cleary, Y. (2021). Shaping the ‘inexplicable’: A social constructionist analysis of news reporting of familicide-suicide. Journalism, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/146 48849211063265 Gill, R. (2007). Gender and the media. Polity Press. Gillespie, L. K., Richards, T. N., Givens, E. M., & Smith, M. D. (2013). Framing deadly domestic violence: Why the media’s spin matters in newspaper coverage of femicide. Violence Against Women, 19(2), 222–245. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801213476457 Gilmore, J. (2018, May 14). FixedIt: Murder is a choice. Jane Gilmore. https://janegilmore.com/fix edit-murder-is-a-choice/ Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. ([1978] 2013). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state, and law and order (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Hawley, E., Clifford, K., & Konkes, C. (2018). The “Rosie Batty effect” and the framing of family violence in Australian news media. Journalism Studies, 19(15), 2304–2323. https://doi.org/10. 1080/1461670X.2017.1343096 Karlsson, L. C., Antfolk, J., Putkonen, H., Amon, S., da Silva, J., de Vogel, V., Flynn, S., & Weizmann-Henelius, G. (2021). Familicide: A systematic literature review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 22(1), 83–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838018821955 King, M. (2016, October 19). Lost in the system: Where’s the care factor for Australia’s unpaid carers? Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age]. Littau, J. (2016). Participatory news websites feature more opinion pieces. Newspaper Research Journal, 37(1), 70–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739532916634645 Little, J. (2015). “Family violence happens to everybody”: Gender, mental health and violence in Australian media representations of filicide 2010–2014. Continuum (Mount Lawley, W.A.), 29(4), 605–616. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1025366 Little, J. (2021). Filicide, journalism and the ‘disempowered man’ in three Australian cases 2010– 2016. Journalism, 22(6), 1450–1466. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918809739 Mailloux, S. (2014). Fatal families: Why children are killed in familicide occurrences. Journal of Family Violence, 29(8), 921–926. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-014-9643-0 McCallum, J. (2016, October 27). Relatives of dead family say there is no need for blame or judgement. The Daily Telegraph. McMahon, C. (2017, May 10). Alan Hawe’s family say they did not delay exhumation of his body. Independent.ie. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/alan-hawes-family-say-theydid-not-delay-exhumation-of-his-body-35701491.html Mollard, A. (2014, September 13). Kim Hunt’s sister Jenny Geppert does not blame her brotherin-law Geoff Hunt for Lockhart murder-suicide. The Daily Telegraph. Mourners told of ‘tragedy beyond our understanding’ at Hawe family funeral. (2016, September 13). Irish Independent. https://www.independent.ie/breaking-news/irish-news/mourners-told-oftragedy-beyond-our-understanding-at-hawe-family-funeral-35018185.html Powell, A., Overington, C., & Hamilton, G. (2018). Following #JillMeagher: Collective meaningmaking in response to crime events via social media. Crime, Media, Culture, 14(3), 409–428. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659017721276 Puvanenthiran, B. (2018, May 14). How the media is covering (or not covering) the Margaret River tragedy. Crickey.

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Quinn, F., Prendergast, M., & Galvin, A. (2019). Her name was Clodagh: Twitter and the news discourse of murder suicide. Critical Discourse Studies, 16(3), 312–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17405904.2019.1568896 Riches, G. (1998). Spoiled memories: Problems of grief resolution in families bereaved through murder. Mortality, 3(2), 143–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/713685897 Rimke, H. (2016). Introduction: Mental and emotional distress as a social justice issue: Beyond psychocentrism. Studies in Social Justice, 10(1), 4–17. https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index. php/SSJ/article/view/1407 Simons, M., & Morgan, J. (2018). Changing media coverage of violence against women: Changing sourcing practices? Journalism Studies, 19(8), 1202–1217. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X. 2016.1266279 Spooner, R., Silvester, J., Cooper, M., & Wright, J. (2014, February 13). Mother says Luke loved and trusted his father despite his problems. The Age. https://www.theage.com.au/national/vic toria/mother-says-luke-loved-and-trusted-his-father-despite-his-problems-20140213-32juf.html Staff Writers. (2018, May 14). Aaron Cockman, father of children killed in Margaret River shooting says he still loves suspected murderer Peter Miles. The Daily Telegraph. Sutherland, G., Easteal, P., Holland, K., & Vaughan, C. (2019). Mediated representations of violence against women in the mainstream news in Australia. BMC Public Health, 19(1), 502–508. https:// doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-6793-2 Sutton, C. (2020, February 21). Mum’s family desperately tried to save her from ‘monster’ dad. News.com. Taylor, R. (2009). Slain and slandered: A content analysis of the portrayal of femicide in crime news. Homicide Studies, 13(1), 21–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088767908326679 Truscott, E. (Deputy State Coroner). (2019). Inquest into the deaths of Maria Claudia Lutz, Elisa Manrique, Martin Manrique, Fernando Manrique (Report number 2016/00310113; 2016/00310114; 2016/00310115; 2016/00310084). Warren, R. (2017, June 17). ‘We didn’t recognise that he was dangerous’: Our father killed our mother and sister. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/17/we-didntrecognise-that-he-was-dangerous-our-father-killed-our-mother-and-sister Websdale, N. (2010). Familicidal hearts: The emotional styles of 211 killers. Oxford University Press. Websdale, N., & Alvarez, A. (1998). Forensic journalism as patriarchal ideology: The newspaper construction of homicide-suicide. In F. Y. Bailey & D. C. Hale (Eds.), Popular culture, crime, and justice (pp. 123–142). West/Wadsworth Publishing Company. Wheildon, L. J., True, J., Flynn, A., & Wild, A. (2021). The Batty effect: Victim-survivors and domestic and family violence policy change. Violence Against Women, 1–24. https://doi.org/10. 1177/10778012211024266

Chapter 9

Forensic Reporting and the ‘Mystery’ of Familicide

‘We May Never Know’ In the face of tremendous violence, how does the news media and its sources make sense of events? As shown in Chap. 6, the familicide cases examined in this book varied considerably in terms of the known contexts behind them. In most cases, there was no known history of domestic and family violence by perpetrators before the killings. Rowan Baxter’s murder of his children (Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey) and former partner (Hannah Clarke) were quickly contextualised in news reporting within a prolonged history of varied forms of domestic abuse and coercive control; however, no such history was known in the cases of the Hunt, Milne, Manrique, or Miles familicides.1 How did journalists—and their sources—therefore make sense of the murder of an entire family when there was no known history of previous violence, especially early on in reporting? In the previous chapter, I showed that reporting on familicide was shaped in complex ways by the wider cultural terrain; not only journalists but key sources for the news such as friends, neighbours, coroners, and police are interpellated into their cultural environment and use available frames to make sense of what has happened. How these complex cases are made sense of must be understood at the intersection of multiple contemporary discourses available to make the seemingly incomprehensible more comprehensible to readers (Buiten & Coe, 2022). In this chapter, I explore how familicide cases in which there was not a known history of violence or abuse by the perpetrators prior to the murders were often framed in the beginning as a mystery. I look at how the complexity of familicide shaped assumptions around its incomprehensibility in news reporting, so that cases without such a history came to be framed as unfathomable, mysterious family tragedies. As The Age headline above assumed, “we may never know” (Young, 2018a) what drives such violence; familicide was often portrayed as ultimately unknowable. This construction of familicide as 1

This does not necessarily mean that none existed in all of these cases. In the Miles case, there were suggestions there may have been a history of domestic and family violence, but it was not clear whether Peter Miles himself was a perpetrator (see Chap. 7). © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 169 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_9

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mysterious represented a perpetuation of “internal myopia” (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998) in news reporting, constructing the murders as isolated anomalies despite quite apparent patterns in the murder of women and children by men—patterns evident in the news media’s own coverage of previous such events. This was especially the case with early reporting on the familicide cases, taking place within the first few days of the murder. This early reporting often drew on elements of a murder mystery motif in which forensic details of the crimes were focused on, anchoring the narrative in material details where individual ‘motive’ appeared unknowable. Heavily reliant on the drip of information by police, early reporting was especially prone to sensational attention to forensic details. Through this, the events were presented as somewhat more tangible, more knowable—details of the gun or other instruments of murder, the location and position of bodies, the age of and relationship between victims, the ‘tip off’ to the killings, the detailed timing of events, and the police’s first encounter with the crime scene. This is forensic journalism (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998), homing in on the forensic minutia of the crimes in a way that is devoid of attention to the broader social meaning, context, or patterns of such violence. Where familicide was assumed unknowable, forensic details reminiscent of those presented in crime dramas came to stand in as—yet move news reporting further away from—understanding. As Websdale and Alvarez (1998, p. 139) note, this style of reporting offers “sensational crime scene minutiae over the social structural context within which that violence occurs”, a social and structural context that was largely assumed absent in such cases. The narrative of familicide as mystery presented in this chapter slipped easily into discourses of mental illness/distress that will be discussed in the following chapter. As the anchoring effect of forensic details fell away, more meaning was sought, and since the violence was framed as mysterious—without pattern or structural context—understanding the workings of the minds of individual perpetrators was often assumed the next logical step in unlocking the mystery. This is similar to what can be observed in murder mystery narratives from popular culture, in which the truth is sought through a combination of forensic science (Cavender & Deutsch, 2007; Kruse, 2010) and psychopathology (for example, Parrott & Parrott, 2015). An individualised explanation of violence as stemming from perpetrator mental illness or distress relied, in part, on the notion that there were no other systemic red flags, that it was a ‘conventional’ family subjected without seeming warning to extreme and total violence. Constructing familicide as the outcome of mental illness/distress, therefore, relied on the assumption that the murders were mysterious—that the clues to understanding its perpetration lay not in the heteronormative family or the structures of society, but in the pathological mind of one perpetrator. Material forensic detail may be compelling at the outset and may tell us more about what happened, but its potential to offer a satisfactory answer as to why is limited. If the ‘why’ is not regarded as answerable through contemporary narratives of domestic and family violence, early forensic reporting can develop into psychological excavation. This chapter focuses on sketching the narrative of familicide as mystery, showing how it was often rendered through forensic reporting (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998), before proceeding in the next chapter to examine how a mental illness/distress

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frame (Buiten & Coe, 2022) was used to make sense of familicide in cases without a known history of domestic and family violence. I suggest in this chapter that, while familicide is indeed complex and the full details of these cases may never fully be known, presenting it as mysterious or out-of-the-blue is disingenuous and fails to recognise known patterns of gender-based violence, including familicide. Further, while forensic reporting is evocative for readers, it sensationalises violence, further entrenches individualistic narratives and moves us further away from, rather than closer to, understanding. It should be noted that not all cases were reported as a mystery, and certainly not to the same extent. As will be discussed in Chap. 10, in those cases in which young children in the family had disabilities—notably in the Milne and Manrique familicides—disability-as-burden discourses were more often deployed to rationalise the violence. Discussions of disability featured in the Miles and Hunt cases too, though they did not anchor the story to the same extent. The familicide as mystery frame was particularly common in reporting on the Hunt and Miles familicides, though aspects of this frame—particularly forensic reporting—were deployed in the Milne and Lutz-Manrique cases as well. First, this chapter will contextualise the representation of familicide as mystery within the literature on representations of domestic and family violence more broadly. Feminist scholars in this area have long critiqued the ways domestic and family violence is portrayed episodically, as a series of isolated incidents devoid of a broader gendered context. I then move to examine the data, showing how reporting in cases of familicide without a clear known history of violence by perpetrators was often framed as a mystery, unexpected and unpreventable. I then go on to analyse how early reporting focused on gathering ‘clues’, combing through the material forensic details of the cases and dramatising the ‘crime scene’ in ways resonant with crime dramas. I consider the role of police as primary definers (Carvalho, 2008) in early reporting on familicide cases and the impact of forensic reporting on our understanding of familicide. I offer a critique of these framings as de-contextualising familicide, making problematic assumptions about the likelihood and visibility of domestic and family violence, and obscuring the way the killings themselves were acts of domestic and family violence.

Isolated Incidents One of the key goals of feminist work on domestic, family, and sexual violence has been to politicise it as part of a broader pattern of patriarchal structures and power relations (Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017). Feminist activists and scholars from the 1970s worked hard to emphasise the connections between individual acts of violence (Kelly, 1987, 1988; Kelly & Radford, 1990; MacKinnon, 1979), their underlying gendered dimensions, and their wider social role in the subjugation of women (Brownmiller, 1976; Walby, 1990). As such, they sought to situate both the

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causes and effects of such violence beyond the individual, in so doing politicising violence against women. In this context, news portrayals of domestic, family, and sexual violence against women that present them as private troubles or individual tragedies are of significant concern for feminist scholars. One of the most consistent feminist critiques of news media representations of domestic and family violence has been the tendency to frame stories of violence as isolated incidents (Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017). This is seen to detach individual incidents of violence from the broader social context in which they are produced and supported, and to obscure their situatedness within a highly gendered pattern of violence. Representing domestic and family violence as individual incidents, therefore, is regarding as failing to provide the social context needed to understand and address it, discursively promoting individualised solutions to what are social and structural issues (Carlyle et al., 2008; Easteal et al., 2019; Hawley et al., 2018; Sutherland et al., 2016; Websdale, 1996). Individual problems call for individual solutions, and social problems for social solutions—for institutions and society to have responsibility for solving them. The lived effects (Bacchi, 2009) of individualised framing of social problems, therefore, can extend to unchallenged social attitudes that feed into violence or gaps in social policy. Websdale (1996) has therefore identified individualised constructions of male violence against women as a “non-conspiratorial” feature of the architecture of patriarchal ideology, “reproducing the power relations of gender by obfuscating systemic social problems” (p. 63) of violence against women. It can also reinforce perpetrator denial of the seriousness of their violence and abuse; as Kelly and Westmorland (2016) have shown, perpetrators of domestic violence evade the significance of their behaviours by constructing narratives of violence as discrete ‘incidents’. Sutherland et al.’s (2019) review of scholarship in this area showed that most feminist studies of gendered violence in the news focus on reporting on intimate partner homicide and that a common theme in these studies is the lack of context provided for cases. This can include omitting the history of violence that led up to women’s deaths or framing them in individualised terms without reference to broader patterns and statistics. Similarly, Walklate and Petrie (2013) have observed this tendency in filicide reporting, showing that the murders of children by parents are often portrayed as isolated incidents without considering them in the context of patterns of perpetration. Carlyle et al. (2008), drawing on the work of Iyengar (1991), calls such individualised representations of domestic violence episodic framing. Episodic framing is characterised by a tendency to focus on the unique details of particular cases, to the exclusion of patterns, connections, or social causes. It is events-based, a feature of traditional news reporting more broadly, and leads to the assignment of blame for social problems onto individuals rather than society (Iyengar, 1991). Carlyle et al. contrast this with thematic framing that places incidents in context and relies on social explanations for the causes of violence. Some of the ways thematic reporting is achieved can be through the inclusion of statistics, reference to government responses, policy, or public health perspectives (Carlyle et al., 2008). Others have suggested the increased use of domestic and family violence advocates, researchers,

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and service providers as news sources, and the provision of information on relevant support resources such as domestic violence helplines, to achieve thematic reporting (Gillespie et al., 2013). Such features in reporting serve to connect the individual case to a wider social issue with effects and implications beyond individual incidents (Gillespie et al., 2013). While thematic framings of domestic and family violence have been observed in some media reporting, they are still largely overtaken by persistent episodic reporting (Sutherland et al., 2019). This is particularly the case in certain types of news, such as crime reporting (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998). Police sources are the principal source of information for such reporting, and because police generally concentrate on the specific details of individual cases (Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017), this sourcing pattern results in more episodic reporting. Court reporting as part of journalism around crime has a similar effect, given the nature of the criminal justice system that looks at each accused, and indeed each criminal act, at the individual level. This was, to a large extent, reflected in many news reports on familicide, particularly in early reporting and particularly in those cases in which a history of domestic and family violence was not known. Familicide was represented as out-of-the-blue, an anomaly, a mystery, despite notable patterns in its perpetration. Given news media’s preference to the ‘bizarre’ and ‘unusual’, the familicide as a form of extreme, mass violence contributed to its framing as an isolated anomaly rather than indicative of broader social issues. Despite the relative rarity of familicide (Karlsson et al., 2021), however, this depiction as an isolated anomaly is not inevitable. About one case of familicide-suicide occurs each year (Karlsson et al., 2021) and many more femicide-suicides. These cases also occurred in a context in which the prevalence of domestic femicide was gaining increasing attention within the news media itself. Yet, as has been observed with other forms of domestic and family violence, much reporting on familicide ignored previous reporting on this or related cases and statistics. Instead, the events were often described as shocking and surprising, despite the reliability of their occurrence and their patterned nature (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998). As Kozol (1995) put it, the media are “constantly rediscovering (and forgetting) the problem of domestic violence” (p. 646). This “internal myopia” within crime journalism (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998, p. 139) both arises from and exacerbates episodic reporting. Feminist scholars and activists have long identified and challenged the framing of domestic homicide as ‘out-of-the-blue’—unexpected, unpatterned, and without cause or context. As Dobash et al. (2009) write: “It came ‘out of the blue’ is often said when a man with no known history of criminality kills his intimate partner. This reflects a belief that a ‘conventional man’ without a criminogenic past or a problematic personal history would not commit murder” (p. 194). In these circumstances, also common in cases of familicide, murder is regarded as ‘inexplicable’ (Dobash et al., 2009). Yet, in research testing this assumption of inexplicability, Dobash et al. (2009) found that this assumption should be challenged. While men without a history of criminality who killed their partners did tend to fit more ‘conventional’ profiles (employed, quiet neighbour, viewed as good family men), they shared significant similarities with the criminal group in terms of attitudes towards their victims and

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the circumstances of the murders, such as family separation. In other words, men without criminal histories who killed their partners may have presented as more ‘conventional’, but nonetheless acted out of similar attitudes and circumstances. They concluded that these similarities “challenge the notion that the murder comes ‘out-of-the-blue’ and underscore the relevance of gender and a feminist analysis of [intimate partner] murder” (Dobash et al., 2009, p. 194). In this study, familicide like other forms of domestic homicide was often represented as out-of-the-blue, unexpected, and even unforeseeable. The Lutz-Manriques were “a lovely, friendly couple” (Gusmaroli et al., 2016), “just a normal family” (Patterson, 2016). There were “no signs” that Geoff Hunt was unhappy, it was reported, and “nobody in town had suspected anything was amiss” (Bennett, 2014). “A close-knit Riverina community is struggling to make sense of a terrible tragedy” (Partridge, 2014a), wrote The Canberra Times of the Hunt familicide. Yet, in the words of the police Superintendent whose team pulled Geoff Hunt’s body from the water, this search for understanding would be fruitless: “these things don’t make sense in the world and sometimes trying to make sense of them is futile” (Partridge, 2014a). The West Australian, reporting on the Miles familicide, called the killings a “horrific puzzle” that, despite police’s “painstaking on-the-ground work” may remain “a puzzle that may never be fully worked out” (Barrass, 2018). What these examples suggest is that representations of familicide as a mystery assumed three things: that familicide is largely unknowable and therefore that seeking to understand, theorise or prevent it may be in vain; that it is particularly unfathomable when occurring within the bounds of what is considered a ‘normal’ family2 ; and that the experience of domestic and family violence is necessarily visible to the outside world. In the following sections, I explore each of these assumptions.

Unknowable A headline for The Daily Telegraph’s read: “Hunt family murders: Inquest hears town will never know what triggered family annihilation” (Anonymous, 2015). Citing the forensic psychiatrist who reviewed the case, reporting on the Hunt familicide focused on the mysterious nature of the events, which saw Geoff Hunt murder his three children and his partner despite having no known history of previously perpetrating domestic and family violence. He had made his children, Mia, Phoebe, and Fletcher, their school lunches for the next day and arranged a tennis game with a friend just before (Barnes, 2015). The forensic psychiatrist offered depression and suicide as a probable motive, a point discussed more in the next chapter, but emphasised that the ‘trigger’ for Hunt’s actions may never be fully known (Anonymous, 2015). The reporting and headline focused on this invisible thread between the circumstances of the moments leading up to the killing and Geoff Hunt’s decision to act in violence. 2

O’Brien and Culloty (2022) found something similar in their study on familicide-suicide in Irish broadcast media.

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Of course, the psychiatrist was correct that no one will ever know exactly what transpired in the moments leading up to Geoff Hunt’s horrific actions. Familicides are complex, and without survivors there is often a tremendous paucity of information to understand what occurred (Mailloux, 2014). The most personal experiences of victims and perpetrators will never be fully available to the public or, indeed, to anyone else. Representations, however, always involve choices. What is included, focused on, and excluded works to construct the (in)visibility of the diverse possible causes, meanings, and consequences of violence. By focusing narrowly on the narrow space between a circumstantial ‘trigger’ and the decision to act, some kinds of explanations come into focus while others are obscured. Causes of violence exist at a range of overlapping and interacting levels—the individual, the interpersonal, and the structural level where cultural norms, practices, and systems reside (Anderson, 2005). In this example of news reporting—drawing on the construction of familicide occurring through the coronial inquest process—it is information primarily at the individual level that is held up as the only level at which understanding can be sought. At this level, information was limited, and the violence was therefore assumed unknowable. Similarly, the Miles familicide was variously reported through the following headlines as one which can never be known or understood. Margaret River shooting: murder-suicide could not be predicted, WA premier says (Anonymous, 2018a). ‘We may never know’ answer to murders (Young, 2018a). Margaret River tragedy: ‘we may never know why he did it’ (Anonymous, 2018b).

In both the Miles and Hunt cases, suicide notes left behind were looked to for clues, and lamented for providing few if any. Of Geoff Hunt’s note, the Sydney Morning Herald produced the headline “Scribbled note leaves no clue to tragedy of Lockhart family” (Partridge, 2014b). It continued “police found a short, scribbled note. But the piece of paper did not explain why a father is believed to have shot his wife and three children dead before turning a gun on himself on their Riverina property near Wagga Wagga” (Partridge, 2014b). Peter Miles’ note—leaving the contents of the house to his former son-in-law, the father of Taye, Rylan, Arye, and Kadyn—was called “bizarre” (Staff Writer, 2018). While it was implied the note had potentially been intended to send a message to his former son-in-law—the message being that while he could have the house’s contents, he could never have the children—the framing of the note in reporting was primarily as a strange and fruitless clue. The proprietary attitudes embedded within the implied explanation of the note—of ownership over the children—were not unpacked. Instead, the “bizarre” note was read either in terms of what it did not explain—as a hollow clue in the mystery—or as a sign of family “strain” (Dye, 2018). The assumed futility of seeking answers emerged regularly in the Miles and Hunt cases. Quoting the lawyer of the father of Taye, Rylan, Arye, and Kadyn, it was reported that “we may never know why, or have deep understanding … the community may have to come to terms with that” (Young, 2018a). While some explanations were offered—a sense of failure, family hardship—the tone of much of the reporting on

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the Miles familicide was that tragedies such as these sometimes happen and cannot be explained. Citing a neighbour of the family, The Age reported: “It’s a tragedy and we can now start moving on a bit” (Young, 2018b). For some, the unknowability of the crimes also meant they could not be predicted and, therefore, could potentially not have been prevented. The murder-suicide of seven people at a rural property in Western Australia could never have been predicted and the cause may never be known, the state’s premier says. […] ‘Why he did it, what he did, you can only ever surmise’. Asked if he thought the community would ever know the reasons, Mr McGowan replied, ‘Probably not’ […] ‘it’s not one of those situations where you could have predicted what might occur’ (Anonymous, 2018b).

The choice to frame the story in line with this quote from a politician—someone presumably and ostensibly without expertise in the area of domestic homicide—can shape public perception in consequential ways. While not everything may be known about the circumstances of such crimes, reporting messages of mystery and resignation is problematic. In assuming futility in seeking to understand violence and in ignoring the national context of extensive, patterned domestic and family violence— including patterns in familicide perpetration—such representations diffuse the imperative for political action. As Carlyle et al. (2008) state regarding episodic reporting, it leaves the social and political responsibility for addressing violence unvoiced. Being framed as a unique anomaly, one that no one could have predicted, deflects responsibility from government, institutions, and society as a whole, and weakens political accountability (Iyengar, 1991). If it is unknowable and unpredictable, then no one is responsible. This is not to suggest that reporting on complex cases of familicide be approached with hubris, attributing causes confidently to a single issue in the absence of complete information, or assuming all can be known. However, complexity and unknowability are not synonymous, and it is important to remember that representational choices have political implications.

An ‘Ordinary Family’ Framing violence as out-of-the-blue is even more common when perpetrators are regarded as men of community standing and the families as ‘conventional’ (Dobash et al., 2009). Ideas of the ‘conventional’ family can serve to mask the risk of violence in a range of ways. Assumed to be a safe haven from violence, the ‘conventional’ family is socially produced at the intersection of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Men who are employed, lack a criminal history, who present as quiet, and who are seen to be actively involved in their families (largely assuming in-tact heterosexual marriages) are often assumed ‘conventional’ and not prone to violence (Dobash et al., 2009). In reporting on familicide, this was also often the case. Tropes of the ‘ideal’ or ‘normal’ nuclear family were frequently deployed in reporting, implying that such violence was particularly unexpected in this context.

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This echoes what Walklate and Petrie (2013) observed around cases of filicide; those cases that befuddle the public and attract the most speculation as to motive usually involve an affluent family and a perpetrator possessing a high status or traditionally ‘respectable’ job within the community. The assumption that, within such families, fatal violence is less comprehensible points to the way representations of violence are deeply invested in cultural constructions of the normative white, middleclass, heterosexual family as a space safe from violence. “[Geoff Hunt] had himself a nice wife and couple of kids”, one source was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Everything looked rosy. This is just such a shock and there is no one left to tell … they are all gone” (Partridge et al., 2014). Reporting on the Miles and Hunt familicides lingered extensively on images of idyllic country family life. There were frequent descriptions of the close-knit regional community, the niceness of the families, and picturesque farming life. The Miles’ farm was described as a “paradise”, “postcard perfect”, surrounded by “sweeping valleys, browning vineyards, fruit trees and a smattering of sheep” (Foster, 2018). One headline promised readers a view “Inside slain family’s idyllic home” (Brook, 2018). In the Lutz-Manrique case, while describing in grim detail the police’s discovery of the bodies of Maria, Elisa, and Martin, care was taken to incorporate descriptions of the “manicured hedge and shrubs” and “French doors” into the scene (BennyMorrison, 2016b). Reporting on the Hunt family murders was peppered with references to peaceful, wholesome country life, juxtaposed with the violence that had taken place. Inside a small white house surrounded by bright yellow fields of canola, police found a short, scribbled [suicide] note […] The family had enjoyed many a happy memory on the Boree Creek Road property that appeared to be a children’s wonderland. A white van carrying a body drove past a motorbike track, a horse arena with two grey ponies and the fibro house that featured a delicately trimmed bush maze behind it (Partridge, 2014b).

This juxtaposition infers that violence is out of place. The use of social media images in the reporting—full of smiling happy faces, idyllic moments, and posthumously read social media posts about the ambitions of those killed—added to the ideal family trope. Implicitly, family violence does not happen in idyllic settings or in families that experience love and laughter, that pursue their dreams, that demonstrate care for their properties. It contributes to a narrow image of domestic and family violence as an ugliness unexpected in such settings. Indeed, sometimes the existence of such violence was framed as something which defiled the idyllic setting. Headline: “‘It’s simply too much’: Margaret River’s tourist idyll devastated by shootings”. Margaret River in the south-west of Western Australia is world-renowned for its spectacular wineries and fine food. Tourists pour into the region for its rugged dense forest, which is only minutes away from some of the most incredible stretches of coastline in Australia. But the sprawling estates with vineyards that spiral down picturesque winding roads are now teeming not with tourists but police and journalists in the wake of one of the worst mass shootings in Australia’s history (Foster, 2018).

Much reporting focused on the shock and devastation of the local community. And while this is understandable, absent in much of the reporting were the victims themselves, and the wider context of family violence in Australia.

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Implicit references to middle-class lifestyles were common. White middle-class families are often implicitly reified as ‘conventional’ families, and when violence occurs in these families, it is less likely to be attributed to the social group or to ‘culture’ and more likely to be assumed unusual, out-of-the-blue, or caused by individual issues such as mental illness (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Maydell, 2018; Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005). These assumptions flow over into legal responses to violence. In a study comparing Indigenous and non-indigenous men’s sentencing for family violence, for instance, non-indigenous men were less likely to be given prison sentences for violence they committed against their families (compared to violence they committed outside of their families) (Jeffries & Bond, 2015). Whiteness made their violence within the family more likely to be perceived as out-ofcharacter. Indigenous men, however, were just as likely to receive prison sentences for violence against their families as they were for violence perpetrated outside the family (Jeffries & Bond, 2015). Violence is more likely to be considered out-of-the-blue or out-of-character when occurring within a white, middle-class family. Tropes of heterosexual love and marriage can also serve to mask the risk and existence of violence and to make cases appear more mysterious, unpredictable, or tragic. Homicide-suicides committed within relationships between elderly people with declining health, for instance, are often romanticised as a mutual tragedy—the final sad chapter of a love story, side-stepping violent agency in favour of descriptions of a couple “devoted to each other” (Flynn et al., 2015, p. 270). As Nikunen (2006) points out too, reporting on the murder of children is often accompanied by images of the seemingly ‘nice’, ‘normal’ family in which such violence is deemed incomprehensible. In the case of reporting on familicide, normative constructions of the heterosexual nuclear family were sometimes presented as suggesting immunity to violence—and therefore that the violence was unexpected and unknowable. This was most evident in the Lutz-Manrique case, where descriptions of Maria Lutz presented her as a paradigm of maternal virtue. She was described as “A fiercely protective mother”, “dedicated volunteer and fundraiser”, a “devoted” mother who “campaigned tirelessly for children with autism” (Morri & Houghton, 2016). One headline read “Honour for much-loved and selfless mother, victim of murder-suicide” (BennyMorrison, 2017). Themes of motherly self-sacrifice were common, including in the Baxter case, where Hannah Clarke was frequently described as a fiercely protective and loving mother who put her children’s well-being first. Cynda Miles’ volunteer work around sustainability was often described. Emphasis was placed on Kim’s role as a nurse. Gendered virtues such as selflessness, and nurturing roles such as those as mothers, carers, and volunteers were emphasised when describing them. On the one hand, given the tremendous attention given to unpacking the motives of perpetrators at the expense of a fuller picture of the people who were killed, seeing descriptions of the personal qualities, efforts, and contributions of these women was justified and important. Concerning, however, was that there tended to be a focus on lauding quite traditional gendered attributes that presented victims as valued human beings primarily through their roles as mothers, nurturers, and volunteers. This contributes to notions of the ideal victim (Christie, 1986), with implications for

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how police view (Charman, 2020) and respond to women experiencing violence when they do not match these tropes. Gendered representations of ideal victimhood can also contribute to the assumption that domestic and family violence is not something that does—or at least not something that should—occur to ‘women like these’. Where victims’ traditional gender roles are extolled as key signifiers of value lost, of an even greater tragedy, a victim hierarchy is constructed. Conventional, middle-class, nuclear family life—heterosexual partner, children, stable employment, a home—were often implicitly presented as rendering masculine violence unexpected or unpredictable. As we heard, “[Geoff Hunt] had himself a nice wife and couple of kids […] everything looked rosy […] this is such a shock” (Partridge et al., 2014). Fernando Manrique was described as an accomplished middle-class father through his role as breadwinner and homeowner. His employment in a lucrative and masculinised industry was one of the main—often only—features of descriptions of him. He was a “highflying technology executive whose work took him around the world” (Morri & Houghton, 2016). Notions of the middle-class father also saw frequent references to the family home in the leafy suburb of Davidson, a home Manrique had built “brick by brick” (Brennan & Patterson, 2016). In quite conventional gendered terms, his partner and children were described as “well looked after” (Patterson, 2016). Normative constructions of masculinity buttressed the implication that his violence was ‘out-of-the-blue’ or, at least, imperceptible. But beneath the friendly face and suit-and-tie was a man who turned the family home he built 11 years ago into a gas chamber (Morri & Houghton, 2016).

In this way, reporting sought to “make sense of extraordinary events by relying on conventional ideas about gender” (Nikunen, 2011, p. 81). Peter Miles, too, was referred to in strikingly gendered terms, emphasising conventional expressions of rural masculinity to signal his violence as unexpected. “He’s going to look like a monster” a former friend and colleague of his was quoted as saying, “but I knew him as a very family-oriented man, a very community minded [sic] person, and a knockabout bloke” (Paddenburg et al., 2018). Another source described him as a “straightforward sort of guy”, a “down-to-earth farmer” (Paddenburg et al., 2018). Prevailing ideas about gender were in this way invoked to more deeply craft the newsworthiness of the stories, suggesting them as extraordinary. Ironically, while emphasising the gender normativity of perpetrators and victims, violence was largely not recognised as gender-based. The connection between familicide and the conventional gendered family structure was lost even as this family structure was reified. As Websdale (2010) has observed, even civil reputable familicide perpetrators are “exaggerated versions of those of the successful self-made middle-class men of modern capitalism” (p. 245); those very features that are held up as indicative that violence is out of place are expressed in familicide in distilled form. On the one hand, it is possible that drawing attention to the normative conventionality of families worked to signal that family violence can affect anyone, a message that domestic and family violence advocates have been keen to disseminate (Hawley et al., 2018). On the other hand, this message can tend to present family violence as something that has nothing to do with gender, something that happens despite, not

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because, of conventional gender roles. Further, in the case of these representations the message that family violence affects all sorts of families is unlikely to be produced when considered in the context of the presentation of familicide as mysterious and unknowable, and the general dearth of reference to domestic and family violence in the reporting. In this context, the effect was largely to present the violence as out-of-the-blue particularly in these kinds of families. Presenting adherence to traditional models of femininity, masculinity, and family as something that makes violence unexpected conceals that it is, in fact, the traditional nuclear, middle-class, heterosexual family that is most at risk of familicide (Karlsson et al., 2021). As shown in Chap. 4, normative ideas about masculinity, femininity, and the place of children within the family are deeply implicated in family murders. Familicides occur almost exclusively within nuclear heterosexual families, and most often in white families (Liem & Reichelmann, 2014) with higher levels of education (Karlsson et al., 2021). Particularly those cases committed by seemingly non-violent men occur within middle-class families (Websdale, 2010). The collapse, or threat of collapse, of the family and of traditional gender roles through financial troubles or separation are frequently the trigger for familicides. Further, the use of violence in response to these circumstances is patterned, with men most likely to apply violence to both women and children in this context. When looking at the research, therefore, the very things that are often portrayed in the news as making violence incomprehensible are profoundly salient to the genesis of the violence. Showing that violence can affect all sorts of families—including those who are not typically associated with violence or ‘deviance’—is important. However, without situating these notions of conventional family-hood within a broader context of gendered patterns of violence, familicide continues to be framed as an isolated incident, a crime without gender. Familicide is crafted as not domestic or family violence at all.

Mass Murder, But ‘No Violence’ In some cases, familicide as an expression of violence was altogether obscured, entrenching the mystery. Two notable exceptions were Rowan Baxter’s actions, presented as a bone-chilling expression of violence and cruelty and, to a lesser extent, Peter Miles’ actions which were more often presented as extreme violence through references to his actions as a ‘mass shooting’, the greatest since the infamous Port Arthur mass shooting of 1996. In the other cases, however, there was a startling general absence of reference to violence. Indeed, in emphasising an absence of a history of domestic and family violence, or the lack of physical signs of violence on bodies, some reporting operated to diminish the violence of the murders themselves in favour of a narrative of mystery. Cases of mass murder were, largely, disconnected from discussions of patterned domestic and family violence, which were assumed to offer few if any clues as to why the murders took place. In reporting on the Hunt familicide, the lack of a known history of domestic and family violence became a central part of reporting flowing from the coronial

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inquest. In turn, this led to an emphasis on psychological causes such as depression (further discussed in the next chapter). Geoff Hunt was described as a gentle husband and father, and in reference to the testimony given in the coronial inquest, readers were told “the grieving town of Lockhart will never know what triggered a loving father with no history of domestic violence to destroy his entire family last September” (Anonymous, 2015). In other cases, while the absence of a known history of violence was not as directly referenced, it was largely assumed absent. In the Milne familicide case, for instance, no mention of the terms “violent” or “violence” was made at all. Indeed, while the fiery car-crash initially received a reasonable level of reporting, media coverage dissipated quickly, despite the crash being revealed to be a familicide; the intentional violence behind the case faded from view, barely after it was established as fact. In the Manrique case, numerous reports noted that the bodies of the victims showed “no signs of violence” (Anonymous, 2016a, 2016b; Benny-Morrison, 2016a; Brennan & Patterson, 2016). Referring to an absence of visible physical wounds, this was still a significant choice of words in the context of a mass killing—and a striking erasure of the violence of the murders themselves (Buiten & Coe, 2022). Until the eventual reporting of the coronial inquest findings, in which coroner Truscott was deliberate and emphatic in her assertion that the case should be viewed as family violence, virtually no reporting put the case in this context. A few notable exceptions included a small sample of articles in which Maria Lutz’s friends purposely challenged the general media narrative and inserted ‘family violence’ into the discussion. Overall, however, violence formed very little part of the narrative. Despite his unfathomable actions, Manrique didn’t present as a monster […]. He wasn’t violent or aggressive, but rather a quiet, hard-working man whom Martin and Elisa were happy to see when he was home (Benny-Morrison, 2016b).

In emphasising an absence of known violence, reporting feeds into the tendency to frame the murder of women and children as somehow ‘out-of-the-blue’. A common critique of news portrayals of domestic homicides is the absence of references to historical control or abuse that, in most cases, precedes femicide and intimate partner murder-suicide (Gillespie et al., 2013). Such historical behaviours (for example, controlling and threatening behaviours) and events (seeking violence intervention orders, for example) are frequently omitted in reporting of domestic homicide, giving the erroneous impression of an unpredictability to such acts of violence or violence as coming out of nowhere (Gillespie et al., 2013). Most domestic homicides are the outcome of a relatively stable and systematic process of abuse and control that generally follows a staged progression (Monckton Smith, 2020). Within these stages, physical violence is a common but not necessary predictor of murder (Monckton Smith, 2020). In some cases, there may be reasons for this tendency to omit histories of violence in reporting on domestic homicide, with legal constraints on reporting being one. In Australia, restrictions on news reporting on family violence intervention orders (Blatchford & Morgan, 2020), and on reporting any facts not before the jury during or leading up to a domestic homicide trial (Blatchford, 2020), can curtail journalists’ ability to establish a history of violence. Such restrictions can therefore

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lead to reporting that omits its context, erasing histories of violent, and abusive behaviours (Blatchford & Morgan, 2020). That said, the preclusion of a trial in familicide-suicide cases should reduce the direct chilling effect around some of these factors. Still, given the context of a tendency to frame domestic homicide as an isolated incident, reporting on familicide that emphasises an absence of a known history of abuse and uses violence-minimising language deepens the disconnect between patterned and systemic violence and individual cases. On the one hand, a lack of historical family violence can be read as important for sketching out context. After all, if journalists may be critiqued for failing to signal a history of violence or abuse, the failure to signal its absence can also misconstrue the nature of the murders. Indeed, as I have argued, it is important we look at the way familicide may often not map neatly onto the broader phenomenon of domestic homicide, especially among ‘civil reputable’ (Websdale, 2010) offenders who tend not to have a known history of violence. However, focusing on the absence of such a known history assumes that the existence of previous violence will always be apparent, even when there are no survivors to attest to this. News reporting often relies primarily on the testimony of police, neighbours, and acquaintances in reporting, who tend to claim they saw no warning signs and were not aware of a violent past (Taylor, 2009). It is close friends and family who, on the whole, may be more likely to be aware of a history of violence or control in the relationship (Taylor, 2009), but for various reasons these are not or cannot always be included. The resultant assumption is that more cases appear ‘out-of-the-blue’ or mysterious than is the case. Second, focusing on the absence of a known history of domestic and family violence can also work to obscure the continuum of violence and control (Boyle, 2019) over women and children that is the context for such acts. Even if there is no known history of overt family violence or abuse, familicide expresses the ultimate form of violent control, something that must be recognised even if it does not appear connected to premurder behaviours. In addition, the sense of entitlement to such ultimate control through violence is unlikely to have spontaneously materialised in full; as researchers on familicide have argued, existing proprietary attitudes undergird these actions, even if they have not yet expressed overtly through violence or coercive control as was the case with Rowan Baxter. Fernando Manrique, according to coroner Truscott (2019), displayed a “possessive” attitude towards Maria. Outside of Australia, Alan Hawe was later described by Clodagh Hawe’s family as controlling and strict, even if not physically violent or abusive (Full transcript …, 2019). The risk is therefore setting up a binary between cases that involve a clear history of escalating abuse expressed through a final act of control, and those that are seen as unconnected to violence and, therefore, a mystery or a sign of mental illness. While violence against women and children is often rendered in media as an unexpected intruder on the serenity of life, scholars have long noted that the actual or potential threat of patriarchal violence is ever-present (Monckton Smith, 2012). Familicide, especially when committed by the ‘civil reputable heart’ (Websdale, 2010), demonstrates this cuttingly, despite its presentation as mysterious.

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Forensic Reporting and the Hollowness of Minutia As discussed, cases not clearly attributable to domestic and family violence were disposed to a frame of mystery and unpredictability. Reporting on these cases was largely devoid of reference to domestic and family violence, or in any way to a wider social context. What did journalists, therefore, have to offer readers by way of understanding these crimes? To a large extent, facts and details. As stories of the Hunt, Miles, and Manrique familicides broke, news outlets rushed to cover the stories in as much detail as possible. While some early reports were short and perfunctory within the initial vacuum of information, a growing pool of facts provided by police increasingly came to frame the reporting. As shown earlier, quotes from neighbours and acquaintances combined with descriptive details of the neighbourhoods and homes constructed familicide as a mystery. Where information from police was increasingly available, however, a stronger focus on the material details of the crime scenes emerged. Particulars about the scene of the crime— great or small—furnished stories of ostensibly meaningless horror with some sort of comprehensibility. Some news pieces, particularly more tabloid-style news outlets such as News.com, dramatised this information in the form of a narrative. One headline sensationally read “Death house’s grisly layout: The trail of bodies that greeted police who went knocking at Davidson family home” (Anonymous, 2016c). Another read: “HOUSE OF HORROR: Mum, four kids in WA shooting tragedy” (Wolfe, 2018), before discussing the position of the bodies. Mrs Hunt, a much-loved nurse, was found dead on a path behind the house, not far from the Hills Hoist, which on Wednesday still had the family’s clothes pegged to it. Her children were found a few metres away, inside their home. After the grain farmer left his family behind, Mr Hunt got into an old white ute and drove down a dirt driveway. It appeared as though he drove several hundred metres before he swung towards a paddock of wheat about half a metre high. A thick set of tyre marks carved across the wheat crop and led directly to the dam where Mr Hunt’s ute was found abandoned. On Wednesday afternoon, police divers recovered what is believed to be the body of Mr Hunt. Although a formal autopsy had not been done, it appeared as though he had walked into the water and shot himself. A gun was found close to Mr Hunt’s body. Police said it appeared as though the body had been in the muddied water for about 30 hours (Partridge, 2014b).

As in the example above, details often seen in a crime drama were presented. Reference to the position of the bodies, the murder weapon, timing of events, and forensic science (an autopsy to be carried out) all dramatised the story. Police information was blended with journalists’ own rich descriptions of the materiality of the scenes—the washing line with clothes pegged on it, the tyre marks that cut through the long grass, the muddied water of the dam. It is a vivid example of what Websdale and Alvarez (1998) termed forensic journalism, a style of crime reporting that “focuses on the minutiae of the crime scene rather than the social context in which it is embedded” (p. 126). In this style of reporting, information provided by police is privileged, information that tends to be situational or case based. These ‘factual’ or material details are “confined to the

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immediacy of the crime scene itself” (p. 127) which, as in the crime drama, is “imbued with an investigative motif” (p. 127). Specifics of the scene, the weapons, sometimes even the victims’ bodies feature dominantly. This form of reporting relies keenly on the language and authority of science; forensic science and those who communicate it are assumed to possess ‘objective’ knowledge and understanding of the crimes. Forensic journalism can be located within broader cultural narratives of crime and the growing appeal of crime dramas. There is a longstanding cultural fascination with violent crime, but as Websdale and Alvarez (1998) point out, it is more recently that this has come to be a feature of mainstream news reporting. In the context of growing economic pressures in the industry and associated market-driven journalism, reporting on crime—particularly rare and extreme forms of crime—has become a staple for news outlets (Beale, 2006). More broadly, there has also been a growing fascination with forensic science in popular culture over the past two decades, which has spawned a range of fiction and non-fiction media products on the investigation of violent crime (Cavender & Deutsch, 2007). These artefacts of popular culture deploy ‘forensic realism’, which in turn circulates certain meanings about crime and violence (Cavender & Deutsch, 2007). A key feature of this is that gritty forensic details are yoked to notions of scientific authority, presenting physical evidence as irrefutable truth without the need for social context (Cavender & Deutsch, 2007). As a growing and evolving genre, crime news reporting like other forms of news reporting is subject to particular “stylistic parameters” (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998). These stylistic parameters are routinised and shape the construction of meaning around crime. Broadly, forensic journalism would be informed by fact-based reporting conventions and considerations of newsworthiness, both of which contribute to the appeal of forensic details. They are also shaped by practical considerations—easily available facts and sources (police, neighbours). Police, in particular, are primary definers in crime reporting on cases that have not yet gone to court. Primary definers are official, institutional sources that “establish the initial definition or primary interpretation of the topic in question” (Hall et al., [1978] 2013, p. 58). As such, they have a significant impact on news framing. Indeed, they can serve to set “the limit for all subsequent discussion by framing what the problem is” (Hall et al., [1978] 2013, pp. 61–62). In much crime reporting, as here, police are relied on as primary definers in the early stages of reporting and, at times, at the later stages if the case goes to trial or is subject to a coronial inquest. Crime and law enforcement discourses, therefore, have an important role to play in defining the problem through a particular lens. Police approach crime scenes on a case-bycase basis (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998). In sharing information with the media, often the first information really available to journalists, they are usually factual and perfunctory, focusing on a core set of details about the crime: who, where, and when, for example. Legal and criminological discourses, which are drawn upon by police, also tend to focus on the particulars of a given case, adopting an individualised approach to violence prevention (Stanko, 1994). Forensic reporting is an example of ‘non-conspiratorial’ patriarchal ideology (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998, p. 125). Though not necessarily intentional, it circulates cultural assumptions about violence, disconnecting gendered violence from its

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context. A key trait of forensic reporting is the way it stresses “the dramaturgical nature of the homicide-suicide event, rather than the social structural patterns in which they are embedded” (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998, p. 136). This form of representation has political consequences or effects (Bacchi, 2009): it works to maintain the invisibility of gender in violence, presenting events “in astructural ways that ignore systemic violence against women” (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998, p. 137). Preoccupied with sensational crime scene details, the bigger picture of gendered violence against women and children is eclipsed. We come to know “more and more about less and less” (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998, p. 126). The following news piece reflects this sharply. I have included a lengthy extract here to illustrate more fully the drama and focus of the narrative. It’s 10.30am and as the two policemen walk up the long pathway towards the house, sitting behind a manicured hedge and shrubs, all is quiet. Perhaps too quiet. Certainly no telltale sounds of a domestic. Just the pattering of light rain on the tiled roof. They knock on the door. No answer. They knock again. Nothing. They yell out. Silence. One of the young officers phones [Maria’s friend], the worried caller [to police], to reassure her that her friend’s house is locked up. No signs of a disturbance. Everything appears to be fine. But [her friend] is not satisfied. Isn’t the family dog, a bull mastiff called Tequila, in the yard, she inquires? And what of Lutz’s car and her husband Fernando Manrique’s car? She describes their colours, makes and models. Are they there? The officer confirms that both vehicles are parked in the street. That’s very strange, a worried [friend] tells the officer, who explains that he’s not authorised to break into the house unless there’s evidence of imminent danger. Now somewhat alarmed, one of the officers unlatches a black Colorbond gate and peers directly through clear French doors on the side of the house. What he sees hits him like a thunderbolt: a middleaged man, slumped in the TV room, apparently lifeless beneath a whirring ceiling fan. The officers frantically burst into a bedroom at the rear of the property, where they’re confronted with an even more shocking sight: Lutz, lying lifeless in her bed beside her 11year-old daughter, Elisa. In the next bedroom, more heartbreak: her dead 10-year-old son, Martin, with Tequila limp on the floor. But there is something else as well. Something in the air, odourless and colourless, circulating with every deadly turn of the ceiling fan in each room (Benny-Morrison, 2016b).

The horrendous scene painted above is a vivid exemplar of the situational-based dramaturgical nature of forensic reporting. Aimed at bringing the crime scene to life (Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017), readers are offered an ‘emotional hook’ (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998) that feeds off the material and temporal minutia of the crime scene combined with the evocative language of tragedy. Readers are enticed into a sense of deep knowledge of the crimes as they are invited to gaze on the scene (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998). As a second news outlet reported on the crime scene at the Lutz-Manrique’s home: the position of the father’s body, on the floor in a hallway rather than in bed or on a sofa for instance, raised questions about [Fernando Manrique’s] intentions. As did a burnt computer found in the home. ‘Did Fernando intend to die with his family? That’s open to interpretation,’ [the coroner] said. ‘The body in the hallway is consistent with being overcome with gas — but also suicide. Burning the hard drive could be consistent with him moving to the Philippines — or ending his life’ (Brook, 2019).

Certainly, details of the events must be investigated. What I am concerned with here is the way news reporting that places emphasis on forensic details constructs a

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narrow understanding of domestic and family violence, excluding more substantial discussions in favour of minutia. As Websdale and Alvarez (1998) put it, “amidst the seeming objectivity, situational explanations, and dramatic representations of crime and criminals, systemic patterns of violence and their structural causes are marginalized or disappear altogether” (p. 128). Though forensic reporting offers the cultural authority and credibility of scientific and legal discourses—and the gritty air of realism—it offers mostly a hollow sense of meaning. Forensic detail may bring us only so far in comprehending the causes of familicide; it confers on the audience more and more information but less and less understanding. In reporting on the Miles familicide, for instance, readers were informed of details as inane as the clothes of the perpetrator: “slumped in a chair on his veranda, [Peter Miles] dressed in black tracksuit pants with a white leg stripe, a dark top and light brown Uggies. A long-arm gun was rested between his legs and a yellow torch sat on a nearby table” (Barrass, 2018). Such details tell us no more about the wider context, or about social and structural explanations—and potential remedies. Forensic reporting not only reflects the individualisation of crime and violence, but reinforces it. “The sharper the focus and the more details we know, the less we learn about the larger issues and patterns” (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998, p. 126). It is also worth underscoring the potential impact of this kind of sensational forensic reporting on surviving families. Rebecca Poulson, a domestic violence advocate and author who lost her father Peter, niece Malee, and nephew Bas to domestic violence wrote about this in response to reporting on the Miles familicide. I didn’t read the media reports about the 2003 deaths of my loved ones until years later but I still felt the painful blows of each word when the story was sensationalised. Seared into my memory is one of the headlines about my experience that read: ‘My family were slashed to death’ and ‘another with a dripping blood red font next to a close-up photo of my face. Also included in the stories were unnecessary, gratuitous details on the number of knife wounds that were inflicted on little Bas and Malee. Of what interest was that to the public?’

Forensic reporting often exploits lurid details of the bodies of victims for dramatic effect while presenting an “investigative motif” and an “ethic of detection” that disguises this appetite for sensationalism (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998, p. 136). The veer of ‘objectivity’ with which this ‘fact-based’ investigative reporting is furnished conceals the dehumanisation and exploitation of victims in such representations.

Mysterious Minds Each year, the media reports on scores of women killed at the hands of men. About once a year, such cases involve family annihilation, with almost always men killing their entire families and themselves. Despite this, familicide is frequently represented as a mystery—something unknowable and, in turn, largely unsolvable. Presumed outof-the-blue particularly because it happens to ‘nice’, middle-class families, familicide is drained of political importance and social meaning. The mystery framing is

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rendered via a range of routinised journalistic decisions common in crime reporting— procuring sensational details with which to ‘hook’ readers, advancing an air of ‘objectivity’ through a presentation of ‘facts’ about the crime scene rather than contextual drivers, and relying on police sources that individualise cases and neighbours who insist things like this never happen here. It is further shaped by the rising fascination with, and reliance on, forensic minutiae that “reaffirms both the accuracy and, more important, the authenticity of this way of understanding the violent event” (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998, p. 125). I have argued that, while civil reputable (Websdale, 2010) familicide offenders do not always present as possessing the features of men who commit patriarchal violence, the tendency to assume the violence is, therefore, not patriarchal but somehow an unknowable tragedy belies the diverse ways in which patriarchal control manifests. In this assumed void of meaning, forensic reporting grants a sense of insider knowledge of the crimes—an opportunity to closely gaze upon them, even—while moving readers further away from any real understanding of the workings of gender and power. However, the allure of forensic details eventually falls away, and where forensics offer less and less to satiate readers’ understanding, individualised framings of familicide as unforeseeable tragedies often evolve into psychological excavation of perpetrators. After all, if the violence is not social, it must be psychopathological. In the following chapter, I address the mental illness/distress frame (Buiten & Coe, 2022) of familicide. In all the familicide cases other than the murders committed by Rowan Baxter, in which a clear history of abuse preceded it, a dominant news frame was of perpetrator mental illness/distress as the cause of violence. The following chapter defines and contextualises the mental illness/distress frame, examines the journalistic practices through which it manifests, and considers its implications.

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Barrass, T. (2018, May 13). Margaret River shootings: WA police pick over pieces of horrific puzzle. The West Australian. Beale, S. S. (2006). The news media’s influence on criminal justice policy: How market-driven news promotes punitiveness. William and Mary Law Review, 48(2), 397–481. https://scholarship. law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol48/iss2/2 Bennett, A. (2014, September 10). Riverina father happy, says local priest. The Age. Benny-Morrison, A. (2016a, October 19). Police believe ducted gas used in family murder-suicide. The Canberra Times [also appears in Sydney Morning Herald]. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre. Benny-Morrison, A. (2016b, December 16). ‘A horrific thing’: The death of the Manrique-Lutz family. Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age]. Benny-Morrison, A. (2017, June 20). Honour for much-loved and selfless mother, victim of murdersuicide. Sydney Morning Herald. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre. Blatchford, A. (2020). The whole story: Intimate partner homicides, legal rules and the news production process [PhD thesis]. Melbourne Law School. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/252827 Blatchford, A. & Morgan, J. (2020). Making violence against women (in) visible? Restrictions on media reporting of intervention orders. Monash University Law Review, 45(1), 228–255. https:// doi.org/10.3316/agispt.20210805051245 Boyle, K. (2019). What’s in a name? Theorising the inter-relationships of gender and violence. Feminist Theory, 20(1), 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700118754957 Brennan, R., & Patterson, I. (2016, October 18). Davidson deaths: Police investigate murder-suicide at horror home where family of four were killed. The Daily Telegraph. Brook, B. (2018, May 12). Inside slain family’s idyllic home. Daily Mercury. Brook, B. (2019, April 9). Inquest into Sydney family’s murder-suicide raises questions over fathers intentions. News.com. Brownmiller, S. (1976). Against our will: Men. Bantam Books. Buiten, D., & Coe, G. (2022). Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility: Familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news. Crime, Media, Culture, 1–19. https://doi.org/10. 1177/17416590211009275 Carlyle, K. E., Slater, M. D., & Chakroff, J. L. (2008). Newspaper coverage of intimate partner violence: Skewing representations of risk. Journal of Communication, 58(1), 168–186. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2007.00379.x Carvalho, A. (2008). Media(ted) discourse and society: Rethinking the framework of critical discourse analysis. Journalism Studies: Language and Journalism, 9(2), 161–177. https://doi. org/10.1080/14616700701848162 Cavender, G., & Deutsch, S. K. (2007). CSI and moral authority: The police and science. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 3(1), 67–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/174165900707 4449 Charman, S. (2020). Making sense of policing identities: The ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ in policing accounts of victimisation. Policing and Society, 30(1), 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10439463.2019.1601721 Chesney-Lind, M., & Chagnon, N. (2017). Media representations of domestic violence. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/978019026 4079.013.103 Christie, N. (1986). The ideal victim. In E. A. Fattah (Ed.), From crime policy to victim policy: Reorienting the justice system (pp. 17–30). Palgrave Macmillan. Dobash, R. E., Dobash, R. P., & Cavanagh, K. (2009). Out of the blue: Men who murder an intimate partner. Feminist Criminology, 4(3), 194–225. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085109332668 Dye, J. (2018, June 17). Suicide note left for Aaron Cockman a final message after years of strain. The Age [also appears in Sydney Morning Herald]. Easteal, A. M. P., Holland, K., Breen, M. D., Vaughan, C., & Sutherland, G. (2019). Australian media messages: Critical discourse analysis of two intimate homicides involving domestic violence. Violence Against Women, 25(4), 441–462. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801218780364

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Nikunen, M. (2006). Parenthood in murder-suicide news. Idealized fathers and murderous mums. Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 7(2), 164–184. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14043850601029430 Nikunen, M. (2011). Murder-suicide in the news: Doing the routine and the drama. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 14(1), 81–101. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549410377141 O’Brien, A., & Culloty, E. (2022). Reporting familicide-suicide in broadcast media: An Irish case study to inform better practice. Journalism, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884920978028 Paddenburg, T., Barrass, T., & Walsh, R. (2018, May 13). Margaret River shootings: Why was a WA family murdered? The West Australian. Parrott, S., & Parrott, C. T. (2015). Law and disorder: The portrayal of mental illness in U.S. crime dramas. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59(4), 640–657. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 08838151.2015.1093486 Partridge, E. (2014a, September 11). Shock loss of a strong bush family. The Canberra Times. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre. Partridge, E. (2014b, September 11). Scribbled note leaves no clue to tragedy of Lockhart family. Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age]. Partridge, E., Norrie, S., & Jeffery, C. (2014, September 11). Country town left reeling after community caught in tragedy. Sydney Morning Herald. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre. Patterson, R. (2016, October 17). Four people and a dog found dead at Davidson home on Sydney’s northern beaches. The Daily Telegraph. Sokoloff, N. J., & Dupont, I. (2005). Domestic violence at the intersections of race, class, and gender: Challenges and contributions to understanding violence against marginalized women in diverse communities. Violence Against Women, 11(1), 38–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780120 4271476 Staff Writer. (2018, June 18). Grieving father Aaron Cockman’s reveals motive behind Margaret River massacre in a heartbreaking interview on sunday night. https://www.news.com.au/ent ertainment/tv/currentaffairs/grieving-father-aaron-cockmans-reveals-motive-behind-margaretriver-massacre-in-a-heartbreakinginterview-on-sunday-night/news-story/657cce50b52ca6facc c60acf4f53c6a3 Stanko, E. (1994). Challenging the problem of men’s individual violence. In E. Stanko & T. Newburn (Eds.), Just boys doing business? Men, masculinities and crime (1st ed., pp. 32–45). Routledge. Sutherland, G., Easteal, P., Holland, K., & Vaughan, C. (2019). Mediated representations of violence against women in the mainstream news in Australia. BMC Public Health, 19(1), 502–508. https:// doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-6793-2 Sutherland, G., McCormack, A., Pirkis, J., Vaughan, C., Dunne-Breen, M., Easteal, P., & Holland, K. (2016). Media representations of violence against women and their children: Final report (Horizons). https://www.anrows.org.au/publication/media-representations-of-vio lence-against-women-and-their-children-final-report/ Taylor, R. (2009). Slain and slandered: A content analysis of the portrayal of femicide in crime news. Homicide Studies, 13(1), 21–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088767908326679 Truscott, E. (Deputy State Coroner). (2019). Inquest into the deaths of Maria Claudia Lutz, Elisa Manrique, Martin Manrique, Fernando Manrique (Report number 2016/00310113; 2016/00310114; 2016/00310115; 2016/00310084). Walby, S. (1990). Theorizing patriarchy. Basil Blackwell. Walklate, S., & Petrie, S. (2013). Witnessing the pain of suffering: Exploring the relationship between media representations, public understandings and policy responses to filicide-suicide. Crime Media Culture, 9(3), 265–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659013493917 Websdale, N. (1996). Predators: The social construction of “stranger-danger” in Washington State as a form of patriarchal ideology. Women and Criminal Justice, 7(2), 43–68. https://doi.org/10. 1300/J012v07n02_04 Websdale, N. (2010). Familicidal hearts: The emotional styles of 211 killers. Oxford University Press.

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Websdale, N., & Alvarez, A. (1998). Forensic journalism as patriarchal ideology: The newspaper construction of homicide-suicide. In F. Y. Bailey & D. C. Hale (Eds.), Popular culture, crime, and justice (pp. 123–142). West/Wadsworth Publishing Company. Wolfe, N. (2018, May 11). House of horror: Mum, four kids in WA shooting tragedy. Daily Mercury. Young, E. (2018a, May 15). ‘We may never know’ answers to murders. The Age. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre. Young, E. (2018b, May 14). ‘We may never know’: Bodies of murder-suicide victims not yet released. The Age [also appears in Sydney Morning Herald].

Chapter 10

The Mental Illness/Distress Frame

He Just ‘Snapped’ I can see how families can snap (Benny-Morrison, 2016a).

In the previous chapter, I showed that familicide is often represented as a mysterious tragedy, ultimately unknowable except through the forensic details of the crimes. This is particularly the case where there is no known history of domestic and family violence prior to the murders, rendering even such an extreme expression of family violence less intelligible as such. Discourses of mystery and unknowability disconnect familicide from the wider public issue of domestic and family violence. As such, journalists may seek meaning elsewhere. Initially, forensic minutia (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998), both macabre and mundane, can provide the vivid imagery and sense of knowability that journalists need to furnish readers: the positioning of bodies, the weapons used, the layout and location of the home, even the clothes worn by the perpetrator. However, as I argued in the previous chapter, as the early anchoring effect of forensic reporting dissolves, as the forensic details of the crimes are established, further meaning will be sought. Here, the narrative of familicide as mystery often slips easily into an investigation into the mental state of the perpetrator. If these expressions of violence are seemingly out-of-the-blue, divorced from the wider-known public crisis of domestic and family violence, then the answer must lie, it is assumed, in the minds of individual perpetrators. Unlocking the mystery relies on going into the mind of offenders, seeking out their story and their state of mind. Like other contemporary representations of murder and criminality, where the ‘truth’ cannot be gleaned through the authority of forensic science (Kruse, 2010), the fall-back explanations for social problems offered by psy-discourses are appealing (Rimke, 2016). Within these discourses, however, clues lie not in the family structure, power relations, or the conventions of society, but in the pained or pathological mind of one perpetrator. This chapter focuses on the mental illness/distress frame (Buiten & Coe, 2022). This refers to the framing of familicide (or any form of gender-based violence) as © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_10

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driven by mental illness - or more broadly, mental and emotional distress of perpetrators conceived of in individualistic terms. This frame “is amplified in cases of familicide [in which] the cultural signifiers for the increasingly publicly-conceived-of issue of ‘domestic violence’ are often not apparent, leading to popularised psychological explanations” (Buiten & Coe, 2022, p. 2). While not all news representations directly implicate mental illness in the perpetration of domestic and family violence, many rely on assumptions that violence is caused by perpetrators ‘snapping’ or that violence has been driven by difficult personal circumstances (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Niblock, 2018). They assume a psychocentric lens (Rimke, 2016), through which violence is attributed to the pathological mind and/or body of an individual, and through which mental illness/distress (and violence as a response to it) is presumed both astructural and ahistorical. As I show in this chapter, the mental illness/distress frame is often present in reporting on familicide-suicide, but also highly contested within news media spaces themselves. This reveals both the continued reliance on psychocentric explanations for violence as a fall-back position, especially when violence does not map neatly onto contemporary cultural understandings of domestic and family violence, and the way these framings are being subjected ever more to critique. First, I briefly contextualise the mental illness/distress frame within increasingly sympathetic and normalised public discourses of mental illness in Australia (Cui et al., 2019; Holmes, 2016; Rowe et al., 2003) and the broader rise of ‘psychocentrism’ in Western contexts (Rimke, 2012, 2016). I argue that the rise and contestation of the mental illness/distress frame are situated at the intersection of two competing discourses: public health discourses of mental illness that promote the treatment for sufferers, and increasingly mainstreamed feminist discourses of domestic and family violence that reject the premise that mental illness causes violence against women (Buiten & Coe, 2022). This creates a situation in which the mental illness/distress frame is both likely to be deployed in reporting on cases of extreme family violence and subject to swift rebuke. I refer to existing feminist research and advocacy that has identified and critiqued mental illness ‘referents’ (Little, 2015) in cases of family violence, and some research that shows this framing has been subject to public scrutiny in media spaces. I then chart how the mental illness/distress manifests in reporting on familicide, sometimes via direct references to mental illness but more commonly in implicit ways through language, the use of sources, and the way the crimes are contextualised (Gillespie et al., 2013). I discuss some of the complexities around the construction of a mental illness/distress frame, including how it has often been invoked by families and friends of victims as well as disability support advocates. I then examine how the mental illness/distress frame is rationalised or made sense of through tropes of the ‘nice, normal’ family, and the effects of this way of representing the issue of familicide. Finally, I highlight that the mental illness/distress frame does not go unchallenged, that it is subject to intense rebuttals within the news media itself, and that it is important to account for these feminist-informed counter-narratives when examining news representations.

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Contexts: Mental Health and Domestic Violence Discourses in Australia The appearance (and contestation) of the mental illness/distress frame needs to be understood within a context of competing discourses of mental illness/health and domestic and family violence that lay different contours around how cases of familicide may be interpreted. As Bacchi (2009) suggests, we need to ask not just how social problems are represented, but how these representations came about. What are the evolving discursive terrains in which problem representations emerge? What competing discourses are available within the culture to make sense of events, and how do these render some explanations more culturally intelligible than others? As I have argued elsewhere, “the comparative intelligibility of the mental illness/distress frame [must] be considered in the context of modern psychocentrism, particularly the medicalising and de-politicising of social issues through the trope of mental illness [and] a shift towards embracing mental illness as a public health issue over the last few decades” (Buiten & Coe, 2022, p. 5). Medical responses to mental illness have, over the past fifty years, shifted radically through de-institutionalisation, the development of a therapeutic discourse that normalises medical management of mental illness within the community (Cui et al., 2019; Holmes, 2016), and a growing willingness to talk about mental health (Holmes, 2016). In the last thirty years, mental health and illness have entered common parlance, featuring prominently in Australian life narratives (Holmes, 2016), and subject to growing media coverage (Francis et al., 2004) and policy development (Cui et al., 2019). While earlier media coverage of mental illness was often identified as largely negative and connected to violence, mental illness has received increasingly ‘sympathetic’ and normalised coverage in Australian news media (Francis et al., 2004; Rowe et al., 2003) and policy (Cui et al., 2019). This normalisation has largely been achieved by enfolding mental illness within biomedical and/or psycho-social models of health, displacing blame from the sufferer and positioning mental illness “as an individualised pathology in need of management through biological, psychological, or social controls” (Rowe et al., 2003, p. 680). Within the matrix of policy reforms towards increased awareness around and treatment for mental illness, the introduction of media reporting guidelines on mental illness and suicide (Australian Press Council, 2011, 2016), and significant efforts to de-stigmatise mental illness, the concepts of mental illness and health are ever more available to make sense of actions that may confound the public—in a way that is more sympathetic to an assumed sufferer. This is not to suggest that negative discourses around mental illness have been altogether eliminated. The connection between mental illness and the perpetration of violence within cultural representations, for instance, is still prevalent (Blood et al., 2002; Kesic et al., 2012). Still, while perceptions of people experiencing mental illness show that dangerousness continues to be associated with mental ill health, this association is diminishing and becoming increasingly mediated by factors such as type of mental illness (Kenez et al., 2015; Reavley et al., 2016; Rowe et al., 2003). Sufferers of rarer and more severe forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia,

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for instance, continue to be largely represented in the media in negative ways associated with violence, while people experiencing common mental health issues such as anxiety or depression are represented as in need of support rather than as violent (Reavley et al., 2016; Rowe et al., 2003). Still, even some sympathetic coverage of mental illness continues to connect it to the perpetration of violence, by framing violent crime as the outcome of a failed mental health system (Morgan & Jorm, 2009). This, too, can reproduce stigma and inhibit help-seeking (Morgan & Jorm, 2009). Overall, existing research suggests that it is not uncommon for violence to be associated with mental illness in the news, but that this is shifting, and that mental illnesses regarded more everyday are receiving increasingly care-oriented coverage. While moving largely away from more overtly negative constructions of those experiencing mental illness as deviant ‘others’, contemporary discourses of mental illness still rely on largely individualistic, psychocentric understandings of mental health (Cui et al., 2019). The call to end stigma surrounding mental illness and position it as a public health problem has been launched not through an appeal to address the social determinants of mental illness, but to a psychocentric, neoliberal construction of mental distress (Cui et al., 2019). In policy, mental illness is represented in largely individualised terms as resulting from biology or difficult personal circumstances, absent of attention to “the influences of broader social conditions” in the development of mental distress (Cui et al., 2019, p. 746). Similar to approaches taken to addiction in the Alcohol and Other Drugs sector (see Yates, 2019), the language around mental illness is often gender-neutral and individualist. The progressive de-stigmatisation of common experiences of mental distress, therefore, has been achieved through (and reinforces) neoliberal discourses that delineate emotional distress as something arising within the individual, disavowing the role of social structures (Cohen, 2016; Cui et al., 2019). As such, the solutions to mental illness proposed revolve largely around notions of a responsible, selfgoverning subject who accesses individually-tailored supports such as counselling and medication (Cui et al., 2019; DeFehr, 2016). Therefore, while mental illness is more visible as a public health issue and those who experience it cast as legitimate sufferers in need of support, mental illness is seldom subject to social appraisal in terms of causes or solutions. At the same time as discussions of mental illness as a public health issue have been mainstreamed through media and public policy, domestic and family violence advocates have worked concertedly to re-frame violence against women as a public issue of national importance (Murray & Powell, 2011). The domestic and family violence sector, however, has been propelled not by biomedical or psychocentric discourses, but in contrast to the mental health sector, by a sharp focus on the social and structural causes of violence (Yates, 2019). While there is still much room for improvement in Australian domestic violence policy (Kuskoff & Parsell, 2021) and even more so in related institutions such as the family court (Nelson & Lumby, 2021), social/structural feminist framings of domestic and family violence have come to assume a relatively normative position in contemporary Australian domestic and family violence policy (Hill, 2019; Yates, 2020). In news media, feminist insights on violence against women as a gendered public issue are also receiving greater

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attention (Buiten, 2020; Dragiewicz & Burgess, 2016; Gillespie et al., 2013). Perhaps never before has there been a greater media visibility and integration into policy of feminist thought around domestic and family violence than we see today. At the same time, however, the role of feminist models in this space remains hotly contested, subject to reinvigorated knowledge disputes and anti-feminist backlash as discussed in Chap. 2. Mainstream news portrayals of domestic and family violence, while also showing movement towards incorporating feminist frames, are still heavily reliant on individualised, episodic framing (Carlyle et al., 2008). Mental illness framings in news reporting on domestic and family violence have been critiqued by feminist scholars, the domestic and family violence sector, and social media users at large. Little (2015), for example, has censured references to mental illness as an antecedent for family violence as an “insidious” manifestation of “gender politics’ continuous role in stereotypical or over-simplified accounts of families and violence as wholly private concerns” (p. 606). Richards et al. (2011) have argued that emphasising perpetrators’ mental or emotional problems amounts to a form of indirect victim-blaming. From the domestic violence sector itself, reporting guidelines for news coverage of domestic violence provided by OurWatch, a leading Australian primary prevention organisation, explicitly mention mental illness as something that should not be reported as a cause of violence: [Do not describe] violence as being driven or ‘fuelled’ by alcohol or drugs, or connected to mental health, stress, finances, culture, the ‘burden’ of caring for someone with disability, or a perpetrator ‘just snapping’. This does not align with the evidence. While these issues may exacerbate violence, they do not drive it. (OurWatch, 2019, emphasis original).

Social media users have also formed part of the push against mental illness/distress framings of domestic and family violence (Quinn et al., 2019). The appearance of a mental health frame in news reporting on the Hawe familicide in Ireland, for instance, was picked up and vociferously challenged by social media users on Twitter (Quinn et al., 2019). What I have sought to sketch here is the contested, intersecting discursive space in which the mental illness/distress frame emerges. On the one hand, mental health has ascended as a public health issue in Australia in recent years, and mental illness has been increasingly normalised and subject to sympathetic (if individualistic) portrayals. At the same time, feminist perspectives on the social and structural determinants of violence against women have been asserted in public policy (Hill, 2019; Yates, 2020) and in media spaces as feminism has become increasingly professionalised (Buiten, 2020), even if they are subject to resistance and backlash. This complex discursive space scaffolds journalistic interpretations of familicide. Journalists seek to make sense of events, “however, much they seem incomprehensible” (Michelle & Weaver, 2003, p. 603). As I have observed elsewhere, “within this culturally invested ‘language of rationalisation’ […] nascent discourses of mental illness as a public issue may be drawn on as part of a journalistic repertoire of sensemaking” (Buiten & Coe, 2022, p. 5). This use of a mental illness/distress lens to explain familicide is even more likely to be deployed when cases involve self-harm or suicide, as familicide often does (Buiten & Coe, 2022), and in cases involving

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children that confront cherished social beliefs about parents as protectors (Little, 2015). At the same time, the feminist-informed discursive constructions of domestic and family violence contribute to powerful counter-narratives and sites of resistance to the mental illness/distress frame.

Familicide and the Mental Illness/Distress Frame Within the cases studied, the mental illness/distress frame, whether implicit or explicit, was most prominent in cases where there was no known history of domestic and family violence. This included primarily the Hunt, Miles, Manrique and to a lesser extent given low levels of reporting, the Milne familicides. These cases, generally regarded as ‘mysterious’, were most prone to mental illness/distress as an explanatory device due to their greater ambiguity. Whereas the Baxter familicide was more readily linked to the public issue of domestic and family violence due to compelling early connections made to ongoing domestic abuse, the remaining cases were regarded as more perplexing and subject to psychological explanations. Reporting that inferred the role of mental illness/distress was largely speculative, frequently devoid of sound evidence or other compelling information that the primary driver might in fact be mental illness. This is in line with existing research on news reporting around murdersuicide, in which unsubstantiated speculation about perpetrators’ mental state is pervasive, and in which mental illness assumes a proxy position as “the only credible explanation for the offender’s actions” (Flynn et al., 2015, p. 271). It also illuminates some of the more dominant cultural narratives available to decode acts of deadly violence—at least those committed within normatively gendered, classed and racialized families, as I will discuss later. The general public often default to individual explanations of domestic and family violence and as such, “news frames focusing on individual circumstances or qualities resonate as the seemingly natural explanation” (Fairbairn & Dawson, 2013, pp. 167–168). While the mental illness/distress frame was dominant in much reporting on familicide, divergences from and nuances around this theme are worth noting. The Baxter case did draw some news reports that took on a mental illness/distress framing; however, this was far rarer, and the case was generally positioned as illustrative of the severity and deadliness of domestic and family violence in Australia (discussed in Chap. 13). The mental illness/distress frame was far more prominent in the Hunt, Manrique, Miles, and Milne familicides. Second, the deployment of a mental illness/distress frame in reporting was often subject to shifts according to emerging sources and new information. For instance, the release of the coronial inquest findings on the deaths of Elisa and Martin Manrique, Maria Lutz, and Fernando Manrique (Truscott, 2019), more than two years after the murders, catalysed some later reporting that moved decidedly away from the mental illness/distress frame characterising earlier coverage. This later reporting was still reliant on individualistic explanations of Manrique’s violence (Buiten & Coe, 2022). However, the earlier presumption that Manrique was motivated by mental distress arising from

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raising autistic children was quashed as further details emerged through the coronial inquest process.1 In reporting on the Hunt familicide, on the other hand, the mental illness/distress frame was amplified by the coronial inquest report which was heavily reliant on a psychiatric assessment of Geoff Hunt (Barnes, 2015). The mental illness/distress frame is, therefore, temporally variable and influenced by emerging news sources.

Manifestations of the Mental Illness/Distress Frame How does the mental illness/distress frame manifest in relation to these cases? In this section, I examine some of the most common ways this frame presents: more overtly by employing the language of mental illness; through implicit references to mental illness/distress via the implication that perpetrators lacked control over their actions; through a focus on difficult personal circumstances that are assumed to lead to the perpetrator’s personal ‘breakdown’; and through a lack of contextualisation within domestic and family violence patterns. These modes of producing and supporting the mental illness/distress frame were achieved through a combination of language used (and not used), sources platformed (and excluded), and incorporation of contextual information (or lack thereof) (Gillespie et al., 2013). This framing of familicide was further supported and rationalised by discourses of the ‘normal’ family.

The Overt Language of Mental Illness Particularly in the Miles and Hunt cases, mental illness was often overtly referenced. At times, these more direct attributions of violence to mental illness appeared to be quite actively pursued and fashioned in the reporting. This resonates with what has been observed elsewhere in reporting on murder-suicide (Flynn et al., 2015)— that there is often an eagerness to insert mental illness as an explanation through active conjecture and by utilising ambiguous or even unsubstantiated information. Various pieces of available information were sometimes stitched together in a way that amplified mental illness as an explanatory device. A good example of this came in an article in The Australian, titled “Margaret River killer’s depression ‘worse and worse’ in his last days” (Burrell & Taylor, 2018). Text messages from Cynda Miles to a friend in which she said that Peter Miles was getting ‘worse and worse’ (without indicating in what way) were attached in this headline to a separate conversation she had with friends in which she mentioned he had been taking anti-depressants. In the body of the article, it is stated that “photos of Mr Miles reveal he had gained a lot of weight in recent months — a common symptom among 1

Key among these were that Manrique had begun methodically planning the familicide after Maria had expressed her intention to leave him, and that he had been having an affair (Truscott, 2019).

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people who take anti-depressants” (Burrell & Taylor, 2018). Where these photos came from or how they had been accessed by the journalists was not revealed. In another article in The Australian, the headline read: “darkness descends: depression is being blamed for WA familicide” (Taylor & Burrell, 2018). In this headline and the article that follows, depression was the agent. Quite strikingly, depressionas-agent was represented as largely omnipotent, without the possibility for mediation or intervention through personal or social agency. A range of sources of information discussing mental illness, depression, and Miles’ use of anti-depressants were synthesised to forge a clear message that the “inexplicable” murders had been the act of a depressed man, a man who was “ill” and “troubled” (Taylor & Burrell, 2018). Miles, it was said, had been neglecting some of the maintenance on the farm, had experienced a range of “sadness and conflict”, and had become more withdrawn and unenthusiastic (Taylor & Burrell, 2018). In this piece, a chemical basis for depression and violence was also presented. Desperate for answers, some friends believe Peter Miles’s depression — perhaps exacerbated by the medication he was taking — ruined his capacity for rational thought. They point to claims that some anti-depressants can trigger suicidal, and even homicidal, thoughts. ‘This was not part of a pattern of domestic violence’, says one close friend (Taylor & Burrell, 2018).

This statement was representationally powerful in terms of its appeal to biomedical truth-claims. While narrowing in on biomedical explanations as an assumed cause of violence left a range of other factors uninterrogated, it is worth asking whether such pieces of information may have been relevant to the case. Experiences of mental distress are deeply embodied and affected by a range of environmental factors including exposure to chemicals. As people experiencing certain mental health difficulties can attest, one’s state of mind can be significantly affected. At the same time, as outlined in Chap. 6, a psychocentric and principally biomedical account of mental illness ignores the rich and complex intersections of embodied experience and social factors, both material and ideological. The likelihood and presentation of ‘psychosis’, for instance, can be inflected by social conditions and inequalities (Heinz et al., 2013). Further, violence is not a standard response to depression, and gender can shape responses to depression and suicidal ideation in significant ways, leading men to be more likely to discharge feelings of distress in hegemonically masculine ways, for example, through violence (River & Flood, 2021). There is a dialectical relationship between the social and biological. Positioning (presumed) biomedical conditions as the sole determinant—even agent—of violence leaves unproblematic a range of social conditions that have been established as major drivers for violence against women and their children, and how they may mediate both mental illness/distress and violence as a response to it. In a void of concrete knowns as to motive, a range of provisional contextual information is available from a range of sources; how this information is selected and crafted into an explanation involves journalistic choices. Here, “the filtering capacity of public assumptions about mental illness” (Little, 2015, p. 608) come to fill the void. Journalists for The Australian reflected, following the Miles familicide, that

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“there are three clear themes in the recent cases of familicide in Australia: mental illness, a rural or regional setting, and ready access to guns. The perpetrators are mostly men” (Taylor & Burrell, 2018). Sexed patterns in perpetration and what they may mean in terms of gender relations, however, were not discussed in the remainder of the article. Instead, the focus remained on mental illness, with reference back to the coronial report for the Hunt familicide (Barnes, 2015), in which Geoff Hunt was said to be experiencing depression. The Australian also referred in the same article back to Damien Little, who in January 2016 shot his two small sons—four-year Koda and nine-month-old Hunter—then himself and drove them off the Port Lincoln Pier into the ocean. “His family said he had not sought treatment for his depression because he did not want to appear ‘weak’”, reported The Australian. The only point of connection between these three cases that was emphasised, therefore, was mental illness. Overt references to mental illness in reporting on the Hunt familicide were spurred by the coronial inquest process and the release of the coronial report (Barnes, 2015). The coroner’s report fed directly into a mental illness/distress frame in the news. Like so many cases of mental illness and marital difficulties, particularly in rural communities, the Hunts largely kept from others the demons that tortured them. And while the mental health and disability support network looked after Ms Hunt very diligently, [the coroner] found the system failed to penetrate the stoic exterior put up by her husband, whose silent suffering eventually grew too much, and led him to commit ‘the absolute worst of crimes’ (Begley, 2015).

This is a disquieting passage in many ways. By drawing directly from the coronial inquest, an authoritative source of information was utilised to make truth-claims. Notably, it again positioned mental illness—Geoff Hunt’s ‘silent suffering’—as the sole cause of violence, disavowing Hunt’s agency. While it did extend the framing of the familicide into a public issue, as a ‘system’ failure, this related solely to the need to address individual emotional distress arising from individual circumstances. The systemic failure implied was also not in protecting women and children from men’s violence, or in addressing the social norms that legitimate murder-suicide as a response to depression, but in addressing the mental health of the perpetrator. This resembles the way mental illness has increasingly been constructed as a public health problem but through a psychocentric lens. Most startlingly in the passage above, however, was the implication that the system ‘looked after’ Kim Hunt better than it did her husband, a profound example of the way a mental illness/distress frame can obscure, deny, and minimise the harms to victims by focusing on the suffering of perpetrators. Injured masculinity in this way becomes not a cause of violence against women and children, but a men’s health problem (Salter, 2016). Much is assumed in the mental illness/distress frame, much that cannot be fully known to neighbours, friends, or even extended family who are relied on for casespecific information. It provides an appealing fall-back position in the absence of a known history of domestic and family violence. The implicit binary set up between mental illness/distress and power and control-oriented domestic violence, furthermore, means that where mental illness is assumed present, it is assumed that gender, power, and control are not implicated. Further, it presumes that the presence of

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a history of varied forms of domestic violence and abuse can always be known to those outside of the family. Resultingly, murder of a family, even in a national context in which deadly domestic violence is rampant, must be the product of a pained or irrational mind rather than of gender and power. While the direct references to mental illness were more common in cases without a known history of domestic and family violence, it did arise occasionally in reporting on the Baxter familicide. In the most pronounced example of this, it was politicians’ take on the case that drove the narrative. Following the Baxter familicide, a Liberal Member of Parliament was reported as recommending that the school curriculum incorporate ‘respectful relationships’ education, but that mental health support was also ‘crucial’. ‘My view is mental health plays a vital role in domestic violence behaviour’, she said. ‘What lies beneath the surface of violent behaviours are specific psychological symptoms – poor coping skills, poor emotional regulation, poor distress tolerance, poor impulse control, a lack of empathy’ (Ireland, 2020a).

The Minister for Women at the time made similar statements, discussing the need for changes in “community attitudes” towards violence against women, while also signalling a focus would be on “examining access to mental health services to support both victims of domestic and family violence and people at risk of perpetrating violence” (Ireland, 2020b). It is interesting here that a balance between cultural change and mental health supports was attempted in both cases. However, the language around mental illness/distress and its relationship to violence remains gender-neutral and devoid of social context.

Perpetrators Without Control Beyond the more direct invocations of mental illness as a cause for violence, perpetrators were in various ways represented as out of control of their actions. This was achieved via reference to popular cultural narratives of the otherwise loving father who ‘snaps’ under pressure (Niblock, 2018). This narrative has been variously observed in representations of intimate partner homicide (Fairbairn & Dawson, 2013), in portrayals of male-perpetrated filicide (Niblock, 2018) and even among defence lawyers and judges for domestic homicide cases (Dobash et al., 2004). As Dobash et al. (2004) argue, “It is often said […] that men who kill an intimate woman partner are just ordinary men who in a moment of extreme passion or under extreme ‘provocation’ just ‘snap’. They kill, but they are not like others who do so” (p. 577, emphasis my own). The discourse of the ‘ordinary man’ who ‘snaps’ distances such men from ‘real’ perpetrators of violence. Their violence is implied as incompatible with their true nature; they did not have within them the embers of violence—a patriarchal desire for power or control, or the capacity for abuse. Violence is assumed to be something committed by an unconventional other.

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While it is true that a higher number of familicide offenders have no known history of domestic violence compared to perpetrators of other forms of deadly family violence (such as domestic femicide and filicide) (Karlsson et al., 2021a; Websdale, 2010), the implication that they simply ‘snapped’ distances them from patriarchal violence in a way that is at odds with what we know about the patriarchal nature of familicide. Further, considering that familicide is prone to premeditation and planning (Karlsson et al., 2021a), and certainly was carefully planned in at least three of the cases covered here, the presumption that familicide offenders suddenly ‘snapped’ is inaccurate. In the vein of psychocentrism, such discourses naturalise male violence against women and children as a response to over-whelming stress. Within the narrative of the ‘ordinary man’ who ‘snaps’, men are framed as “succumbing to a natural tendency that may be inevitable and even understandable under certain circumstances”, not asking why women and children are subjected to violence in the face of this stress (Fairbairn & Dawson, 2013, p. 153). This narrative was at times provided by ‘experts’: “dad snapped under strain, say police” (Partridge, 2014a). At other times, it was inserted quite speculatively, without a source to refer it back to. For example, a by-line for The Age read, “eight days after the Osmington tragedy, police are no closer to understanding what made Peter Miles snap” (Cormack, 2018). No source for the term ‘snap’ was referenced, signifying its relatively established place within the cultural lexicon on family murder. In another example, The Australian reported that “it has been alleged that Mr Manrique, 44, ‘snapped’ and in an apparent murder-suicide rigged their home with gas cannisters as a way of bringing about a painless death for the four” (Buckingham-Jones, 2016). Again, no source was attributed for the term. The incongruity between the explanation and the manner of the killings also seemed to go unquestioned. To ‘snap’ suggests a sudden and sharp action, not manifestly represented in the slow, careful, consistent attention that was required to ‘rig’ the home in this way. The attribution of murder to a man who ‘snapped’ functioned to obscure the victims of these crimes; the harms done to them were, in such renderings, profoundly silenced by positioning the perpetrators’ experiences at the centre of the narrative while divesting them of accountability for their conduct. This was particularly the case when all those who died were presenting in equal terms as a family in distress, a family who snaps. As a source in one article stated of the Lutz-Manriques: “I can see how families can snap” (Brown, 2016).

Family Tragedies Without Agents of Violence The language of tragedy and private pain prevailed in representations of familicide where perpetrators had no known history of violence. Of course, the events were tragic in the sense that they embodied tremendous suffering. But the language of tragedy was largely passive. It inferred a calamity, an extraordinary set of events rather than events that index back to a chronic and pervasive social issue. The conflation of familicide with other calamities, such as natural disasters and ‘freak’ accidents, was

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particularly apparent in an opinion piece by a local community journalist published in the Sydney Morning Herald. While there is no sense of comparison here to Port Arthur or mass shootings of that kind, those of us in this community have spent the past weekend trying to grasp what seemingly unsurmountable difficulties can lead to this type of calamity for a farming family in rural Australia (Edwards, 2018).

Miles’ violence against the family was dissociated from other mass killings, inferentially through the reasoning that the former was the result of ‘insurmountable’ personal crisis that took hold of the family, incomparable with the killings at Port Arthur. The piece went on, instead, to compare it to other tragedies in the area, tragedies without seeming rhyme or reason—unforeseeable and therefore largely unavoidable calamities. We [the community] have also known our fair share of tragedies in the past 25 years: the 1996 Gracetown rockfall in which five adults and four children were killed when a beach cliff face they were sheltering under collapsed; and the tragic bushfires of 2011, which destroyed 39 homes and damaged 26 others (Edwards, 2018).

Violence in the face of personal crisis was in this way likened to other agentless tragedies, or tragedies in which the forces of nature, rather than human action, were implicated. Human efforts, it seemed to be suggested, are no match for these forces of nature that sweep in, sudden, and undefeatable. “It is now apparent that no one was able to reach into the core of the family’s private pain” (Edwards, 2018). The pain assumed to be driving the violence was also positioned collectively as the family’s, yet only one family member acted in violence. This is a potent example of the logical gap that often exists within the mental illness/distress frame; the space between anguish and action is left uninterrogated. In the causal and temporal space between the experience of mental illness or distress and the wielding of ultimate power and control over the situation through violence, there is socially situated human agency—and it is gendered. As seen in the collection of headlines below, the narrative of generalised ‘family tragedy’ was often bound up in a pattern of passive language use, where socially situated perpetrator action and agency were rendered invisible, and the distinction between those who chose to die and those who did not was obfuscated. House of horror: Mum, four kids in WA shooting tragedy (Wolfe, 2018a). Farewells for family in Margaret River tragedy (Anonymous, 2018a). Help needed to relieve private pain (Edwards, 2018). Lockhart shooting: Wagga Wagga community reeling after Hunt family tragedy (O’Neill et al., 2014). Mia Hunt’s haunting photo of ducks on a dam on Lockhart farm where tragedy struck (Koziol, 2014). A full probe is needed to stop family tragedy striking again (Iredale & Donald, 2015). Davidson deaths: was it all too much for tragic parents? (Brennan, 2016).

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Inside the final weeks of tragic family found gassed in their home (Anonymous, 2016a).

Reading these headlines, one would not know who the shooter was, nor sometimes even that the events involved murder. In some full articles on the Miles familicide, the shooter was never identified—readers were told of a ‘mass shooting’ and ‘murdersuicide’ but not who committed it. The deployment of passive language has been observed in reporting on sexual (Henley et al., 1995) and domestic violence by men (Frazer & Miller, 2009). Henley et al.’s (1995) pioneering work on passive language and reporting on violence against women not only established that passive language was used more habitually in reporting on such crimes, but also that there is a rigorous justification for taking this pattern seriously. In passive language, an action or event is devoid of the primary agent; the person or object experiencing an action is described rather than the person or object that has performed the action upon them. For instance, while the sentence “man murders woman” highlights the person performing the action, “woman is murdered” removes the agent from the equation and focuses on the person who had the action performed upon them. Henley et al. (1995) showed that exposure to news reporting on rape in which passive voice was used lead to greater levels of victim-blaming and rape myth acceptance than when active language was used. They also found that male readers were more likely to attribute less harm to victims and less accountability to perpetrators when passive language was used. Frazer and Miller (2009) revealed that the use of passive language to describe acts of violence is more common when perpetrators are male than when perpetrators are female, a feature they argued both expresses and reinforces attitudes towards gender and power. In the headlines above, the narrative of family tragedy was similarly devoid of a clear agent of violence. At times, an agent of violence was absent altogether (“tragic family found gassed in their home”, “help needed to relieve private pain”). At others, it was the tragedy itself that was presented as the agent (“tragedy struck”, “stop tragedy striking again”). On the one hand, I am cognizant that familicide in a context of no known previous family violence could easily be interpreted by journalists as a ‘family tragedy’ given that it has been perpetrated by seemingly previously non-violent men who took their own lives in the process. The makings of a ‘villain’ were not articulated by friends, neighbours, or often even extended families. These cases would have been more complex and ambiguous for journalists to report on than a case like that of Rowan Baxter, who chose such an inconceivably cruel and painful instrument of violence to murder the woman and children who had been trying to escape his abuse. Without these more unambiguous markers of the ‘violent man’, and in the presence among some like Hunt and Miles of a reported history of depression, journalists could easily be swayed into thinking of the case as a collective tragedy for all people involved. Still, Henley et al. (1995) remind us that the lexicon and syntax of representations of violence matters greatly. It shapes not only how perpetrator subject positions are constructed, but how victim subject positions are formed. In this case, the discourse of collective family tragedy masked the iniquity and unique harms committed against victims. It also did not lucidly communicate the salient facts of the cases that could

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inform how to prevent them, facts that resonate with what we know about gender and violence in our society more broadly: that men, whether anguished or not, acted in violence against their families.

Sad Men, Failed Men This section highlights two interlinked assumptions about men and mental distress in representations of familicide: that sad men are failed men and that sad men can easily be violent men. Embedded within discourses of sad, failed men was the assumption that men will experience severe (even murderous) distress in particular circumstances, and that under those circumstances, familicide is a rational, albeit tragic, choice. The connections between masculine ‘failure’ and male violence, however, were largely naturalised. Representations of familicide often rested on the assumption that ‘failure’ in traditionally masculine areas leads to family annihilation. Much reporting focused on uncovering whether perpetrators had experienced problems in conventionally masculine areas: control over finances, especially in their role as breadwinners of the family, and oversight over the direction of the family as heads of households. For example, The Age reported that “friends have told [reporters] Mr Miles ‘could not look after his family’ and felt a ‘sense of failure’. He had financial problems, was battling mental illness, and was reportedly taking anti-depressants” (Anonymous, 2018b). Fernando Manrique was described as under financial strain: “They were in financial dire straits. He had massive tax issues, a credit card that was maxed out and two home loans reduced to interest only payments” (Brook, 2019a). Often, particular care was taken to unearth information about financial troubles, for example, through social media. There have been murmurs the 61-year-old grandfather [Peter Miles] was under financial stress and was struggling to find work, a narrative backed up by a number of Facebook appeals and Gumtree ads offering his farm expertise (Wolfe, 2018b).

Even an absence of financial difficulties was at times raised to underscore the perplexing nature of the events, and local sources appeared to have been specifically asked about financial troubles by journalists. [The Hunt] family were not under financial pressure and were about to build a dream new homestead on their Watch Hill property, surrounded by lush wheat and canola fields (Partridge, 2014a) He said he thought the farm had been doing well financially. ‘I did not think there were any financial problems’.

The theme of failed traditional masculinity has been observed by Little (2021) in her analysis of representations of male-perpetrated filicide in the Australian news. She calls it the “disempowered man” frame (Little, 2021, p. 1450), in which the masculine subject position constructed around perpetrators in news is shaped by assumptions

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of gender role performance. The ‘disempowered man’ is a man who has attempted, but failed, at succeeding in embodying a “specifically Australian” (Little, 2021, p. 1454) form of hegemonic masculinity. As Little (2021) reminds us, these cultural discourses do not originate in the newsroom alone, but through a wider “interpellative community” (p. 1451) of which journalists, readers, and commentators all form a part. This interpellative community lays contours around how violence is read, by drawing on preexisting discourses of gender and the family through which to make sense of events. As a failed masculine subject, the ‘disempowered man’ at once represents hegemonic masculinity (in his use of violence) and an aberration in his failure to achieve normative masculinity in other ways. Mental illness/distress as an explanatory device is rationalised through the “filtering capacity” not just of public assumptions of mental illness (Little, 2015, p. 608) but of men and the family. Accordingly, that financial troubles are often looked to in order to make sense of family annihilation is a gendered phenomenon; it reflects assumptions about gender norms and roles, and the depth of men’s responses to failure to meet them. Where framed as altruistic murder-suicides assumed to be aimed at ‘sparing the family pain’, perpetrator actions were sometimes presented a final act as head of the household. These themes came together in perhaps their most distilled form in the news reporting of the press statement given by the father of Taye, Rylan, Arye, and Kadyn soon after their deaths. As discussed in Chap. 8, this statement and the way it shaped news reporting on the familicide was deeply complicated by the fact that the news came to be shaped by the words of a surviving family member, a father experiencing fresh grief. I discuss this further later in this chapter. What I wish to point out here is the way notions of the failed man, and Miles’ violence as the assumed act of a protective patriarch, emerges. [The children’s father], who unexpectedly fronted the media after news of the mass shooting broke out on Friday, said Peter Miles was trying to ‘fix the whole problem’. […] ‘Peter has been trying to hold it together for a long time’. I thought, ‘There is no way possible he could [suffer another tragedy],2 he will kill himself’. I thought, ‘No he will not do that either because he is so close to my kids that he would not leave the kids upset for the rest of their lives about it’. But he thought, ‘I cannot live anymore, so this is it for me. But I need to take out everyone because that will fix the whole problem’ and he is fixed the whole problem (Staff Writers, 2018). For Peter to actually take on a farm with all my kids on it and be the father figure, it is a lot of pressure on someone that is not mentally capable and should not be in that situation (Taylor, 2018c).

Familicide, here as elsewhere in the reporting, was implicitly the rational act of a family patriarch. Peter Miles was portrayed as struggling to “hold it together”, under tremendous pressure as “the father figure” and failing to manage this, killed the family to “fix the whole problem”. The explanation of the stoic, silent, and decisive patriarch, acting out his role as head of the family, surfaced all too easily. Peter Miles was described as the “family patriarch” in an article detailing the “beautiful service” 2

Specifically, he spoke of Peter Miles not being able to lose another son. Peter and Cynda Miles had lost a son a few years prior, and another son was experiencing health problems.

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held to mourn the family (Anonymous, 2018c). Manrique was also referred to at one point as the “family patriarch” (Anonymous, 2016b). Rather than invoking the term ‘patriarch’ to interrogate constructions of gender or questions of power, however, it was wielded in a way that reified the underlying family structures it represented. Their role as patriarchs was raised, but patriarchal relations not implicated as a causal factor in the familicide. The coverage of the familicide by Darren Milne, while sparse and subject to less perpetrator sympathising, also portrayed him as a depressed man who could not face what he perceived as the inevitable failure of his family to cope with their son’s disabilities. The calm and focused notes he left behind, detailing the meticulous planning of the familicide, were included in the news without social contextualisation through sources, experts or other journalistic resources. Milne’s actions read in news reports as the quite rational, if deeply shocking, actions of a man facing failure. Indeed, it should be acknowledged that a loss of control over conventionally ‘masculine’ domains such as family and finances is a common catalyst for familicide, as shown in Chap. 4. Further, familicide is more likely to be committed by the ‘family patriarch’—the head of household and primary breadwinner (Liem & Koenraadt, 2008; Mailloux, 2014; Oliffe et al., 2015; Wood Harper & Voigt, 2007). However, the reporting referred to here did not tackle the gendered drivers behind this; the notion of failed masculinity as the basis for mental illness/distress and of family annihilation as the rational, if extreme, acts of the family patriarch, remained naturalised. Failed masculinity and a perpetrator’s sense of shame and powerlessness (Websdale, 2010) were offered as a reason for family murder without asking why this should be. Male violence in the face of failure was presented as natural, and therefore rationalised (Naylor, 2001), subtly reifying the very patriarchal constructions of the family that underlie the phenomenon of familicide. As Gilmore (2019) puts it, while journalists may search for quotes that suggest causal explanations for male violence, especially those that signal conditions like depression or other forms of mental illness, they “almost never ask why, if that were the cause […], the man in question chose to kill his family”. Shier and Shor (2016) agree. While psychological problems can potentially play a role in family murders, they say, gendered drivers such as the policing of female sexuality or the humiliated fury and shame that arise when masculine control is threatened “are central to understanding family violence in every society” (p. 1180). News reporting, while giving attention to men’s mental distress, tends to sidestep one crucially important point: that perpetrators of family violence, especially those involving an intimate partner, are for the most part men despite women also experiencing mental illness (Shier & Shor, 2016). Interestingly, causal links between gender and mental distress were broached in a small portion of news reporting. Specifically, cases involving rural and farming men (the Miles and Hunt familicides) stimulated some commentary on the gendered dynamics of personal mental health care and help-seeking behaviours. Over-whelmingly, we are asking ourselves how to set up measures to ensure other farming families in crisis in regional Australia receive real assistance before another tragedy occurs.

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How do we find new ways to help men, trained for generations in stoic coping, express their deepest fears and ask for help? (Edwards, 2018). There are lots of people like [Geoff Hunt] out here … you do not talk about things […] He was a farmer, and they are all a bit the same in the way they do not say a lot (Taylor & Burrell, 2018). We farmers are hardened […] The black dog [depression] works in strange ways (Staff Writers, 2018). [Farmers] are socialised to be the tough guy and wear it and bear it and grin. Often they have serious depression issues, and they have not been diagnosed (Partridge, 2014b).

A few of these articles also spoke about the hardships facing contemporary Australian farmers, identifying social and economic conditions at a broader structural level that are impacting on farming families and especially farming men. Through this kind of reporting, a connection between the social construction of Australian farming masculinities and experiences of mental illness/distress was forged, reflecting relevant research in this area (for example, Bryant & Garnham, 2015). Still missing, however, was the link between rural farming masculinity, mental distress, and patriarchal violence against women and children (Pease, 2010). Without expressing these links, notions of Australian farming men in crisis risk rearticulating stories of violence against women and children as stories about the suffering of men. As Salter (2016) points out, expressions of men’s threatened dominance are increasingly being reframed as a public health issue. Attempts to reclaim masculine dominance are, accordingly, represented as signs of men’s declining mental and physical health. The focus shifts from addressing gender inequality to retrieving and revitalising threatened masculinities in the interests of public health. As such, the mobilisation of “spectacles of suffering” men is a burgeoning political tactic against feminist progress (Salter, 2016). Considering the intersections of masculinity and mental illness/distress, therefore, is not enough; we need to consider why and how this is mobilised as violence against women and their children (River & Flood, 2021).

Nice, White, Middle-Class Families Suffer from Mental Illness, Not Patriarchy The mental illness/distress frame is most prominent where violent actions appear ‘out-of-the-blue’ or ‘out of character’. Its presence is often undergirded by assumptions that if such violence happens in a ‘nice, normal’ family (read: white, middle class, nuclear, seemingly happy) that it must be mental illness not family violence. When a seemingly ‘ordinary’ person is willing to commit mass murder, “mental illness acts as an informal ascription or ‘folk category’ that fills in for abnormal or otherwise unexplainable behaviour” (Duxbury et al., 2018, p. 771). However, what makes an ‘ordinary’ person, a ‘nice’ family, in the media? The power and potency of the mental illness/distress frame rests on the assumption that killers themselves are

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not socially deviant, and that their violence must therefore be explained by mental disorder. It also relies on normative constructions of the family, within which it is assumed members are sheltered from violence. As I have argued elsewhere: Constructions of the ‘nice’ man who kills his family [operate] to support assumptions of these violent acts as inexplicable, devoid of a context of control and coercion (Niblock, 2018). Yet, ‘killing [often] makes public what has been private, hidden to family, friends, and neighbours who often thought that this man had been a “doting” and “loving” father and “dutiful” husband’ (Niblock, 2018, p. 2453). Representing violence as out of character bolsters the mental illness/distress frame, as ‘nice men’ cannot be conceived of as violent but can be conceived of as sufferers of mental illness or distress (Buiten & Coe, 2022, p. 9).

Perceptions of killers and their motivations are inflected by intersecting social categories. Existing research on mass murder (Duxbury et al., 2018), terrorism (Kunst et al., 2018), and femicide (Shier & Shor, 2016) has shown that violence is more likely to be presumed driven by psychopathology, and perpetrators viewed as sufferers of mental illness, if they are white. People of colour, on the other hand, are less likely to have their actions attributed to mental illness/distress and more likely to have their violence ascribed to ‘culture’ or ideology (Duxbury et al., 2018; Maydell, 2018; Shier & Shor, 2016). Incredibly, so strong are these associations that they work in reverse: when an act of mass violence is described as motivated by mental illness, people are more likely to interpret the racial appearance of perpetrators as more ‘white’, and to assign them less blame for their actions; when mass violence is attributed to ideology, the reverse is true, with perpetrators’ appearances judged to be less ‘white’ (Kunst et al., 2018). This deep racializing of violence shapes when and how domestic and family violence is represented as an individual or structural issue, with white or otherwise ‘insider’ violence more likely to be individualised (Karlsson et al., 2021b) or justified (Pepin, 2016). While the Manrique and Milne cases involved families with a migrant background, they were framed as members of a multi-cultural Australian society, in which migrant backgrounds are common. It is difficult to know, empirically, how familicide would be portrayed if a family was not white, given that such cases did not present in this period (and are, as I said in Chap. 4, far rarer). However, in the context of the extensive literature on differential framings of violence by race—including domestic violence (for example, Karlsson et al., 2021b; Maydell, 2018; Shier & Shor, 2016) and mass violence (for example, Duxbury et al., 2018; Kunst et al., 2018)—it is fair to anticipate that race may play a role in strengthening an individualistic mental illness/distress frame in these cases. Social class can also play an important role. As Walklate and Petrie (2013) observe, family murder within affluent families and by perpetrators of higher social status is subject to greater speculation as to motives, their behaviour deemed less understandable. The mental illness/distress frame, therefore, offers a convenient explanatory mechanism that can map more easily to these ‘inexplicable’ and unanticipated behaviours (Buiten & Coe, 2022). As I showed in Chap. 9, representations of the Miles, Manrique, and Hunt cases were heavily invested with classed symbols of family life: idyllic homes (Brook, 2018), manicured hedges and French doors (BennyMorrison, 2016b), leafy suburbs (Brook, 2019b), fecund farmlands (Foster, 2018),

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children playing in the front yard (Patterson, 2016), ponies and delicately trimmed bush mazes (Partridge, 2014c). Information on the value of the family properties was even raised in some reports. Along with statements from neighbours and friends about the unlikeliness of the killings, picturesque middle-class rural and sub-urban settings were framed as conventional places in which violence could not be expected. [Maria Lutz] seemed very nice, we cannot believe something like this could happen here (Brennan & Patterson, 2016). [The Lutz-Manriques] were just a normal family, and the kids would play in the front yard. [Fernando Manrique] built them a little play area so they could play in the front garden. The dad more or less built the house himself. They were well looked after (Patterson, 2016).

As discussed in Chap. 9, adherence to normative gender roles also implicitly tied to the idea that the violence was out of place. In humanising the victims, particularly adult women, there was a tendency to emphasise conventionally (middle-class) feminine qualities and virtues, enabling the construction of ‘ideal victims’ (Christie, 1986). As Lloyd and Ramon (2017) argue, reports of domestic femicide “frequently draw on the construct of the ideal woman and the dominant ideology of motherhood” (p. 126) to portray victims as sympathetic and deserving. They show that women must be portrayed as busy and hardworking but also primarily focused on the family to achieve this status (Lloyd & Ramon, 2017). I also found that unpaid community work—charity work, road safety advocacy, sustainability work, and so on—as well as caring work was particularly emphasised and that victims who engaged in these kinds of activities were more likely to receive rich character descriptions. Male perpetrators, too, were described in conventionally gendered terms, their achievements in masculine domains emphasised. While Fernando Manrique was not described in great detail in the first cycle of reporting (prior to the result of the coronial inquest being made available), when he was it was in traditionally masculine terms, as a breadwinner, a successful career man, a highflyer who travelled extensively for work, financially “looked after” his family and built his home “brick by brick” (Gusmaroli et al., 2016). Adherence to normative middle-class masculinity was implicitly advanced as something that made his violence unexpected, as can be seen in the passage below: But beneath the friendly face and suit-and-tie were a man who turned the family home he built 11 years ago into a gas chamber (Morri & Houghton, 2016).

Seeming ‘normality’ in classed and gendered terms “lends weight to the explanatory power of mental illness/distress by making male violence less culturally intelligible” (Buiten & Coe, 2022, p. 12). We can see similar descriptions of Geoff Hunt: I think [Geoff Hunt] was a very popular young man. They were just hard-working people. Typical of people who live in a small community. [Mr Hunt was] a hard-working farmer who loved Australian football […] He had himself a nice wife and couple of kids […] Everything looked rosy (Partridge et al., 2014).

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These gendered constructions “strengthen the assumption of violence as an unexpected anomaly, granting a mental health/distress frame greater explanatory power” (Buiten & Coe, 2022, p. 11). And yet, despite the assumption that certain (normatively gendered and classed) families are largely immunised against the ugliness of patriarchal violence (see also O’Brien & Culloty, 2022), familicide is more likely to occur in such contexts, as shown in Chap. 4. There is a tendency to regard the nuclear heterosexual family as safe haven, when it very often is not (Kay, 2020). When confronted with such cases, it can be difficult to see or accept that the terrible violence displayed is part of a remarkably common continuum of gendered violence located within the heteropatriarchal structure of the family that is presumed so safe. First, as Kay points out, contemporary western capitalist society “generates, naturalises, and institutionalises particular kinds of intense emotional attachments, within social constructs such as marriage and the family” (p. 885). As discussed in Chap. 4, these deep intensely felt attachments to certain ideas of ‘family’—combined with an investment in men’s (patriarchal) roles within the family—intensify the shame and hopelessness that men can experience and undergird familicide. Second, these intense attachments are forged at the expense of other kinds of affective and solidaristic possibilities outside the nuclear family (Kay, 2020). This is potentially dangerous, as we can see in the case of familicide, because it renders the notion of survival and flourishing outside the family unit unthinkable for perpetrators. Normative, idealised constructions of family and gender are not, therefore, discordant with familicide but implicated in it. Yet, when it comes to news portrayals, families representing these norms are often presumed immunised from patriarchal violence, rendering mental illness/distress the more likely explanation.

Lack of Contextualisation Perhaps the most straightforward, yet significant, way the mental illness/distress frame was produced was through a lack of contextualisation within patterned domestic and family violence. In particular, this occurred through the kind of support services posted (and not posted) within articles and the selection of expert inputs that were sought (and not sought). The inclusion of relevant domestic and family violence support services and expert input from the sector plays a crucial role in constructing a context for news stories (Easteal et al., 2021; OurWatch, 2019). Gillespie et al. (2013) argue that three key mechanisms work to produce news frames of genderbased violence: language, sources, and context. These are also linked; for instance, language referencing ‘domestic violence’ can allude to a case’s connectedness to this wider social issue and the selection of sources (neighbours versus family violence experts, for instance) can serve to contextualise or de-contextualise a case. Listing support services and including the voices of experts on domestic and family violence are simple but effective ways of referencing a wider social context.

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The provision of support services in news reporting on cases of domestic violence is important for a range of reasons. First, it helps to contextualise individual cases within broader patterns of gender-based violence, “constructing a bridge between the individual event and other events identified on the same terms” (Buiten & Coe, 2022, p. 8). This counteracts the tendency towards episodic reporting on domestic and family violence (Carlyle et al., 2008) and positions individual cases as part of a public issue. News can also be an important source of symbolic recognition and vital information for women experiencing violence and abuse. When only mental health and suicide-related services are listed, women reading news coverage of familicide who may be experiencing domestic violence and abuse are given the message that resources are aimed at assisting perpetrators rather than at protecting victims. For those who may be reading about familicides and wondering: ‘could that be my family next?’ the absence of such resources signals a tremendous symbolic disavowal of the threats that face them, and the reality that murder is the final act in far too many abusive relationships. Mental illness or not, the failure to recognise this through the absence of, at the very least, posted domestic and family violence resources epitomises a dearth of victim/survivor centred reporting. This can have lived effects (Bacchi, 2009). As Easteal et al. (2021) point out, a “lack of coverage of resources available may exacerbate [victim-survivor] perceptions of isolation, inhibit help-seeking, and decrease public knowledge about the availability of services, while their inclusion provides acknowledgement of the widespread nature of the problem beyond that of an individual problem to be dealt with by the victim alone” (p. 3). Astonishingly, few news articles on the Hunt, Milne, Miles, and Manrique cases listed any contact information for domestic and family violence services, such as 1800Respect3 or Men’s Referral Service.4 On the other hand, mental health and suicide-prevention support services were almost ubiquitously included, most commonly Lifeline (a service for those in personal crisis or thinking about suicide), Mensline (a mental health support counselling service for men), BeyondBlue (a depression support service) or the Suicide Call Back Service (for those thinking about suicide). Only a quarter of articles on the Hunt case included domestic and family violence support services, around six per cent of the Lutz-Manrique articles, none of the MilneCastillo articles,5 and just over twenty per cent of the Miles articles. These numbers are low, but higher than those contained in a 2016 Australian-wide study that found just 4.3% of the domestic violence-related newspaper articles they reviewed (929 articles) included domestic violence help-seeking information (Sutherland et al., 2016). A later, smaller-scale study found that of 100 domestic and family violence-related articles reviewed, journalists without specific domestic violence reporting training 3

The National Sexual Assault, Domestic, and Family Violence Counselling Service for Australia. A service for Australian men dealing with family and domestic violence matters, especially as perpetrators. 5 Articles on this case were fewer in number and very few after it was discovered that the case was murder-suicide. Nonetheless, this is an important omission given there was some reporting on the case after the Coronial Inquest which revealed the car crash as a premeditated familicide. 4

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only included relevant support services 30% of the time. In short, the omission of relevant domestic and family violence support services is a common issue in news reporting not only of familicide but domestic violence more broadly and one that is connected, at least in part, to an understanding and awareness of its importance among journalists. The Australian Press Council’s Advisory Guideline on Family and Domestic Violence Reporting (2016) states that: “where lawful and appropriate, it is strongly recommended that published material relating to family violence that could be distressing should be accompanied by information about sources of assistance” (np). Notably, the guidelines do not stipulate which sources of assistance must be listed but offer a range of “examples of sources of assistance publications may wish to include in articles” on domestic and family violence. These examples include resources such as 1800Respect and Mensline, but also more general support services such as Lifeline. As such, even for journalists following the Australian Press Council’s guidelines, the provision of a general mental health support service such as Lifeline could be interpreted as sufficient. Add to this, there are specific standards—mandated requirements—for reporting on suicide. The Specific Standards on Coverage of Suicide (Australian Press Council, 2011) is a binding document that requires reporters to include 24-hour suicide support lines when reporting on cases of self-harm or suicide. This helps, in part, to explain why in cases of murder-suicide these kinds of services are almost always listed, while domestic and family violence services seldom are; these are standards rather than guidelines as is the case with reporting on domestic violence cases. There is, however, also an interpretive component to the selection of support services. Specific training programmes on best practice for reporting around domestic and family violence can significantly increase the likelihood that journalists will include relevant domestic violence services in their publications (Easteal et al., 2021). Having a better understanding of best practice and the rationale behind it can make a difference even if journalists are not mandated to engage in best practice. Complexities arise when journalists are dealing with stories of domestic murdersuicide, which occur at the intersection of suicide and domestic homicide. The imperatives of responsible reporting on suicide and mental illness, and those of responsible reporting on domestic and family violence, can come into tension. For instance, framing murder-suicide as wholly the result of male violence against women could potentially be in tension with suicide reporting recommendations to avoid reducing suicide to a single problem or stigmatising sufferers of mental illness (Richards et al., 2014). Similarly, suicide reporting guidelines tend to emphasise the role that news on cases involving suicide can play in informing the public around issues of suicide and mental health (Richards et al., 2014); however, advocates in the area of domestic and family violence have similar reasons for wishing to highlight these issues in the media and are likely to see an emphasis on mental illness in reporting on femicide-suicide as problematic. There is lack of specific reporting guidelines in dealing with stories of femicide-suicide, which deserves different treatment to suicide-only cases in the media (Richards et al., 2014). As such, Richards et al.

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(2014) conclude that reporting guidelines on suicide need to be extended and integrated with guidelines on reporting domestic and family violence to create a specific set of guidelines for reporting murder-suicide. Among the recommendations they make in this respect is that reporting on femicide-suicide, the most common form of murder-suicide, must include reference to domestic and family violence resources and experts. Various researchers have suggested that sourcing practices also have a significant impact on how news on domestic and family violence is framed. The inclusion of experts on the social issues at hand, rather than the usual overreliance on law enforcement as sources in violent crime reporting, is a common recommendation among those researching and writing on gender-based violence in the media (for example, Morgan & Politoff, 2012; OurWatch, 2019; Richards et al., 2014). As Morgan and Politoff (2012) point out, research on sourcing practices has shown there exists a “‘hierarchy of credibility’ when reporting gendered violence” (p. 59), one that shapes the over-reliance on sources that, by virtue of the approaches and practices embedded with their professions, are more likely to frame it in individualistic terms. Their research showed a “disturbingly low” (Morgan & Politoff, 2012, p. 61) rate of inclusion of experts on violence against women in Victorian news, at just 6% of articles. The absence of women-centred expertise in news coverage of gender-based violence acts as a form of symbolic annihilation, itself acting as “an instrument of oppression and contributor to systems of gender inequality” (Fairbairn & Dawson, p. 170). Including experts on gender-based violence of various kinds is a reasonably simple and highly effective way to contextualise individual cases of violence and to inject the news with constructive counter-narratives to dominant episodic framings. It is an act of recognition of the wealth of survivor-focused expertise6 and enables journalists to contextualise particular cases against wider issues without making specific claims about the facts of the case at hand. In reporting on familicide in the Miles, Milne, Manrique, and Hunt cases, a conspicuous absence of expert voices on familicide, filicide, intimate partner homicide or domestic violence was observed. While some expert voices did emerge, this was most frequently through opinion pieces written by feminist and domestic violence advocates and survivors who regularly conduct journalistic advocacy through their relationship with certain publications. These established lines of access into the mainstream news cultivated counter-narratives that, articulated as they were from within the relative authority of the ‘Fourth Estate’ (Little, 2015), represented important sites for discursive contestation particularly around the mental illness/distress frame. At the same time, they are clearly presented as opinion pieces or editorial content rather than ‘hard’ news. As such, while their position within the mainstream news commanded a platform of relative authority, the ‘hard’ news pieces 6

“Experts” can and should include, where possible and done in an ethical and supportive way, the lived experience expertise of victim-survivors. Domestic Violence New South Wales, for example, have been working to empower and support survivors to speak about their experiences and lobby for change. Their team of survivor-advocates has been working with the media and providing media producers and others with lived experience expertise on issues of domestic violence. See their Website: https://www.dvnsw.org.au/working-for-change/voices-for-change/.

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continued to rely on law enforcement, neighbours, friends, and (through the relevant coronial processes) legal and psychiatric experts. Even the more in-depth feature articles that allowed for more flexible story-telling devices and richer investigation into the cases reflected a dearth of invited experts who could speak to familicide from the perspective of what it represents as a form of family violence. There was also, as a result, a lack of statistics around familicide given to counter the internal myopia (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998) through which reporting ignores “the implications of the patterns evident in their own history of reporting a particular crime” (p. 128). Thus, while some editorial content by experts in domestic and family violence operated to counter the mental illness/distress frame, there was a distinct paucity of expert voices in the majority of news on these cases capable of contextualising familicide.

The Effects of the Mental Illness/Distress Frame While there is often strong criticism of mental health framings of domestic and family violence (for example, Buiten & Coe, 2022; Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017; Little, 2015; Quinn et al., 2019), here, the mental illness/distress frame was often achieved by quoting friends and family of both victims and perpetrators, as well as via disability service advocates.7 Families bereaved by murder (Riches, 1998) and suicide (Chapple et al., 2013) understandably have complex reactions not only to the murder and suicide itself, but to the question of how it is reported on in the news. Families bereaved by homicide or suicide can have very different perspectives on how these cases should be reported than, for example, reporting guidelines. Those bereaved by murder can experience intensified distress arising from the stigma associated with murder and the media’s emphasis on criminality and criminal proceedings over the personhood of their loved ones (Riches, 1998). They may feel the memory of their loved one is spoiled or tainted by the publicity assigned to the murder and be frustrated with the media’s focus on the perpetrator rather than the victim (Riches, 1998). Research suggests that families who have lost loved ones to suicide may prefer more personalised accounts of the person who took their life (Chapple et al., 2013), a wish at odds with some reporting guidelines that discourage such portrayals to avoid valorising suicide (Richards et al., 2014). For families who have lost loved ones through murder by another loved one, and the suicide of the killer, this must be inconceivably difficult. How these families react and how they want the news media to frame their stories would be complicated and potentially subject to change as they wrestle with what has happened. Significantly, how families make sense of the events and how they may prefer it to be portrayed may well be at odds with not only journalistic guidelines for reporting on such cases, but the views of social advocates of various kinds, such as those from the mental health or domestic violence sector.

7

Representations of disability are discussed more in Chap. 11.

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The effects (Bacchi, 2009) of representations are multiple. Representations can affect surviving families and friends personally but also have a political and social role to play. How representations of familicide frame subjects (for example, framing perpetrators as suffering mental distress) shapes how people see and experience themselves and others—what Bacchi (2009) calls subjectification effects. These can also have broader effects, shaping the discursive boundaries constructed around conversations about domestic and family violence and what is intelligible and sayable about it—discursive effects (Bacchi, 2009). It can influence public policy and practice, as well as the emotional wellbeing of survivors and those in grief—lived effects (Bacchi, 2009). The complexities of sourcing and the way it contributes to the mental illness/distress frame highlights the tensions that can arise in considerations of representational effects. A piece by Price (2014) in The Age following the Hunt familicide exemplifies this tension. “There is, of course, some sympathy for relatives and friends in all these circumstances” she wrote. “There is no question that they have the right to remember the person they loved as they were” as a “loving farmer”, for example. However, she argues, “it is not about what the families want. And it should not be about the perception of an audience wanting tidy messages that can be consumed on the train or bus without a disruption to our routinised lives. Being nice. Being private. Being respectful. That will never save lives” (Price, 2014). The mental illness/distress frame acts to de-politicise familicide and disconnect it from the broader issue of domestic and family violence, obscuring the myriad interlocking forces that contribute to familicide and other forms of domestic violence. It normalises violence against women by creating ‘reasons’ for perpetration and sympathising with perpetrator (Smith et al., 2019). The discourse of a man who is ‘not himself’, who acts out of a mental pathology that does not reflect his nature, also mirrors and reinforces the discourses employed by violent men; men who are violent to their partners often employ strategies of “dissociation” (Wood, 2004, p. 565) to deflect from and minimise their responsibility for violence, such as claiming disbelief at their own actions—“was that really me?” (p. 565)—or professing that they were “not their ‘real selves’” (p. 565) when committing the violence (p. 562). A mental illness/distress frame can therefore operate to legitimise such violence-minimising and denying strategies. Second, the mental illness/distress frame privileges the experiences and perspectives of perpetrators, those who chose the violence, to the exclusion of victims’ experiences. Focusing on the mind, the experiences, and emotions of perpetrators, news media coverage becomes “offender-centric” (Grau, 2021, p. 185), and the rights of victims fade into the background. Of course, feminist media scholars and advocates of better media coverage of violence against women (for example OurWatch, 2019) suggest that perpetrators and their actions should be more visible in reporting on violence against women. However, the mental illness/distress frame places perpetrators front and centre in a way that privileges their needs and experiences rather than their responsibility for violence.

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Talk-Back: Challenging the Mental Illness/Distress Frame Feminist work on news coverage of domestic and family violence has often drawn attention to the problematic ways themes of mental illness and perpetrator loss manifest. Less attention has been paid to the growing counter-narratives against these frames. While the mental illness/distress frame was often employed in representations of familicide, it was also subject to strong talk-back. Through editorial content and content provided by regular commentators offered a platform in the news, a direct challenge was launched against suggestions that familicide was the outcome of perpetrator mental illness. This can be seen in the following headlines: Murder-suicides by men should get no sympathy (Power, 2014). Davidson family deaths: Let us stop eulogising a killer (Moody, 2016). This was not a murder-suicide. It was cold-blooded murder (Harvey, 2016). When we make excuses for male violence, we encourage it (Badham, 2018).

Badham (2018) provided one of the most scathing critiques of sympathetic portrayals of Peter Miles as a man suffering difficult personal circumstances, worth quoting at length here. Whatever may have transpired in Margaret River that morning, the narrative of the ‘good bloke’ who ‘snaps’ and kills his family is myth [and] maintaining it as a frame for news reporting provides external validation to potential murderers that their inclinations towards violence are not unconscionable. […] We also know that what domestic murderers have mostly in common is not the ‘heartache’ that is been speculated within Peter Miles. It is not tragic childhoods, substance abuse problems, persistent criminal behaviour or mental illness, either. What perpetrators over-whelmingly share is the use of violence to enforce rigid stereotypes about gender roles where ‘being dominant in their relationships with women was central to their sense of manliness’, […] rooted in maintaining a unique power differential against women. […] (Badham, 2018).

As this piece powerfully reflects, talk-back against the mental illness/distress frame drew on feminist discourses to establish a counter-narrative and to subject familicide to a social, rather than psychocentric, lens. As suggested in Chap. 8, feminist-informed editorial content was seen to play an important role in diversifying explanatory frames and disrupting dominant representations of familicide in the news. This editorial content is in the minority, to be sure, but is significant to note, particularly given how feminist scholarship and activism in this space informs counter-discourses. Quinn et al. (2019) have observed how a mental illness frame produced in the news around the Hawe familicide in Ireland was also subjected to strong critique on social media. This reflects what has been shown in wider research on the importance of social media in generating counter-narratives around gender-based violence, counternarratives that can in turn “seep” into mainstream media framings “as a form of second-level agenda-setting” (Quinn et al., 2019, p. 326). While the influence of social media in this respect can be “slow, inconsistent, and unpredictable” (Quinn

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et al., 2019, p. 326), emerging and shifting media platforms and modes of engagement with(in) the mainstream news are generating an array of possibilities for disrupting dominant narratives around domestic and family violence. The profusion of openly accessible online editorial content is part of this and could be seen to be playing a role in fashioning powerful counter-narratives around the mental illness/distress frame. In Chap. 13, I tackle some of the features of these counter-narratives that, I argue, warrant some attention and concern in respect to their ability to garner a nuanced understanding of gender-based violence and familicide. Here, however, I wish mostly to highlight the existence of talk-back, noting that the mental illness/distress frame did not go unnoticed or unchallenged, suggesting that critical feminist-informed discourses on domestic and family violence are, as Quinn et al. (2019) put it, ‘seeping’ into the mainstream news media.

Beyond Either/Or’s At the same time, the fierce challenges launched against mental illness/distress frames in the news itself raised questions around the extent to which the rich and more nuanced insights of feminist scholarship on domestic and family violence are represented in some talk-back. As I will discuss further in Chap. 13, while the mental illness/distress frame is problematic, and feminist-informed talk-back re-framing familicide as domestic and family violence is important, I am concerned that some of this talk-back reified an individualistic conceptualisation of domestic and family violence perpetration by positioning familicide as an individual choice without also discussing social drivers, or by eschewing the affective dimensions of violence perpetration altogether. Framing violence as individual choice alone may operate to ensure that the perpetrator’s actions remain in focus but will not adequately contextualise them within the gender structure. Further, I am concerned that a blanket rejection of the salience of mental illness/distress does not assist in exploring the patriarchal roots of that distress and how it is responded to, and risks alienating the public from feminist explanations of violence by discounting a social issue that has become a prominent point of public discussion. As feminist scholars, it is also important to interrogate the assumptions, presuppositions, and silences within our own representations of complex social problems (Bacchi, 2009). This process of self-problematisation can be difficult and raise thorny questions about how best to frame complex issues such as familicide. However, it is important to continue to engage in self-problematisation to advance a finer, more robust feminist lens and to equip ourselves to be able to talk-back to anti-feminist backlash in more effective ways. In Chap. 2, I highlighted how critics of feminist scholarship and activism perceive feminism as inherently antagonistic to the complexities of violence and mental illness. Yet, as I have aimed to show in this book, this is not the case. Critically, examining how some feminist-informed news representations of familicide may also sometimes forward simplistic or problematic explanations for violence is a worthwhile part of the feminist project.

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Deepening continuum thinking around gender and violence (Boyle, 2019), we can begin to chart ways of representing that move beyond the binary that is often erected between the explanatory frames of patriarchy and perpetrator mental illness/distress, appreciating complexity while keeping patriarchal violence firmly in view. Familicide is undergirded by intense feelings of failure, hopelessness, shame, rage, and powerlessness (Websdale, 2010). As argued in Chap. 6, however, patriarchal norms and power relations propel and shape both experiences of mental illness/distress and specific forms of violence in the context of it. A feminist sociological lens, I have suggested, is capacious enough to move beyond questions of whether male violence against women and children is driven by patriarchy or mental illness. Emotions are “mobilised in social relations” (River & Flood, 2021, p. 911); familicide is not just a feeling but a social practice. A wholesale rejection of the existence of mental illness or distress among perpetrators—how they may experience feelings of powerless and pain even as they choose to inflict immeasurable pain against and power over others—may not do justice to the issues.8 The problem with the mental illness/distress frame is not just that it deflects attention away from the social issue of domestic and family violence and produces a sympathetic construction of perpetrators, but that it homes in on mental illness/distress through a principally psychocentric (Rimke, 2016), individualised lens. Mental illness/distress may indeed be present in perpetrators of terrible violence. Where this is acknowledged, however, it must be done in a way that does not naturalise or de-gender the experience of mental illness/distress nor the way in which it is responded to with violence against women and their children. Like Fairbairn and Dawson (2013), I am not arguing that “news frames that ‘explain’ why the homicide occurred at the individual level are not accurate or relevant to explaining what has occurred”, but rather that “a reliance on such [individualised explanatory] frames will likely preclude discussions of the broader social roots and solutions to this type of violence” (p. 167). It is this likelihood that is borne out in the news representations I have looked at in this chapter. The problem with the mental illness/distress frame is not so much that mental illness/distress is ever raised. Rather, it is that it achieves discursive prominence at the expense of discussions that can more productively lead to better social outcomes, and that it is largely naturalised, de-gendered, and de-coupled from issues of patriarchal power and control.

References Anonymous. (2016a, October 22). Inside the final weeks of tragic family found gassed in their home. News.com. Anonymous. (2016b, October 19). Davidson gas murder plot was “elaborate and well-planned”. The Daily Mercury.

8

The same relates to filicide, where research in the field has repeatedly emphasised mental illness along with domestic and family violence as key factors in filicide, as discussed in Chap. 5.

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Chapter 11

Troubling Intersections: Disability and Childhood

Inflecting Representations of Familicide: Disability and Childhood Davidson deaths: Was it all too much for tragic parents? (Brennan, 2016). Autism community urges people to seek help after suspected murder-suicide of family-offour (Cross & McCallum, 2016).

The headlines above, published the same day, illustrate the “troubling intersections” tackled in this chapter—the way discourses of disability and childhood were drawn on to make sense of familicide. Referring to the murder of children Elisa and Martin Lutz-Manrique and their mother Maria Lutz by Fernando Manrique in 2016, these headlines reference widespread media speculation that the two children having autism was a key underlying driver for the familicide. In the previous chapter, I argued that familicide in cases without a known history of domestic violence were often framed, overtly or obliquely, as an expression of perpetrators’ mental illness or distress. I showed that the mental illness/distress frame (Buiten & Coe, 2022) must be contextualised within modern western cultures of psychocentrism (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Rimke, 2016) and contemporary mental health-promoting initiatives in Australia. At the same time, I argued that burgeoning feminist-informed discourses on domestic and family violence animated counternarratives against the mental illness/distress frame; the implication that perpetrators’ actions could be understood as the outcome of mental illness were challenged in various editorial news content, particularly by feminist contributors. Lastly, I showed that the mental illness/distress frame was reliant on intersecting discourses of gender and class (and implicitly race), in which a white, gender-normative, middle class, and nuclear family was represented as an unlikely place for patriarchal violence to occur, and mental illness/distress therefore assumed to be a cause. In this chapter, I advance this analysis of how intersecting social categories inflect representations of familicide, looking at how discourses of disability and childhood shaped the reporting. Much research on representations of fatal domestic and family © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_11

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violence, while paying attention to inferences of gender, class and race (for example, Maydell, 2018; Shier & Shor, 2016), tends to apply scant attention to vectors of age and disability. While there is some research on how violence committed by people with disabilities is portrayed in the media (for example, Blood et al., 2002; McGinty et al. 2014; Ross et al., 2021), little work looks at media representations of violence against people with disabilities, especially domestic and family violence. As a phenomenon, violence against people with disabilities is gaining greater research attention (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2011). However, this interest has for the most part not translated into research on how these issues are portrayed in the media.1 Similarly, while there is growing attention to foregrounding the experiences of children affected by domestic and family violence (for example, Arai et al., 2021; Callaghan et al., 2018; Dragiewicz et al., 2021; Fitzgerald & Graham, 2011), little research examines how they are represented in the media as victims and survivors. Research on news reporting on filicide tends to focus on how adult perpetrators are portrayed rather than children themselves.2 In short, there is a dearth of work examining how children or people with disabilities as victims and survivors of domestic and family violence are represented in media coverage. In this chapter, I begin a formative examination of these issues. There are two main themes advanced in this chapter. The first is that in cases involving people with disabilities, familicide was sometimes explained as an understandable (if tragic) response to the assumed ‘burdens’ of caring for or parenting people with disabilities. This narrative was forwarded, at times, through the voices of carers for people with disabilities and their advocates, and sometimes by surviving extended family members of victims. The voices of people with disabilities, however, were demonstrably lacking. Indeed, children with a disability are at greater risk of violence at the hands of carers (Frederick et al., 2019; Rupp, 2018), and children with autism especially vulnerable to filicide (Coorg & Tornay, 2013); as such, there is an empirical link between disability and experiences of violence. Of the five cases looked at in this book, four cases involved victims with disabilities, and of the twenty primary victims of the familicides3 nine lived with a disability, including autism (Elisa and Martin Lutz-Manrique and Arye, Taye, Rylan, and Kadyn Cockman), fragile X syndrome (Liam and Ben Milne-Castillo), and brain injury (Kim Hunt). Disability is a factor in the constitution of risk to family violence. However, I will argue that the way this was represented tended to distort the nature of this link and perpetuate ableist discourses. The second key theme I tackle in this chapter involves the way children were represented (and not represented) in news portrayals of familicide. Specifically, 1

A notable exception is Lucardie and Sobsey (2005a; 2005b) writing in the Canadian context, who examine news coverage of the murder of people with disabilities as a means to highlight empirical patterns in the perpetration of such violence (Lucardie & Sobsey 2005a) and on how cases are portrayed (Lucardie & Sobsey 2005b). 2 Grau (2021) makes in-roads here by considering how victims of filicide are represented compared to perpetrators, and I draw on her work in later sections. 3 This does not include those who died by suicide but does include one victim, Ben Milne, who survived.

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I wish to highlight the adult- and perpetrator-centrism of news representations of familicide, in which the experiences of children were frequently minimised and their lives—even their names—significantly underrepresented. The effect, albeit unintentional, is a brutal silencing of children as full people and of their experiences of domestic and family violence. This silencing of children in discussions of gendered, domestic and family violence is, I believe, redolent of a similar silencing in the wider literature and at odds with an inclusive feminist understanding of patriarchal violence that accounts for a range of power dynamics, including those between adults and children (Boyle, 2019; Hunnicutt, 2009). Discourses about disability were often mobilised to ‘make sense of’ familicide, especially to support and rationalise the notion that it was committed by a perpetrator experiencing mental distress. This was most pronounced in the Hunt and Manrique familicides, as well as the Milne familicide, though the relative sparsity of reporting on this latter case limited the range of articles that made this connection.4 Kim Hunt’s recent traumatic brain injury and her reported subsequent change in behaviour were frequently represented as a likely cause of Geoff Hunt’s actions in killing Kim and their children, Mia, Phoebe, and Fletcher. Early reporting on the Manrique familicide quickly assumed that Elisa and Martin having autism lead one or both parents to murder the family out of ‘desperation’.5 In the Milne case, Liam and Benjamin’s diagnosis with fragile X syndrome formed a key part of reporting on the case in large part because their father, Darren Milne, identified this as the reason for his decision to kill the family in notes that were subsequently found on his computer. Beyond his own words, however, reporting also reinforced this rationale for familicide, as I will show later. While the Miles familicide included four child victims with autism (Arye, Kadyn, Taye, and Rylan), disability was not as directly inferred as a causal factor in this as in other cases. That said, reporting on the Miles familicide did involve needless references to the children’s disability, subtly implicating it in the murders. Where disability was more openly discussed in the Miles case, it was deployed mostly to humanise their mother, also a victim in the murders, as a good carer. Overall, problematic reporting on disability was prevalent, and particularly pronounced in some cases.

Essentialising Mental Distress as an Outcome of Caring for People with Disabilities As I have shown in the previous chapter, the existence of mental illness/distress was in much reporting inferred as a sufficient explanation for violence, leaving the 4

In addition, the crash was only later speculated and then revealed as a murder-suicide, do earlier reporting presented the case as one of the horrific car accident. 5 In early reporting, it was not clear who the perpetrator had been. As such, some initial reports assumed that it may have been one or both parents. It was soon clarified that Fernando Manrique was the likely perpetrator, though narratives of disability as cause remained pronounced.

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space between mental distress and violent action uninterrogated. In this section, I focus on how the existence of this mental distress was attributed to parenting or caring for people with disabilities. Parenting or caring for people with a disability was often framed as something inherently stressful, even capable on its own of driving perpetrators to ‘snap’ in acts of extreme violence. In this way, disability was positioned as intrinsically problematic. For example, sources were quoted saying that Maria Lutz had “struggled with their children’s severe conditions”, that it was a “heavy thing on her heart and some days she found it impossible to cope” (Brennan & Patterson, 2016). Readers were told that Maria Lutz and Fernando Manrique may have been over-whelmed by the “day-to-day grind of bringing up children with complex special needs, taking the last awful step to deal with it all” (Benny-Morrison, 2016b). The reported or presumed challenges of raising children with disabilities was emphasised, particularly in the early reporting on the case reliant on neighbours and acquaintances from whom quotes were swiftly extracted. The message in these reports resonated with those identified by Jones and Harwood (2009) in their study on news coverage of children with autism; “there is a consistent message that life will be an ongoing struggle” in which parents are often painted as “stoic individuals” who “are damaged and traumatised by the experience” (p. 15). In these representations, connections forged between perpetrator distress and the ‘burden’ of parenting children with a disability were reliant on a largely psychocentric lens (Rimke, 2016), in which such distress was assumed natural, rather than social or contextual (Buiten & Coe, 2022). A psychocentric lens, as I have outlined in Chap. 5, positions the source of mental illness or distress within the body, mind, and circumstances of the individual, at the expense of an examination of how human distress may be socially located and produced (Rimke, 2016). This lens on mental illness/distress naturalises it as something that simply occurs, rather than asking how broader ideological and material systems can create (and therefore potentially remedy) it. For instance, stresses that may arise from caring for persons with disabilities would not, through a psychocentric lens, be contextualised within ableist cultural discourses or social structures; instead, such distress would be naturalised as an inevitable outcome of impairment. This was the case in much of the reporting on familicide—raising children with disabilities, it was inferred, is a “grind” (Benny-Morrison, 2016b), something that is often “impossible” to cope with (Brennan & Patteson, 2016). Left unproblematic were the ableist ideological and material factors that may undergird such experiences. As Cologon (2016) argues, cultural assumptions about children with disabilities significantly impact how they and their parents experience disability and the potential stresses associated with it. The discursive construction of disability as a cause of familicide, however, reified the idea that parenting or living with people with disabilities is inevitably and primarily stressful; disability was in this way framed as innately problematic. A small handful of news reports did invoke some structural factors that contribute to difficulties in caring for people with disability, through discussions around the need for greater state-provided support for families of people with disability. A headline in

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the Sydney Morning Herald referencing the Manrique case read: “lost in the system: where is the care factor for Australia’s unpaid carers?” (King, 2016). Another, in the Daily Telegraph, read “our carers deserve so much more. Especially respite” (Ballantine, 2016). One article suggested that “the tragedy [seemed] to have taken on a larger symbolic significance” in respect to the issue of support for carers of children with “complex special needs” (Benny-Morrison, 2016b). In this way, some news reports framed the familicides as the outcome of public failures to provide supports for carers of people with disability, attending to some of the structural conditions that can produce distress. Still, news reports tended to naturalise the notion of disability as ‘problem’; more respite and mental health services for parents and carers to deal with the ‘problem’ of disability was raised, but cultural attitudes towards disability remained uninterrogated. Calls to better support for carers of children with autism relied largely on the notion of autism as tragic and undesirable, reproducing a deficit discourse of disability (Cologon, 2016). Focusing on the difficult experiences of parents and carers, rather than the experiences of people with disability themselves, further entrenched the deficit discourse by framing persons with disabilities as problems for others. An opinion piece on the Milne familicide aptly reflected the link constructed between familicide, mental distress, and disability in some reporting. According to the article, “Darren [Milne] was the intelligent loving father of two sons with a serious disability but he was unable to cope with the future” (Iredale & Donald, 2016). Liam and Susanna’s deaths, and the near death of young Benjamin who survived the familicide, were framed as the outcome of “families dealing with the often exhausting daily demands of caring for loved ones with disability” (Iredale & Donald, 2016). In discussing this, an association was drawn in the article between the Milne and Manrique familicides, inferring that undetected and untreated mental illness/distress arising from the care of children with disabilities underlay both cases. In neither of these cases had those close to the families picked up that there was any risk of such a horrendous potential act. In the Davidson [Manrique] case, friends and colleagues of the mother were shocked to their core as she was such a positive, optimistic person, although it seems less was known about the father. In the Milne case, neither Darren’s close family, his professional work colleagues, his psychologist, the hospital system that had been involved in diagnosing their Fragile X history nor the lawyers [..] detected signs for concern (ibid).

Indeed, less was known about Fernando Manrique at the time, this article being published prior to the revelations that arose from the coronial inquest process. When the findings were released, they showed that Fernando Manrique carefully planned to kill his family after Maria decided to separate. It revealed that Maria, who was most involved in the care of Elisa and Martin, had expressed feeling positive about the future of her and her children (Truscott, 2019). “Maria and the children would, if left to live, have been more than happy on their own; indeed, they would have likely prospered”, said the coroner (Truscott, 2019). Still, while these facts were not known at the time the above article was written, the speculation that Manrique ended their lives under the stress of parenting children with disabilities is telling. As a fall-back explanation in cases involving children with disabilities, the dynamics of gender, power or domestic violence may not be visible.

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The above extract exemplifies the discursive relationship constructed between inferred mental illness/distress and the struggles of raising children with a disability, presumed the reason for both perpetrators’ actions. The Milne-Castillo case was also subject to a coronial inquest, in which the coroner—while acknowledging the children’s disability—condemned Darren Milne’s actions (Day, 2016). In the above news article, however, the coroner was criticised for not attending more closely to the role the children’s fragile X condition may have played in setting Darren Milne on the course to familicide. There was no inquiry at all by the Coroner as to what fragile X syndrome is all about, how it could so overcome a father with access to support and how this tragedy could have been avoided (Iredale & Donald, 2016).

While support for fragile X families is a worthy issue, in drawing on a case of familicide to exemplify this, disability was constructed as a sufficient explanation for such violence. Darren Milne’s notes, discovered after the deliberate car crash, did indicate that his concerns for the futures of his sons and his family were at the heart of his belief that he and his family could not cope. However, in representing disability as cause, there was no questioning of the proprietary beliefs that rendered the singular decision to kill all members of the family—regardless of their wishes or perspectives—the ‘solution’ to these issues. A friend of Susana Castillo reported that when they last spoke Susana expressed happiness at expecting their third child (she was almost 30 weeks pregnant) (Day, 2016), and a source from Autism Awareness Australia was reported as saying Liam was doing well (Day, 2016). Obscured in the discourse above is that familicide is the decision of one person—here, a decision that was maintained over a lengthy period of careful planning during which time Darren Milne took his family on a final holiday and conducted practice runs in the car for the accident (Day, 2016). Foregrounding fragile X as a cause of familicide deflected from the important point that familicide was not the choice of victims, framing it as a crime of ‘altruism’ or of a parent over-whelmed, without examining the proprietary views that made this decision possible. Darren Milne said in his notes, “it is going to be hard to see this [the family] fail” (Day, 2016). Reflecting on what we know about familicide from Chap. 4, a gendered sense of failure as well as a proprietary mindset in respect to the lives of the family are deeply connected to familicide (Kaladelfos, 2013; Oliffe et al, 2015; Walklate & Petrie, 2013; Websdale, 2010; Wood Harper & Voigt, 2007). The concern, therefore, is that in foregrounding the troubles of carers in explaining familicide, these gendered and cultural elements are sidestepped—even reinforced by rendering such proprietary actions understandable (even paternally altruistic). It also does little to tackle the ableist discourses that underlie the belief that life for children with such a disability, and their parents, is not worth living (Cologon, 2016).

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Tacit Victim-Blaming of People with Disabilities The mental illness/distress frame and the more sympathetic portrayal of perpetrators it engendered acted as a form of victim-blaming. As I pointed to earlier, little research has looked in depth at how victims and survivors with disabilities are represented in the media. However, Taylor (2009) has observed that, in reporting on murdersuicide, sympathetic portrayals of perpetrators were especially commonplace in cases involving ‘ailing victims’, or victims who experienced physical or mental ‘illness’.6 Some of these cases were framed as ‘mercy killings’, going so far, she argues, as to portray perpetrators “in a quasi-heroic manner for enduring the burden of [the person’s] illness for such a long time” (Taylor, 2009, p. 41). Taylor (2009) states that this amounts to victim-blaming, assuming there is something inherently flawed or even endangering about disability. Further, representations of the perpetrator as heroic carer assume the lens of the able-bodied perpetrator rather than of the victim, privileging and normalising an able-bodied perspective. In this way, these representations are ableist, reinforcing a cultural preference for non-disability and contributing to a set of social practices that subordinate persons with disabilities (Campbell, 2009). We can see this most vividly in reporting on the Hunt familicide in which Kim Hunt’s traumatic brain injury was suggested as provoking Geoff Hunt’s actions. It was reported that “police believe the strain of [Geoff’s] wife’s disability contributed in some way to his unfathomable actions” (Partridge, 2014). Much of this kind of reporting was also furthered by the coronial inquest, in which Geoff Hunt’s mental state was the focus, psychiatric expertise was preferred, and his actions were framed as the result of the stress caused by his wife Kim’s injuries—disconnected from broader issues of gender and violence. In reporting on the coronial inquest, some of the following was conveyed: Ms Hunt had been involved in a car crash that left her in a medically induced coma for more than a month. ‘For most of the six months she spent in hospital, Geoff was with her, providing emotional support and helping her learn to walk and talk again,’ [counsel assisting said]. The accident left Ms Hunt changed, with one witness testifying previously that she was prone to bouts of rage. ‘It appears that the person who may have borne the brunt of that change in personality was her husband Geoff’, Dr Dwyer said, adding Ms Hunt was once urgently referred to a psychiatrist after turning on Mr Hunt (Rushton, 2015).

Here, Geoff Hunt was presented as the victim of Kim Hunt’s disability, as ‘heroic’ carer (Taylor, 2009) who was as much a victim of her disability as she was. Kim was in some reporting presented as violent and emotionally abusive. Readers were told she “suffered a ‘loss of empathy’ and would verbally attack Geoff Hunt (Higgins, 2015a). While this may have been true, the inclusion of these points in news reporting on the murders of Kim and children Mia, Phoebe, and Fletcher raises considerable questions. The killings were tacitly recast as the outcome of the perpetrator’s victimisation. 6

While not analysing this theme in detail, Richards et al.’s (2014a) preliminary frame analysis of femicide-suicide also identified a ‘mercy killing’ frame applied to cases in which victims suffered seriously illnesses.

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Certainly, this case raised a tremendous knot of issues, given the impact of the accident on the family and that the coronial inquest was unable to find any history of violence or abuse by Geoff Hunt. Kim Hunt’s disability may well have been a salient aspect of the background to the killings. Still, representations involve choices and have effects (Bacchi, 2009). The implications of this kind of reporting must be considered in context. While such cases are often treated in the media as singular, as individual family dramas, they also occur within a matrix of existing patterns of violence and of reporting on both violence against women and people with disabilities. The wider context is one in which women and people with disabilities suffer high levels of violence (Dowse et al., 2016), people with disabilities are routinely represented as characterised by deficiency or lack (Sunderland et al., 2009), and women experiencing violence at the hands of men are frequently blamed for it (Meyer, 2016).

Superfluous References Beyond the more direct invocation of disability as a cause of familicidal violence, there was a general preoccupation with disability, particularly autism, in reporting on the Manrique and Miles cases. This preoccupation with autism among children was present regardless of whether there was any information that it played a role in the motivation or thinking of perpetrators of familicide.7 Reference to the children having autism was peppered throughout the reporting. The terms “autism” or “autistic” were mentioned 126 times across the 79 articles on the Manrique case. The same terms were deployed 33 times out of 73 articles on the Miles case. Even without direct conjecture as to whether this entered into the thinking of perpetrators, the recurrent references to autism had a significant framing effect. Superfluous references to autism were often positioned side-by-side with statements about violence, alluding indirectly to a connection. For example: The bodies of Mr Miles and his wife Cynda, his daughter Katrina, and his four grandchildren Taye, Rylan, Arye, and Kayden [sic]8 Cockman, all of whom had autism, were found on a 30-acre property in Osmington on Friday (McComack & Whitbourn, 2018, emphasis my own). He believed Mr Miles had planned the murder-suicide because he had been told the siblings, all of whom were on the autism spectrum, were in their bed and appeared peaceful (Anonymous 2018 emphasis my own).

Similarly, needless and seemingly out of place references to autism were made in reporting on the Manrique familicide.

7

While, for instance, the notes on Darren Milne’s computer raised his sons’ condition as a key part of his thinking, no such notes or other evidence that disability played any role in Fernando Manrique or Peter Miles’ decisions emerged. 8 This is a misspelling of Kadyn.

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Detectives believe gas deliberately filtered through the sprawling home in Sydney’s north is the most likely cause of death. Both children had autism (Whitbourn, 2016, emphasis my own).

Even when celebrating the children and their lives, their disability was cast as utterly defining, and autism generally as undesirable; they were wonderful talented children, it was sometimes implied, even though they had autism. Lutz, a criminal lawyer, gave birth to a daughter and son who were special needs kids, highly talented artists but on the autism spectrum (Sutton, 2017). Trips to the zoo, a cherished puppy and birthday celebrations were the hallmarks of Maria Lutz’s life with her beloved children [..] But some believe the demands of raising two intellectually disabled children may have become too much (Brennan, 2016, emphasis my own). This morning, hundreds of people [. . .] celebrate the lives and achievements of the couple and their two disabled children (Sutton, 2016, emphasis my own).

These persistent references to autism constituted the subjectivity of the ‘child with autism’ in totalising terms (Bacchi, 2009). That is, subjects were largely reduced to their status as persons with disabilities, without the multi-dimensionality that is assumed for able-bodied subjects. Totalisation arises when autism is constituted in discourse as all-defining, “encouraging generalisations from the disability itself to the whole person” (Jones & Harwood, 2009, p. 15). Their disability came to dominate their victim status (Edwards, 2014). Child victims of family murder are already subject to minimisation in comparison with perpetrators, who are more often represented as complex and layered individuals (Grau, 2021). These representations of children with disabilities, in which they were defined again and again by impairment, further strip away an appreciation of their multi-dimensional humanity.

Complexities: Sources and Ableism in News Reporting One of the most unexpected findings to be made on representations of familicide was the range of sources that often drove or supported this frame. As highlighted in Chap. 8, some representations of familicide were shaped and legitimised by sources very close to the violence, such as surviving family members. In the previous chapter, I highlighted how the voices of family and friends often worked to bolster the mental illness/distress frame and distance familicide from the issue of gendered domestic and family violence. Here, it was often disability support advocates whose voices championed the narrative of perpetrators snapping under the strain of caring for people with disabilities. This was generally the case, however, with disability support advocates who focused on the needs and experiences of carers and parents; a troubling scarcity of persons with disabilities or people advocating for the rights of people with disabilities themselves was manifest. For example, it was two active members of the Fragile X Association, both of whom were “members of families with FX syndrome”, who wrote an editorial piece

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that suggested unsupported carers were key to understanding what caused both the Manrique and Milne familicides. The shocking tragedy [of the Manrique familicide] in Davidson this week, the apparent murder/suicide of a family with two children on the autistic spectrum, is sadly not an isolated event. On February 1, 2015, a similar tragedy occurred for a family with the intellectual disability fragile X syndrome, another condition that can produce autistic spectrum consequences (Iredale & Donald, 2016).

In this piece, Darren Milne was described as an “intelligent loving father of two sons with a serious disability” who “in desperation about the future of his FX [Fragile X] boys […] drove them all at high speed into a tree” (ibid). In the Manrique case, there were calls from parents, carers, and their advocates to seek help to avoid similar tragedies (Cross & McCallum, 2016). One article on News.com centred around the voice of a mother of two children with autism. A direct response to the Manrique familicide, the article sought to highlight the challenges of parenting children with autism and encouraged readers to “‘walk a day in their shoes’ before placing judgement” (Brown, 2016) on the killings. The article quoted a mother of children with autism as saying, “You would be hard [sic] to find a family with disabled children who has not had those thoughts” (Brown, 2016). Readers were urged to “come to my home and walk a day in my shoes, then say how you feel about what has happened [in the Manrique case]. I can see how families can snap, and people who judge have never had to deal for a four-hour meltdown” (Brown, 2016). Another article, reporting on the Manrique familicide, discussed the need for respite for carers. “The recent tragic events [..] put a spotlight on the needs of those who devote every moment of their lives to caring, 24/7” (Ballantine, 2016). As Bacchi (2009) points out, representations involve interpretations as to what a given event comes to mean within the cultural imagination. Often, this involves indexing specific events back to broader social issues to which journalists and sources wish to draw attention. Several sources such as parents, carers, and their advocates harnessed the newsworthiness of familicide to invigorate public discussions around the needs of carers of people with disabilities. Yet, as the quotes above show, the discourses emerging from these advocacy groups for parents and carers were deeply ableist, representing able-bodied parents and carers as heroic bearers of the burdens of people with disabilities, and violence against people with disabilities as natural and understandable. In addition to editorial and feature pieces written by or about parents and carers of people with disabilities, extended families as sources were also drawn on to support the frame. Kim Hunt’s sister gave a deeply affecting interview following the familicide committed by her brother-in-law, Geoff Hunt, in which she said she harboured no hatred for him, just “sadness and the terrible loss of a most amazing family” (Mollard, 2014). As well as describing her tremendous love and admiration for her sister, nieces and nephews, she maintained “I still love Geoff as much as I ever have and I always will” (ibid). Discussing the circumstances around her sister’s brain injury, sustained during a car accident two years before, the following was reported from the interview:

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While [Kim’s sister] will never know exactly what caused her brother-in-law ‘to snap’ she knows better than anyone the pressures the family was under. ‘Kim’s accident had put such a strain on their lives that Geoff obviously thought this was the only option open to him. Kim was no longer the woman he had married’, [she] continued, revealing the extent to which the car accident in July 2012 had changed her sister. ‘A brain injury robs a person of empathy and love. Unless you live with someone who is gone through this you cannot understand – it dulls their emotions.’ […] ‘I think Geoff did it out of love for his children. I think the stresses and tensions just got too much and he wanted to spare them the pain’ (Mollard, 2014, emphasis my own).

It is difficult to know what to make of such reporting. As I said in Chap. 8, the voices of surviving families surely deserve a place in the framing of family violence and loss, and the impact of reporting on surviving families should be an important journalistic consideration. At the same time, some of the very news frames that disability and domestic and family violence advocates have presaged are at times advanced by extended family and close friends. Ableist discourses are deeply embedded within the wider interpellative community; carers, parents, family, and friends exist within a wider cultural context that is characterised by ableism. A piece reporting on the combined funeral held for the Lutz-Manrique family, titled “judged not: tragic family farewelled”, was framed in similarly forgiving terms, referencing the killings back to challenges that may be faced in caring for family members with disability. The victim’s families wanted the collective funeral for the mother, father, and children […] to be one without recrimination or analysis. […] But if there was one message to be taken away from the devastating murder-suicide, the families wished it would be awareness. Their relatives said they hoped exposure of the tragedy may result in awareness of the economic, social, and psychological stresses posed to families in similar situations (Benny-Morrison, 2016a).

As discussed in Chap. 8, family reactions to familicide are understandably complex and fraught. As research suggests, families may often wish to avoid the ‘spoiling’ effect that murder has on the memories of their loved ones, particularly where subject to a high level of media coverage and public scrutiny (Riches, 1998). Preserving good memories of loved ones, especially in cases in which extended family was not aware of any previous violence or abuse, is a possible response. After Damien Little killed his two young boys, Koda and Hunter, and then himself in Port Lincoln in 2016, his wife Melissa described him as a wonderful and loving father and husband who acted the way he did out of mental illness (Grieving SA Mum, 2016); this, she said, was how she wanted him to be remembered. As also discussed in Chap. 8, however, family reactions may change considerably as the events are processed and new information comes to light. When grieving family and close friends are key sources in framing news on complex cases of murder-suicide, the impact can be unexpected, varied, and subject to change.

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The Effects of Implicating Disability as Cause The issue of structural and social support for people with disabilities and those who support them is an important one. In critiquing these representations, it is vital to note that the aim is not to deny the lived challenges that persons with disabilities may face or those of carers and family members, particularly in the absence of adequate social and structural support. It is to point to how such challenges are constructed in the news and the effects these representations engender (Bacchi, 2009). From the perspective of those seeking to tackle domestic and family violence, the unintended consequence of invoking the issue of carer support in the context of family murder is to minimise the violence committed against women and children and to shift the focus away from this as a public issue. In reporting on domestic murder-suicide— cases that garner tremendous public attention—it is common for reporting to index the violence back to social issues other than family violence (Richard et al., 2014a). However, the representational violence done to persons with disabilities whose lives are framed primarily as a source of hardship is considerable. Representations have effects, and one of these is that they “make certain subject positions available”, shaping “who we are—how we feel about ourselves and others” (Bacchi, 2009, p. 16).9 Representations of parenting/caring for persons with a disability as the basis for deep and violent distress could have such effects for people with disabilities, as well as parents of children with disabilities or carers. Jones and Harwood (2009), in their study on representations of autism in the Australian news, discuss some of the harms produced by constructing subjects with disabilities in this way. In relation to people diagnosed with autism, it is concerning to note that, as occurs too frequently to children labelled as ‘disabled’ ..., these individuals are likely to be exposed to extensive media coverage throughout their lifetimes that suggests they are a burden on their families, the education system, and the community (Jones & Harwood, 2009, p. 15).

I suggest that while the cultural and material challenges faced by some parents and carers of people with disabilities are important, repeated narratives of disability as a ‘burden’—even the cause of violent distress—produces a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1998). That is, these narratives act as socio-cultural practices to (re)produce relations of domination, impacting on how persons with disabilities may see themselves and be seen by others. Such representation of disability collectively “entices the dominated to contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting […] the limits assigned to them” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 12) As Thomas et al. (2020) argue, narratives that produce symbolic violence “sustain and exacerbate mental distress and suffering” in those they subjugate, even as they encourage those harmed to internalise negative cultural meanings about themselves. Patterned representations of people with disabilities as ‘burdens’—if not as violent themselves then as the cause of distress and violence committed against them (Buiten & Coe, 2022)— do symbolic violence in a way that reproduces ableism. Such ableism can be both external and internal, with external ableism manifesting in social perceptions of 9

Bacchi (2009) terms this “subjectification effects”.

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people with disability that shape their treatment in culture, institutions and policy, and internalised ableism negatively affecting the ways people with disabilities may feel about themselves and their lives (Campbell, 2009). The implication that disability is to blame for stress and violence within the family augments both forms of ableism. Existing cultural narratives of disability and violence also work to sustain themselves, by shaping the very experiences they represent. Representations have an impact on people’s views and experiences of disability, and these views and experiences are in turn reproduced in the media. Cologon (2016), for instance, shows how cultural narratives of disability profoundly shape how parents of children with disabilities view and feel about their experiences. We are all influenced by the context and time within which we exist. Attitudes towards, and understandings of, ‘disability’ are culturally constructed and embedded and people develop their understandings through a process of enculturation […] For parents of children who experience disability, this is also the case. Parents’ views are shaped by context and experience, as they are enculturated into dominant ways of thinking and being (Cologon, 2016, np).

In this way, discourses do not just reflect people’s views and experiences, but also constitute them. For instance, O’Hagan (2014) cautions in relation to discourses of filicide that characterising any murder of a child as loving or altruistic can unintentionally act to legitimise filicide in the minds of would-be perpetrators; the way we talk about filicide has implications for the perpetration of filicide. Similarly, the risks of representing parenting or caring for a person with a disability as insurmountably hard or as a reasonable motive for murder-suicide can reinforce such experiences and legitimise such actions. As I have said, this is not to deny the complex, lived, and embodied experiences of people with disability and those who care with and for them. However, news reporting plays an important role in reinforcing or challenging deficit discourses of disability that contribute to higher rates of violence against persons with disability, including violence committed by family members. Centralising the voices of parents and carers’ advocates which focus primarily on the struggles they experience, to the exclusion of sources that challenge the deficit discourses around disability, will strengthen dominant ways of thinking about disability that renders violence more likely. Parents of children with disabilities have an often-ambivalent relationship with the disability advocacy community, in some ways important allies yet in others obstructing or undermining some of the movement’s key objectives in challenging ableist narratives (Carey et al., 2020). Including advocates focused on the rights and perspectives of persons with disabilities—and especially persons with disabilities themselves—is crucially important if the media is going to report on such cases in an ethical way.

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‘We Should Be Critical’: Talk-Back Against Disability Narratives As with the mental illness/distress frame discussed in Chap. 10, representations that positioned victims’ disability as an explanation for familicide were met with swift countering not only via social media but also (though more sparsely) within mainstream news publications themselves.10 This ‘talk-back’ was mainly through editorials or opinion pieces, though sometimes through quoted inputs from close friends. As argued in Chap. 8, media scholars should not only highlight and challenge dominant discourses that perpetuate oppressive cultural norms, but also trace the deployment of counter-discourses in the media (Bacchi, 2009). Discourses are contested, and representations of empirically complex and politically live issues such as family murder-suicide are located at the junction of hotly contested struggles over meaning-making. Some discourses may be dominant, but they are not impervious. As Carvalho (2008) notes, discourse analysis should not simply focus on the role of journalists in constructing news but should also highlight how sources and various social actors ‘intervene’ in the construction of social problems in news. Here, various social actors were intervening to generate and disseminate a counter-discourse against dominant representations of disability. While the full impact of counter-discourses may not be fully known, they can be disruptive and render counter-hegemonic social movements and strains of thinking more visible (Linabary et al., 2020). They can also help to articulate sites for strategic interventions in mainstream news; by looking at when and how counter-discourses emerge, we can better identify the representational strategies available within news to produce alternative lenses on the issues. It is for this reason that, while the problematic discourses around disability I have highlighted so far were most prevalent, I spend time highlighting in this section how ‘talk-back’ against this emerged. I quote some of these at length, in part to offer a sense of the textual richness and strength of these counter-discourses, and in part to give a platform to the voices of people with disabilities and their advocates that were largely underrepresented. The presumption of familicide involving children with disabilities as ‘altruistic’ was sharply countered in some opinion pieces. “The Manrique children were murdered, and yes we should be critical” stated one (Hussein, 2016). “Those who say they can ‘understand’ why Fernando Manrique murdered his family are saying that people with disabilities would be better off dead” (Hussein, 2016). Often, these critiques were rendered with tremendous sadness and rage. Carly Findlay, a writer and activist who grew up with disability in Australia, wrote a searing piece for the Sydney Morning Herald on the Manrique familicide, titled “The murder of disabled

10

This was particularly the case for the Manrique familicide; while rebuttals for the framing of the Hunt familicide centred primarily on the need to recognise Geoff Hunt’s acts as domestic violence, the counter-narratives for the Manrique familicide focused more often on challenging the assumption that Elisa and Martin having autism was a causal factor.

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children can never be justified” (Findlay, 2016). Here, she spoke passionately about the impact these representations have on those within the disability community. The focus on the children’s disability in reports suggests their disability might have been a motive. While we do not know all the facts, the media has a lot to answer for in its reporting and portrayal of people with disabilities. And I have tried to write this as respectfully as possible. I cannot imagine the pain felt by the family’s loved ones. It is a tragedy too awful to comprehend. The wider disability community is hurting too. This needs to be talked about (Findlay, 2016).

Decrying the way parents who kill children with a disability are accorded greater sympathy than those who kill non-disabled children—and taking aim at both mainstream media portrayals and social media commentators on the case—Findlay wrote pointedly about the subjectification effects (Bacchi, 2009) discussed earlier. It is worth quoting from their powerful piece at length here. This [kind of commentary] is ableism. It is as though a disabled life is worth less than a nondisabled one. Countless disabled people are impacted by violence and murder, and the whole disability community is affected by how these cases are judged and the way the media reports on them. These incidents [of violence against people with disabilities] are not infrequent. […] I have not been a parent (nor a parent of a disabled child). I have not experienced the strain and the worries. I do not have autism. But I have been a disabled child. I have seen my parents struggle. I have experienced discrimination, exclusion, financial hardship, pain, and ableism. I have also been told that I should not have been born and that I am a burden. Many of my disabled friends have heard similar things about them, too. Tragedies like Monday’s shake the disability community. It is incredibly sad - I am saddened that the family is dead and I am sad a lack of support may have driven a parent to this. But I am sadder at the commenters justifying that killing disabled people is understandable because the children are disabled. This does nothing for disabled people’s self-worth. Imagine what it is like to hear news reports about murders of people like you, or to read comments that are (often unintentionally) ableist, saying they understand why a parent may have murdered their disabled child. Many disabled people are struggling with the news right now, especially with the commentary excusing it (ibid).

While acknowledging the challenges, the family may have been experiencing, Findlay offered a powerful counter-narrative that re-centred violence against people with disability in the discussion and highlighted the effects of reporting on the case within a context of pervasive ableism and violence against people with disabilities. “We all need to play a part in ensuring people with disabilities, and their families are included and supported in the community and can ask for and receive adequate help. But murder is never justified because a disabled child or adult becomes too much for someone to cope with” (Findlay, 2016), she concluded. Other opinion pieces were equally scathing. Responding to commentary on the Lutz-Manrique case which suggested that pressures on the parents were to blame for the familicide, one author had this to say: Voicing these opinions is also victim-blaming – that is, you are saying these kids deserved to die because of the problems their parents faced in raising them. You are also legitimising the killing of people with disabilities who are perceived as being a ‘burden’ (Moody, 2016).

Feminist commentator Clementine Ford levelled a blistering critique against the repeated references to disability in the Miles and Hunt cases. Her commentary added

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to mainstream news a critical lens on how ableism and the mental illness/distress frame converge. [The] repeated references to the children’s autism invite an additional layer of ableism into the picture. Some people already find it far too easy to empathise with the idea of the depressed man who sees familial murder as his only way out of crushing anxiety. But when one or more of those family members have a disability, the narrative shifts even further into the obscene as people begin to say things like ‘well, it was probably for the best’ (Ford, 2018).

Sometimes, close friends served to counter the narrative of disability as cause. Offering interviews with the media, Maria Lutz’ friends emphasised the fact that they believed the children having autism had nothing to do with Fernando Manrique’s violent actions. Instead, they suggested it was a case of “domestic violence” (BennyMorrison, 2017), an attempt to control Maria who had expressed her wish to end the marriage. They offered these interviews in the lead up to the anniversary of the deaths of Maria, Elisa, and Martin, interviews that appear to have been offered as a reflective and impassioned response from some of her friends to what they regarded as irresponsible reporting on the case. In a raw and emotional interview with the Sunday Telegraph leading up to the anniversary of the murders, Mrs Lutz’s friends have provided a frank insight into the case in a bid to raise awareness about domestic violence. Contrary to some of the reports about the high-profile case, Mrs Lutz’s friends said the deaths had little to do with Martin’s and Elisa’s disabilities. It was about Mr Manrique’s loss of control (Benny-Morrison, 2017).

In addition to such pieces that aimed to directly contest deficit discourses of disability, some reporting on Elisa and Martin’s deaths worked to achieve a more layered account of their lives through sourcing practices. By drawing especially on members of the school community as sources, Martin and Elisa were described as loving, creative, and fully engaged with life. Far from the images of want rendered in some of the other reporting, these sources focused on their agency, passions, the meaning they experienced in their lives and what they had to offer to the world around them. Again, it is worth including some examples at length. The below extract comes from an article titled “Elisa and Martin Manrique remembered in art exhibition, one year after their death”.11 ’Eli and Martin were happy, affectionate, bright students who often delighted their teachers with their capacity for learning, their curiosity and their abilities across all aspects of their education,’ [the school principal] said… The [Eli and Martin Bursary established at the school] will continue to focus on [their] particular artistic talents and the joy they took in art making (McCallum, 2017).

Another article quoting a school member of staff offered individual descriptions of Elisa and Martin. Deputy principal [...] said Martin’s personality shone through in his extraordinary talent. ‘Martin loved nothing more than a cuddle […] But his passion for animals shone through each and every day. He was a prolific painter and a very gifted artist—that was how he 11

Lengthy extracts are included here to convey the richness of these counter-discourses and to offer further space for these children to be recognised and remembered as full people.

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communicated, through his art. Martin was a cheeky and funny little boy. […] Elisa would hold your hand in the sweetest way, she was known for this. […] She would look into your eyes and smile and lead staff around the oval. She loved all forms of art, she danced, sung, and painted each and every day. Elisa would create art whenever she could, like her brother, this is how she communicated—she was unique, and she will not be forgotten’ (McCallum, 2016).

A friend of Maria Lutz whose children attended the same school as Elisa and Martin was also included in some of the later reporting. ‘Elisa was cheeky, inquisitive, and loved Katy Perry and Jason Derulo, the family friend recalled, while Martin was more of a ‘Old Macdonald kind of guy’ who had a ‘gentle, precious soul’. Both produced ‘exquisite artworks’ she said. […] Elisa was so talented, her mum dreamt of her one day becoming a graphic designer. […] ‘The loss of Maria, Elisa, and Martin has left a gaping hole in so many lives that will never be filled,’ she said (Brook, 2019).

Such rich descriptions of children who have died at the hands of parents were rare and significant. They also described child victims as multi-dimensional people, counter to the deficit discourse so common in much of the rest of the reporting. These accounts were offered by sources who knew the children directly and over a longer period of time. At times, these sources appeared quite pointed in their intention to push back at the way Elisa and Martin’s disability was reported on as a cause of the familicide or as all-defining of their lives. Much of this kind of more nuanced reporting on Elisa and Martin came sometime after their deaths—as friends and the school community rallied to arrange the exhibition of their artworks and appeared to engage with journalists in a way that sought to generate a counter-narrative to the events. Some of these sources sought to re-categorise the familicide as family violence, and to rewrite the story of Maria, Elisa and Martin away from stories of disability as tragedy. To honour an idea of [Maria] Lutz, the [school] will tomorrow night unveil an exhibition showcasing the talented siblings’ art work. ‘It has been a real vocation for me to see it through and certainly everybody at the school understands, they were known as artists’, ensuring their legacies are not over-shadowed by the unspeakable way in which their lives ended. Martin and Elisa had autism, a factor Mrs Lutz’s friends believe unfairly shaped discussion around the case (ibid). A lot of people spoke about the burden of having children with disabilities but we [Maria’s friends] do not see it that way and Maria did not […]. It is a massive responsibility but it is a responsibility she took up with great gusto, love, and passion (Higgins, 2019).

So little reporting on child victims of familicide included textured accounts of children beyond their status as victims or as someone else’s children. When child victims lived with disability, they were frequently further reduced to symbols of the struggles of adult carers. However, editorial pieces from disability advocates and most importantly persons with disabilities, and sourcing practices incorporating the inputs of those who knew the children as individuals, challenged this tendency. While it is difficult to establish with certainty the extent to which this backlash against ableist news frames made a difference in subsequent reporting, it is interesting to note that reference to children’s disability played a lesser role in the reporting on

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the Miles case two years later in 2018. In that case, irrelevant references to Arye, Rylan, Taye, and Kadyn having autism were still common; however, there was a shift away from the emphasis placed on disability as a causal factor as seen in the Manrique and Hunt familicides. In the Miles case, the children’s disability was raised either superfluously at moments in the reporting, or as a way to humanise their mother, Katrina Miles, as an advocate for and mother of children with autism. She had pulled her children out of the Margaret River Primary School and was determined to give her ‘bright and intelligent’ children the highest level of schooling. She was particularly admired by those who know how demanding it is to be the mother of kids with learning disabilities. […] Katrina confronted her challenges with good humour and a steely determination, according to friends (Barrass, 2018).

News reporting on the Miles case was generally absent of the more overt deficit discourses around autism seen in the early reporting on the deaths of Elisa and Martin. Here, for example, Arye, Taye, Rylan, and Kadyn were described as “bright and intelligent” and as “freespirited [sic] kids who loved growing up on the farm” (Barrass, 2018). Nonetheless, very little was written about them at all, and when they were mentioned it was generally naming them as children who had died, with most (if any) descriptions referencing their having had autism. As can be seen in the above extract, too, where they or their disability was described in more detail it was in reporting that emphasised the qualities of their mother, Katrina. While highlighting their mother’s love for and belief in them, it was principally raised to highlight the loss of Katrina, humanising the parent of children with disability rather than the children themselves. The love and dedication she had for her children was an inspiration to the [Margaret River] autism community. They need to be remembered for that (Barrass, 2018).

While there is clearly much work to be done in reporting on these cases, the powerful talk-back appearing in response to cases such as the Manrique familicide will hopefully continue to influence news reporting. At the time of writing this chapter, a 72-year-old father killed his 46-year-old son, Wayne Leworthy and himself in the suburb of West Lakes, South Australia. Wayne was reported as having ‘severe’ disabilities and his father as having been diagnosed with cancer (Cosenza, 2021). The killings happened and were first reported on Saturday. By Monday, disability support advocates had been interviewed to produce a powerful news piece on the impact of these cases, and how they are portrayed on the disability community. Titled “disability advocate speaks out following suspected murder-suicide in West Lakes”, disability advocate Jocelyn Neumueller spoke of the right of people with disabilities to know they are safe and protected and pushed back at discourses of disability as insurmountable burden (Disability Advocate Speaks, 2021). “[People with disabilities] are not a burden on society, they are not a burden on parents. There are support services out there”, she said (Disability Advocate Speaks, 2021).

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Addressing the Link: Violence Against People with Disabilities So far, I have advanced a critique of news representations that imply victims’ disability as the cause of familicide. Before moving on to talk more closely about the representation of children, I wish to make a point about the empirical connection between disability and violence at the hands of family. People with disabilities experience significantly higher levels of violence than able-bodied people, including violence at the hands of family and carers (Dowse et al., 2016; Lucardie & Sobsey, 2005a; Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, 2021). These experiences of violence are located at the intersection of a range of social categories. Women with disabilities, for example, are more likely to experience a range of forms of violence including domestic and sexual violence, further inflected by vectors such as gender and sexual identity and race (Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, 2021). Children with disabilities experience higher-than-average rates of violence and neglect (Frederick et al., 2019). In one systematic literature review, children with disabilities were shown to experience a staggering three to four times the level of violence compared to able-bodied children (Jones et al., 2012). Filicide, specifically, is more often committed by parents of children with disabilities. Rupp’s (2018) study on filicide in Arizona found that children with special health care needs were more likely to be killed by their parents than those without. Children with autism are particularly at risk of filicide-suicide (Coorg & Tornay, 2013). According to Coorg and Tornay, this may reflect increased carer stresses associated with disabilities with a stronger social or behavioural component. What these studies show is that disability, as it intersects with age and gender, is empirically salient to understanding filicide and, arguably, by extension familicide. Considering how the structural, social, and cultural dimensions of disability produce higher rates of violence against people with disabilities, especially children with autism, is therefore important. I wish to make the point here, however, that while room should be made in the media to discuss the connection between family violence and disability, how this connection is framed is crucial. First, like much of the research on filicide and children with disabilities,12 news portrayals tend to give primacy to able-bodied parents’ and carers’ experiences and wellbeing at the expense of the experiences and wellbeing of persons with disabilities (Perry, 2017). Able-bodied parents’ or carers’ stresses and how this places them at risk of mental illness and of committing violence are usually highlighted over the rights of children with disabilities to life and to safety from violence. Parents who kill children with a disability are often described as ‘altruistic’, or their violent actions the result of stresses induced by the child (Frederick et al., 2019). These representations are “killer-centred” (Perry, 2017) or as disability rights advocate Sara Luterman explains: “the personhoods and motivations of the killers are explored in detail, while their 12

See, for example, Frederick et al.’s (2019) review of research in this area.

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victims are quietly erased and the cultural contexts that fostered murders are hidden” (Luterman, 2020). Extending on what Luterman (2020) says, the cultural drivers of violence against people with disabilities, including by members of their own families, are seldom referenced in news reporting (Perry, 2017). Rather than presenting disability as a sufficient explanation for carer stress, and this stress as a sufficient condition for violence, a greater emphasis should be granted to cultural attitudes towards disability and how these place persons with disabilities at higher risk of violence. This can include as part of a wider discussion the issue of structural support for carers, as was the case in some news reporting, but needs to go beyond this if the deficit discourses around people with disabilities are to be challenged. Propagating a “hardship narrative” around the murder of people with disabilities by carers without addressing ableism “may lead to more violence, rather than changing policy around supports” (Perry, 2017, p. 1). As Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2011) argue, violence against people with disabilities—especially children—“reflects a trenchant dimension of culture; in this case disablist culture”. It is rooted within the social anxieties disability—and having a child with a disability—presents to what is constituted in culture as ‘normal’ and ‘ideal’. These cultural dimensions render children with disabilities not only far more vulnerable to a range of violence from bullying to hate crimes (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2011), but also produces and/or deepens the stresses of parents and carers (Cologon, 2016), contributing to narratives that cast death as ‘mercy’ (Taylor, 2009). We need to attend to these cultural dimensions of disablism, say Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2011), if we are to ever have a hope of addressing violence against people with disabilities. This means moving beyond focusing primarily on individuals who are violent towards people with disabilities (ibid)—for example, by demonising parents who kill children with disability as ‘monsters’—while also challenging ableist media representations that frame these killings as the tragic outcome of disability, which in turn reinforce the very cultural norms that drive high rates of violence against people with disabilities.

Child Victims: A Brutal Silencing Thirteen children were killed as part of the five familicides covered in this book: Phoebe (6), Mia (8), and Fletcher (10) Hunt; Martin (10) and Elisa (11) LutzManrique; Liam (11) Milne; Kadyn (8), Arye (10), Rylan (12) and Taye (13) Cockman; Trey (3), Laianah (4) and Aaliyah (6) Baxter. Two other young victims include Benjamin Milne (7), who survived the attempt at his life, and his soon-to-be sibling (Susana was about 30 weeks pregnant) who did not. Child victims received the least coverage—they were named less and named last, and far less often described as people. Adult victims were often described in detail by neighbours, friends, acquaintances and colleagues, and perpetrators’ lives and experiences were a central focus in news reporting. Children, on the other hand, were seldom described outside of

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reporting on the eulogies delivered by their surviving extended families. Often, they were referred to primarily as someone’s children (for example, ‘Hannah and her three children’), or the ‘family’ was described as the victim of the tragic events, without distinguishing those who were murdered from those who committed the murders. There may be some practical reasons contributing to this. Adult news sources, such as neighbours and family friends, are more likely to know and describe adult victims in detail. Talking to child sources—friends and school acquaintances of child victims, for instance—would be both practically difficult and ethically fraught. Journalists need to offer privacy and distance to family members where possible. Further, the journalistic requirement for brevity might mean that phrases such as ‘Hannah and her three children’ or ‘the family’ are preferred over naming multiple victims throughout. That said, journalistic practice involves choices, and a repertoire of journalistic strategies are available to highlight certain issues and voices. Ideological factors shape the extent and ways in which journalists may be compelled to engage in representational strategies that accord victims greater visibility (Grau, 2021). As such, even where practical considerations apply, reflecting critically on how journalistic practices signal implicit social values is important. While little work has been done on how children as victims of filicide are represented in the media, the work that does exist suggests children’s experiences and voices are granted sparse attention in news reporting (for example, Grau, 2021; O’Hagan, 2014). News coverage of filicide tends to rest principally on the perpetrator (Grau, 2021; O’Hagan, 2014), regardless of whether such a perpetrator is framed in sympathetic or unsympathetic terms. Perpetrators are, according to Grau (2021), depicted as “multi-faceted, nuanced persons with positive, negative, and sympathetic attributes” (p. 200). Contrastingly, child victims are more likely to be described as objects—with details of the injuries to and positions of their bodies— than to have descriptions of their characters, attributes, or activities (Grau, 2021). Where they are described, it is most likely to include basic identifying information such as gender, age, and name (Grau, 2021). This was the case in much of the reporting on familicide. Child victims were seldom described, their names, and ages (when referenced), the main identifying features given. Sometimes, children and other victims largely disappeared as individuals through references to the tragic murdered ‘family’ (Nikunen, 2006; O’Brien & Culloty, 2022). As O’Hagan (2014) observes: For family and friends, the children are an unimaginable loss, the source of much trauma and anguish. But for the public at large and the media serving it, they are mere appendages to the tragedy (p. 5).

Children were also frequently defined in relation to the adult offender, “[privileging] offenders over victims” (Grau, 2021, p. 201) or commonly, in relation to adult victims who were more fully humanised (for example, ‘her children’). Media representations often depict children as extensions of their mothers, child victims of murder-suicide becoming amalgamated with their mothers in much reporting (Cavaglion, 2009). Presenting children less as individual people (given that they

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were seldom described as individuals compared to adults) and primarily as the children of others both reflects and reinscribes the proprietary attitudes towards children that in part undergird filicide and familicide (Walklate & Petrie, 2013). Familicide reflects the proprietary attitudes that men have towards women and children, and filicide the proprietary attitudes of men and women to children (Walklate & Petrie, 2013). Reporting that positions children as the possessions of others unintentionally reinforces these ideas. As Nikunen (2006) notes in respect to reporting on filicide, patterned references to children as the possessions of others or merely as members of ‘his’ (the perpetrator’s) family reify the institutional hierarchy of the family— “there are members who have the family, and there are members who are part of the family” (p. 172). This discursive “positioning” (Carvalho, 2008) constituting children’s identities primarily in relationship to others—especially where perpetrators’ actions were ‘legitimised’ as altruistic—renders violence against children as a symbol of adult experiences—adult pain, adult loss, adult love. Even while children may be objectified as bodies to which harm was done (Grau, 2021), there is a tendency to shy away from looking at what they may have been experiencing while they were still alive (O’Hagan, 2014)—the moments leading up to a child’s death, or protracted experiences of violence and abuse in cases where their deaths were the final outcome of extended family violence. Outside of forensic details, therefore, child victims were often represented in idealised terms, without reference to any suffering they may have experienced. Where children were likely to have felt terror or pain in the moments before their death, there was a tendency to avoid this in news reporting, or to focus on the pain experienced by adult victims to highlight the brutality of the crimes.13 O’Hagan (2014) reminds us that, despite sanitised news accounts, many filicide victims are aware of what is about to happen to them and suffer tremendous physical and psychological pain—yet it is not something adult readers wish to look at. It is important, of course, not to exploit the suffering of children in news reporting and to recognise the impact that reporting on their suffering may have on surviving family and friends (Riches, 1998). However, as O’Hagan (2014) argues, there is a tendency to far too quickly look away from these facts, turning stories about children’s suffering into stories about the painful experiences of adults. In reporting on the Baxter case, in which there was a known history of domestic abuse and coercive control committed by the children’s father, the children’s experiences of this abuse were almost completely erased. While their mother, Hannah Clarke’s, experience of myriad forms of abuse and control was extensively covered, Aaliyah, Trey, and Laianah’s experiences of this abuse were conspicuously absent in

13

Aaliyah, Trey and Laianah were burnt alive in their car by their father. They would have seen him, heard what he said, and heard their mother pleading with him. The older children may even have comprehended what he intended to do, particularly given the history of his abuse. Hannah’s experience of pain and terror was variously reported on, but hardly the children’s – this was perhaps too hard to look at. Similarly, Mia Hunt appeared to be awake when her father shot her at close range in the forehead and therefore must have seen him raise the gun to her. This was a point left out in most reporting.

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reporting. They were only ever reported as “happy” (McGowan, 2020) and “innocent” (Banger, 2020) children. Research on children of women experiencing coercive control shows that, far from passive or distant ‘witnesses’, children are deeply involved and affected. They are almost without exception subject to direct emotional abuse by the abusive parent, and often to sexual or physical abuse as well (Katz, 2016). Many such children live under conditions of fear and uncertainty as to how the abuser will react, and therefore experience high levels of anxiety and survival-induced restraint (Callaghan et al., 2018; Katz, 2016; Katz et al., 2020). Their relationships with others can be deeply affected by the isolation that may be imposed upon them or through direct attempts by abusers to undermine and destroy relationships that may offer them support (Callaghan et al., 2018). Children may be pushed to harm their mother, coerced and encouraged to participate in her abuse (Callaghan et al., 2018), or used to extend control over the mother through surveillance (Dragiewicz et al., 2021). According to Katz et al. (2020) what is often not understood is that children of coercive controllers live under similar “conditions of constraint and entrapment” (p. 322, citing Stark, 2007) experienced by adult victims, with substantial effects on their emotional, physical, and social wellbeing. Yet, in the coverage of the Baxter case—and the Miles case in which some history of domestic violence was implicit—children’s experiences of violence prior to the murders was almost completely silenced. This silencing extends to a wider disavowal of children’s voices and experiences of domestic and family violence and abuse—in media (Lonne & Gillespie, 2014; Sutherland et al., 2019), institutions such as the family court (Fitzgerald & Graham, 2011; MacDonald, 2017; Nelson & Lumby, 2021), policy discussions (Powell & Murray, 2008), and much domestic violence research (Callaghan et al., 2018). Media portrayals of domestic violence involving children have the tendency to sideline the issue of violence against children themselves (Hawley et al., 2018) or how family violence directly affects them (Sutherland et al., 2019). Research looking at the impacts of domestic violence and abuse on children has also tended to situate children as ‘witnesses’ of violence (Callaghan et al., 2018; Katz, 2016), with a dearth of childcentric research that takes children’s own views and experiences seriously (Arai et al., 2021; Callaghan et al., 2018). From the media to the academy, therefore, a lack of attention to children’s voices and experiences is still very much part of the cultural milieu. This is deepened when childhood intersects with disability, given the marginalisation of the views and perspectives of children with disabilities in the news media (McAndrew et al., 2020). These representational patterns are significant—or as Bacchi (2009) says, they have effects. Reporting that emphasises the experiences of victims themselves can help to generate greater support for victims in tackling the issues that affect them (Berns, 2004). However, a “lack of attention on victims makes it difficult to see them as anything more than an object harmed” (Grau, 2021, p. 199). Given the role that reporting on domestic and family violence plays in public understandings and responses (Berns, 2004), and particularly the role of high-profile cases such as those examined here, leaving children’s experiences of violence unexamined in reporting negates their personhood in comparison with the personhood of adults.

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Representational Justice for Children and People with Disabilities Familicide is complex; it is many things. However, as established in Chap. 4, one of its features is paternalism, engendered in the proprietary nature of the singular decision to resolve a difficult situation through family annihilation. As writer and disability advocate, Sara Luterman, argues, “it is a fundamentally paternalistic proposition to suggest that victims [with disabilities] do not get a say in whether they live”. News representations that constitute murder-suicide involving people with disabilities as altruistic or as solely about perpetrator distress reinforce this paternalism. In addition, representations that silence child victims, describe them primarily as the children of others or present them through hollow tropes of innocence—rather than as full people or direct victims of domestic violence—reinscribe the propriety attitudes to children that play a role in familicide and filicide. This forecloses important discussions about children’s experiences of family violence. When discourses of childhood and disability intersect, the silencing and dehumanisation that results are particularly grim. How can the voices and experiences of people with disabilities and children (especially children with disabilities) be accorded the attention they deserve in such cases? There are ways in which it can and should be done, and including the voices of people with disabilities and the perspectives and experiences of children is key. As Grau (2021) suggests, too, “the aim of elevating voices of victims is admirable, but only survivors can be heard. Thus, it is necessary for others, whether secondary victims or reporters, to carry that torch and speak up for non-surviving victims” (p. 189).

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O’Hagan, K. (2014). Filicide-suicide: The killing of children in the context of separation, divorce and custody disputes. Palgrave Macmillan. Oliffe, J. L., Han, C. S. E., Drummond, M., Sta Maria, E., Bottorff, J. L., & Creighton, G. (2015). Men, masculinities, and murder-suicide. American Journal of Men’s Health, 9(6), 473–485. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557988314551359 Perry, D. (2017). The Ruderman white paper on media coverage of the murder of people with disabilities by their caregivers. Ruderman Family Foundation. https://issuu.com/rudermanfoun dation/docs/murders_by_caregivers_wp_final_fina_ac379254b115d2. Powell, A., & Murray, S. (2008). Children and domestic violence: Constructing a policy problem in Australia and New Zealand. Social & Legal Studies, 17(4), 453–473. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0964663908097080 Richards, T. N., Gillespie, L. K., & Smith, M. D. (2014). An examination of the media portrayal of femicide–suicides: An exploratory frame analysis. Feminist Criminology, 9(1), 24–44. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1557085113501221 Riches, G. (1998). Spoiled memories: Problems of grief resolution in families bereaved through murder. Mortality, 3(2), 143–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/713685897 Rimke, H. (2016). Introduction: Mental and emotional distress as a social justice issue: Beyond psychocentrism. Studies in Social Justice, 10(1), 4–17. https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index. php/SSJ/article/view/1407. Ross, A. M., Morgan, A. J., Wake, A., Jorm, A. F., & Reavley, N. J. (2021). Key stakeholders’ recommendations for improving Australian news media reporting of people with severe mental illness, violence and crime. Advances in Mental Health, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/18387357. 2021.1942101. Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. (2021, October 13–14). Public hearing 17: The experience of women and girls with disability with a particular focus on family, domestic and sexual violence (Part 1). https://disability.royalcommiss ion.gov.au/public-hearings/public-hearing-17. Rupp, S. (2018). Filicide and children with special health care needs in Arizona. In T. Brown, D. Tyson, & P. Fernandes Arias (Eds.), When parents kill children (pp. 167–178). Palgrave Macmillan Shier, A., & Shor, E. (2016). Shades of foreign evil: “Honor killings” and “family murders” in the Canadian press. Violence Against Women, 22(10), 1163–1188. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780 1215621176 Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: The entrapment of women in personal life. Oxford University Press Sunderland, N., Catalano, T., & Kendall, E. (2009). Missing discourses: Concepts of joy and happiness in disability. Disability & Society, 24(6), 703–714. https://doi.org/10.1080/096875909031 60175 Sutherland, G., Easteal, P., Holland, K., & Vaughan, C. (2019). Mediated representations of violence against women in the mainstream news in Australia. BMC Public Health, 19(1), 502–508. https:// doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-6793-2 Taylor, R. (2009). Slain and slandered: A content analysis of the portrayal of femicide in crime news. Homicide Studies, 13(1), 21–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088767908326679 Thomas, F., Wyatt, K., & Hansford, L. (2020). The violence of narrative: Embodying responsibility for poverty-related stress. Sociology of Health & Illness, 42(5), 1123–1138. https://doi.org/10. 1111/1467-9566.13084 Truscott, E. (Deputy State Coroner) (2019). Inquest into the deaths of Maria Claudia Lutz, Elisa Manrique, Martin Manrique, Fernando Manrique (Report number 2016/00310113; 2016/00310114; 2016/00310115; 2016/00310084). Walklate, S., & Petrie, S. (2013). Witnessing the pain of suffering: Exploring the relationship between media representations, public understandings and policy responses to filicide-suicide. Crime Media Culture, 9(3), 265–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659013493917 Websdale, N. (2010). Familicidal hearts: The emotional styles of 211 killers. Oxford University Press.

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References: Newspaper Data Set Anonymous. (2018, May 30). ‘Beautiful angels’: Mourners to farewell Osmington family. The Age [also appears in Sydney Morning Herald]. Ballantine, D. (2016, October 20). Our carers deserve so much more. Especially respite. The Daily Telegraph. Banger, M. (2020, February 25). Family murder ‘devastating’, says Morrison. The Canberra Times. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre. Barrass, T. (2018, May 13). Margaret River shootings: WA police pick over pieces of horrific puzzle. The West Australian. Benny-Morrison, A. (2016a, November 1). Judged not: Tragic family farewelled. Sydney Morning Herald. Australian New Zealand Reference Centre Benny-Morrison, A. (2016b, December 16). ‘A horrific thing’: The death of the Manrique-Lutz family. Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age]. Benny-Morrison, A. (2017, October 15). Davidson murder-suicide: Exhibition featuring autistic children’s art to honour lost family [also appears in news.com]. The Daily Telegraph. Brennan, R. (2016, October 19). Davidson deaths: Was it all too much for tragic parents? The Daily Telegraph [also appears in news.com]. Brennan, R. & Patterson, I. (2016, October 18). Davidson deaths: Police investigate murder-suicide at horror home where family of four were killed. The Daily Telegraph. Brook, B. (2019, April 10). Inquest into Sydney family’s murder-suicide hears moving tribute to slain mum and kids. News.com [also appears in Daily Mercury]. Brown, V. (2016, October 20). Mother-of-two autistic children says people need to ‘walk a day in their shoes’ before placing judgment. News.com. Carey, A. C., Block, P., & Scotch, K. R. (2020). Allies and obstacles: Disability activism and parents of children with disabilities. Temple University Press. Cross, J., & McCallum, J. (2016, October 19). Autism community urges people to seek help after suspected murder suicide of family-of-four. The Daily Telegraph. Findlay, C. (2016, October 21). The murder of disabled children can never be justified. Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age]. Higgins, E. (2015a, October 9). Hunt family deaths the ‘result of egocentric delusion’. The Australian. Higgins, H. (2019, May 17). Sydney dad intended to die with family. Katherine Times. https://www. katherinetimes.com.au/story/6129994/sydney-dad-intended-to-die-with-family/ Hussein, S. (2016, October 21). The Manrique children were murdered, and yes we should be critical. Crickey. Iredale, R. & Donald, B. (2016, October 20). Davidson family deaths: This isn’t the first tragic end for a suffering family. Now we need answers. Sydney Morning Herald. King, M. (2016, October 19). Lost in the system: Where’s the care factor for Australia’s unpaid carers? Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age]. McCallum, J. (2016, October 20). St Lucy’s School in Wahroonga mourns after murder-suicide of the family in their Davidson home. The Daily Telegraph. McCallum, J. (2017, October 17). Elisa and Martin Manrique remembered in art exhibition, one year after their death. The Daily Telegraph. McGowan, M. (2020, February 20). Brisbane car fire: Hannah Clarke’s family say they tried to rescue her and children from violent husband. The Guardian.

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Meyer, S. (2016). Still blaming the victim of intimate partner violence? Women’s narratives of victim desistance and redemption when seeking support. Theoretical Criminology, 20(1), 75–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480615585399 Mollard, A. (2014, September 13). Kim Hunt’s sister Jenny Geppert does not blame her brotherin-law Geoff Hunt for Lockhart murder-suicide. The Daily Telegraph. Moody, S. (2016, October 20). Davidson family deaths: Let’s stop eulogising a killer. The Daily Mercury. Partridge, E. (2014, September 12). We’ve lost a nurse, a farmer and three beautiful kids. Sydney Morning Herald [also appears in The Age]. Rushton, (2015, October 6). ‘It’s all my fault’: Hunt family inquest told of father’s note. The Australian. Sutton, C. (2016, October 20). Philip Nitschke’s killing machine and the $85 online death guide. News.com. Sutton, C. (2017, October 21). The five types of parents who kill their children. News.com [also appears in Daily Mercury]. Whitbourn, M. (2016, October 23). ‘It has been a shock’: Latino community pays tribute to Maria Claudia Lutz and family at Mass in Sydney. The Age [also appears in Sydney Morning Herald].

Chapter 12

Notes on Filicide-Suicide Reporting

Maternal and Paternal Filicide-Suicide in the News This book focuses on representations of familicide-suicide. However, given the question I am so often asked in the context of discussions of familicide—“what about women who kill their children?”—it is worth reflecting briefly on representations of filicide, a crime committed in roughly equal numbers by men and women (Brown et al., 2019). I call this chapter “notes on filicide-suicide reporting” because it is not the outcome of a focused study of a defined data set. Rather, as part of gathering data on representations of familicide-suicide during 2014–2020, I also observed and reflected on a range of news articles on filicide-suicide during this period, both maternal and paternal, with the purpose of beginning to think about how these representations may differ from those of familicide. This chapter contains some research notes of reporting on these cases. During the time of this research (2014–2020), a number filicide-suicides were reported in the Australian news media—cases in which a parent killed their (child)ren and themselves but not their partner or former partner. This included six women killing a total of ten children and three men killing a total of four children and one pregnant adult daughter. Filicide-suicides by mothers, therefore, were more common during this time. When combining filicide-suicides and familicides during this period, the total number of deaths at the hands of fathers (excluding their own deaths by suicide) was twenty-five, twenty-seven if counting two unborn victims. One case led to the later death, by suicide, of the grieving mother of two of the child victims. Arguably, she could be considered the twenty-eighth victim of paternal family murder-suicide during this period. The total number of deaths at the hands of mothers (excluding their own deaths by suicide) was ten, all children. Sex-based patterns in filicide-suicide, whether isolated or including those cases that also involved the killing of a partner or former partner, are observably complex. As discussed in Chap. 5, Notes on Gendering Filicide, patterns also vary across time periods and between filicide-suicide only and familicide. Many of the cases reported in the news during this period involved custody disputes and a history of domestic © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_12

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and family violence, but not all. A number involved signs that the perpetrator was struggling mentally, for example, posting on social media about depression, and some affected families that had contact with child protection systems. These are patterns worth examining. At the same time, each case also involved a different set of circumstances. Each victim was a full person with unique experiences whose life was taken. Two-year-old Tilly Ludwig died when her mother jumped, while holding her, from Robertson Lookout at Mt Keira in 2019, killing them both (Palin, 2019). Six-monthold William was killed by his father, who also killed himself, at a remote Queensland campsite in 2019. That same year, Aaleyn (six years old), Matilda (five years old), Wyatt (four years old), and Zaidok (two years old) died in a fiery head-on collision in Queensland with their mother. While at first it was reported as a tragic road accident, it later emerged that the children’s mother, Charmaine McLeod, appeared to have crashed the car deliberately, intentionally killing her children and herself, after a suicide note was found near the crash site (Deutrom & Wolfe, 2019). Lochlan, nine years old, was killed by his mother Erica Bond, who also took her own life, in their Central Coast home in 2018. Ezvin Mugera, eight years old, and his five-year-old sister, Furaha Muhoro, died in a house fire with their mother who, the coroner later indicated, may have killed them first before setting the house alight (Byrne, 2018). Jennifer, thirteen, and her brother Jack, fifteen, were killed by their estranged father John Edwards in 2018; he then killed himself (White, 2021). Horrifically, despite years of documented complaints of abuse against women and children, Edwards was able to access a gun and track them down; Jennifer was reportedly hiding under a desk in her room, her brother Jack covering her body with his to protect her (White, 2021). Their grieving mother, Olga Edwards, died by suicide five months later (White, 2021). Four-year-old Seth was killed by his mother, Stacey Docherty, who also killed herself in their Sydney apartment in 2017 (Benny-Morrison & Olding, 2017). Jacob, seven years old, was killed by his mother, Tanyia Vandervecken, in their Tiddy Widdy beach home in 2017 (Henson, 2017). And in 2015, seven-year-old Jackson and his pregnant mother, Kris-Deann, were killed. Police believed Jackson’s grandfather, Kris-Deann’s father, killed them before killing himself (Toowoomba Murder-suicide, 2015). This horrendous litany of family murder-suicides in a period of just five years underscores the breadth of the issue of filicide-suicide. Indeed, many more children are killed each year by their parents, the cases above only reflecting cases ending in suicide and those reported in the news. On average, one child is killed in Australia by a parent each fortnight (Brown et al., 2019). While reporting on familicide is the focus of this book, in this chapter I make some preliminary observations on the reporting of filicide-suicide by both men and women during this period. This is deemed important for two reasons. First, the broader issue of filicide, of which familicide and filicide-suicide are sub-types, is still both under-researched and little discussed and

Existing Research on Gendered Representations of Filicide

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understood, yet remarkably widespread. How it is covered in the news is significant but has to date received limited research attention.1 Second, critical feminist analyses of news representations of male-perpetrated familicide, at the expense of a consideration of representations of women who kill their children, are at risk of bolstering claims that feminist researchers excuse or ignore women’s use of violence (Carrington, 2013; Renzetti, 1999). As discussed in Chaps. 1 and 5, relatively high rates of filicide by mothers are often invoked to undercut feminist theorisations of family violence, with accusations of bias in the omission of women’s use of violence. Research plays a vital role in framing public and political debates around gender and violence, and without adequate feminist research and theorisation of women’s use of violence, such issues will continue to be instrumentalised by movements that seek to de-gender the terms of debate around domestic and family violence and deflect attention away from men’s gendered violence (Renzetti, 1999). Reflecting on these cases is, for me, part of a nuanced feminist account of the gendered nature of violence and how it is represented. Before making some observations around the reporting of filicide-suicide, I outline some key themes in the existing research in this area.

Existing Research on Gendered Representations of Filicide Filicide is a gendered phenomenon. As Little (2021) discusses, however, the importance of gender for understanding filicide is a frequent blind spot in news reporting on such cases. That is not to suggest that news reporting on filicide is not immensely gendered; while the role of gender in contextualising filicide is seldom reflected on in reporting (Easteal et al., 2015; Little, 2021), dominant discourses of masculinity and femininity are recurrently deployed (Cavaglion, 2008, 2009; Elizabeth, 2016; Little, 2015, 2021; Little & Tyson, 2017; Nikunen, 2006). Filicide profoundly threatens cultural assumptions of the family as a safe haven for children and of parents as their protectors (Little, 2015). In reporting on filicide cases, then, journalists often feel compelled to make sense of it through available discourses of gender and the family, however jarring a manifestation of these very things it may be. The literature is mixed on the question of how sex arbitrates sympathetic portrayals of filicide perpetrators. On the one hand, scholars have pointed to the historical and contemporary demonisation of women who kill their children, such women acting in blatant breach of their assumed role as primary nurturers to children (see, for example, Little & Tyson, 2017; Naylor, 2001; Niblock, 2018; Nikunen, 2006). On the other hand, scholars have also highlighted the relatively sympathetic treatment of women filicide offenders in the media (see, for example, Cavaglion, 2008; Grau, 2021). Men who kill their children are also variously depicted as sympathetic sufferers 1

In Australia, Janine Little (Little, 2015; 2021; Little & Tyson, 2017) has conducted the most research in this area. Internationally, Cavaglion (2008; 2009) has written on the Israeli context, Grau (2021) in the American context, Nikunen (2006) in the Finnish context, and Niblock (2018) in the UK context.

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of mental illness and masculine disempowerment (see, for example, Buiten & Coe, 2022; Elizabeth, 2016; Little, 2015, 2021; Nikunen, 2006) or as “bad dads” (Buiten & Coe, 2022, p. 14) and violent, vengeful fathers (Cavaglion, 2009; Elizabeth, 2016). The extent to which filicide offenders are portrayed sympathetically appears to be significantly mediated, however, by factors such as race, social class, and adherence to gender norms (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Cavaglion, 2008; Huckerby, 2003; Tomi´c, 2019),2 with more sympathetic portrayals often reserved for white, middle-class perpetrators and for women who conform to dominant constructions of gender. Gender inflects representations of filicide by filtering stories of violence against children through the lens of social “normality” (Nikunen, 2006, p. 178). As Nikunen explains, news media evaluates cases in relation to gendered assumptions around what are “suitable” (Nikunen, 2006, p. 178) motivations for women and men to kill their children. Violence by men is largely normalised, even culturally glorified, and fetishised (Little & Tyson, 2017), while women are associated with passivity, vulnerability, and nurturance (Stangle, 2008). As such, these ideas shape news reporting on filicide. These gendered constructions are often made through an essentialist (rather than social and structural) lens, overtly or implicitly situating gendered patterns in vulnerability and dangerousness within male and female bodies, reinforcing ideas of their naturalness and inevitability (Hollander, 2001). So, while sexed patterns in violence perpetration and victimisation do exist,3 stemming in part from gender at the level of identity, interaction, and structure (Anderson, 2005, 2009), the gendering of violence in news portrayals is not often informed by a sociological lens, but mostly through dominant constructions of men and women as inherently different. This shapes the way violent acts, such as filicide, are framed. When men kill their children, it is often presented as both aberrant (confronting the idea of fathers as protectors) and a natural or understandable response to life stressors, particularly men’s disempowerment (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Little, 2021). Men are more frequently presented as reactionary figures, their actions provoked by a series of circumstances, especially loss over an area of masculine control. Little (2021) calls this the trope of the ‘disempowered man’. Of course, as shown in Chaps. 4 and 5, these representations need to be situated against the available research on filicide and familicide, which suggests loss of control over ‘masculine’ domains is often a trigger for such acts of violence. That said, while representations of violent masculinity and the ‘disempowered man’ resonate, in some ways, with the research in this area, what distinguishes them is the extent to which these constructs of masculinity are naturalised or socially contextualised. Men are often assumed, in news reporting, as inherently rational agents (in contrast to women) (Cavaglion, 2009; Little, 2021), and their violence in response to masculine ‘disempowerment’ is natural, rational, and instrumental even (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Little, 2021). There is a justificatory element to naturalised assumptions of male violence as a response to ‘disempowerment’.

2

This extends to verdicts and sentencing in cases of filicide, which are also mediated by the extent to which offenders enact traditional gender roles (Wiest & Duffy 2013). 3 As discussed in Chaps. 3, 4, and 5.

Existing Research on Gendered Representations of Filicide

261

When women kill their children, they are more likely to be constructed in the news as irrational actors, having fallen prey to insanity. These representations should be contextualised, say Barnett (2005) and Stangle (2008), within prevailing discourses of femininity and motherhood. Not only is femininity largely culturally constructed in the West as inherently passive and vulnerable, but motherhood is constructed as a “supreme calling” (Barnett, 2005, p. 11) indivisible from femininity. As Tomi´c (2019) observes, “the role of mother diminishes all other roles that a woman can assume, as well as the woman’s own subjectivity. [..] Motherhood seems to erase all other personal traits of an individual, effectively turning her into an embodied symbol” (p. 5). A woman killing her child(ren), therefore, fundamentally challenges dominant cultural discourses of femininity and motherhood. For this reason, mothers’ feelings of “depression, discontent, and anger are not deemed compatible with this perception—on the contrary, they are viewed as unnatural and deviant, even monstrous” (Tomi´c, 2019, p. 13). The cultural incompatibility of mothers and violence shapes the frames used to explain maternal filicide. The assumed unfathomability of maternal filicide, therefore, leads to it more often being represented as an internal anomaly—a malfunction of female biology or rare psychopathology (Cavaglion, 2008; Huckerby, 2003). While men who kill their children may also be framed as suffering mental illness or distress (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Galvin et al., 2021; Little, 2015; Quinn et al., 2019), extant research suggests their distress is more likely to be understood as reactionary, rational, and driven by difficult personal circumstances (Buiten & Coe, 2022; Cavaglion, 2009; Little, 2021), whereas women’s mental distress is more likely to be situated within a pathological female body (Huckerby, 2003; Stangle, 2008). That said, this does not apply equally to all women. Research suggests that women from marginalised social groups—working class women and women of colour, for instance—are more likely to be constructed as ‘bad’ or ‘monstrous’ than as ‘mad’ (Cavaglion, 2008; Little, 2021). Their actions are more likely to be assumed reflective of a “collective failure of [their] minority culture” (Little, 2021, p. 187). Mental illness as a cultural reference point for filicide is therefore common, though shaped by gender as it intersects with other social categories. The available research on representations of filicide has seldom interrogated what this means for the portrayal of victims (Grau, 2021). That said, while research on these issues is regrettably limited, some scholars have pointed to the ways child victims of maternal filicide, particularly, are often representationally folded into the identities of their mothers (Cavalgion, 2008) and the harms against them resultantly diminished (Stangle, 2008). With both maternal and paternal filicide, a focus on perpetrators prevails in news reporting, at the expense of an accounting of the humanity of the children killed (Grau, 2021).

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Filicide-Suicide Coverage 2015–2020 News reporting on filicide-suicide, compared to familicide, was unexpectedly sparse. The mass nature of the deaths associated with familicide cases—between four and seven people each—would likely have contributed to this. However, even accounting for this the level of reporting on filicide-suicide was unexpectedly low. The main exception, in terms of level of reporting, was the case of the murder of Jack and Jennifer Edwards. This received the most initial coverage, heightened again when the children’s mother, Olga Edwards, died by suicide in December 2018. Subsequent to the period of this study, reporting was rekindled by the inquest conducted into their deaths, the findings of which were released in April of 2021. The findings spanned 272 pages, a comprehensive inquest in view of the series of systemic failures to protect Jack, Jennifer, and Olga after an extended history of physical violence and psychological abuse by John Edwards—not only against them but “routinely” against another “six female partners and eight children he had prior to meeting Olga” (O’Sullivan, 2021, p. 14). This case, therefore, tapped acutely into public discussions and policy debates around the protections provided to victim-survivors of domestic violence. The stunning ineptness of systemic responses to the danger faced by Jack, Jennifer, and Olga was uncovered, layer by layer, in the days, weeks, and years after their murder, maintaining a higher level of media coverage. Coverage of the other cases of paternal filicide-suicide, as well as all cases of maternal filicide-suicide, evaporated quickly. This was especially apparent in the case of Charmaine McLeod, where reporting faded soon after fears of the crash being murder-suicide were revealed. The children’s surviving father also spoke to the media in the weeks that followed, keeping some of the reporting alive. However, the story received unusually little coverage for a case involving so many victims. It is not straightforward to empirically establish why, and there may be various practical, ethical, discursive, and legal factors at play. I wish to make the following tacit observations, however, in relation to both familicide and filicide-suicide reporting. When family murder-suicide happened under seemingly ‘exceptional’ circumstances (for instance, mass killings amidst idyllic backdrops) or the story was quickly revealed to be one of an escalation of domestic and family violence, it is more likely to be seized on by media as an opportunity to either sensationally explore the ‘mystery’ of such killings or to trace systemic failures to protect women and children, particularly in cases in which the perpetrator presented as plainly violent—monstrous even.4 There was also a tendency to turn away from maternal filicide in mainstream news. Perhaps, as filicide researcher Thea Brown (2019) suggests, “There’s a sense that it’s too hard and too confronting to deal with”. As one news by-line asked, “HOW COULD A MUM DO IT” (Chamberlin & Kyriacou, 2019). Add to this that so little is publicly known about filicide in circumstances in which a known history of domestic violence and abuse is absent, and reporters may struggle to establish a narrative beyond that something tragic has happened. 4

As was the case with Rowan Baxter and John Edwards.

Mental Illness/Distress Frames

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Mental Illness/Distress Frames Outside of the narrative of filicide as the outcome of protracted domestic violence, as was the case in the murder of Jack and Jennifer Edwards, the most available narrative in such cases was that of mental illness. In the filicide-suicide cases reported on during the period of this study, this narrative appeared to be more common in the cases of maternal filicide, with all cases implicitly framed through mental illness/distress lens. Here, the psy-complex (Rimke, 2016) was often the default source through which to attempt to resolve confronting issues. As one article read, “Counsellors were called in as police—and the community—try to make sense of how a mother was driven to the unthinkable” (My Angels, 2018). Perpetrators’ social media accounts were sometimes drawn on to establish such a narrative. Less than six weeks after she posted a suicide-prevention video on Facebook, Erica Bond and her son Lochlan were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. […]. Ms Bond, a keen golfer, regularly posted about her son on Facebook and described him as her ‘handsome young man’. But on July 10 she wrote: ‘Depression is real, people can smile all day and still be broken on the inside.’ […] A June 12 post read: ‘Depression, anxiety and panic attacks are not signs of weakness. They are signs of trying to remain strong for too long’ (Caisley, 2018). [Tanya Ludwig’s] final public Facebook post, published on December 17, shared a list of suicide prevention and counselling services, including Lifeline, Beyond Blue, Mensline and Relationships Australia, titled ‘It’s a really tough time of year for people’. ‘It’s ok not to be ok,’ Ms Ludwig wrote in the caption. ‘We all need support sometimes’ (Bedo et al., 2019).

Women perpetrators were, for the most part, represented as sad or mad, depressed, or unhinged, and as mothers first and foremost—as “troubled” (Carey, 2019), or “broken with depression” (Hales & Duncan, 2018)—yet as loving mothers. Reporting on the case of Anne Muhoro, too, dissipated quickly. In the newspaper articles examined, the demonisation of women of colour who kill their children5 observed in other literature was not overtly apparent; however, she received less descriptive, sympathetic coverage. In this case, there appeared a reluctance to speculate around the case at all—even in relation to mental illness—with a tendency to just turn away. Women were, in line with extant research, suggested as overcome by psychological issues, represented in largely non-agentic terms. This aligns with existing research that suggests that women’s violence is more likely to be medicalised and understood as irrational (McCluskey, 2019; Stangle, 2008). There was little effort to unpick ‘motives’, in contrast to the heightened speculation around motive in familicide and filicide cases in which men were perpetrators, where conjecture as to the personal circumstances, mindsets, and motives of perpetrators and the events leading up to the murders was common. Sometimes, it seems to be assumed these terrible things just happen. The Black Dog—the spectre of depression—can cause even the most loving mothers to kill their children. It should be noted that the mental illness/distress lens in filicide-suicide was most likely to emerge in cases with no known or reported history of domestic and family 5

Muhoro was Kenyan-born.

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violence or child abuse, as with reporting on familicide cases. This accounts, in part, for the prevalence of the mental illness/distress frame in respect to women perpetrators compared to men perpetrators, since a history of violence by maternal filicide perpetrators was not indicated as it was in many cases of paternal filicide.6 It should also be clarified that, in highlighting the mental illness/distress frame in reporting on these cases, the intention is not to deny the possibility that significant mental distress and the motive of suicide may indeed have undergirded the actions of perpetrators. It is, instead, to suggest that when women kill it is likely to be assumed in somewhat fatalistic terms to be the product of unbalanced body or mind (McCluskey, 2019; Stangle, 2008). As discussed in Chap. 6, attending to issues of mental illness/distress is important, but needs to move beyond psychocentric (Rimke, 2016) understandings. Representations of maternal filicide-suicide and mental illness, particularly, were prone to the implicit suggestion that the experience of mental illness (and filicide as a response to it) is indiscriminate—that it can happen to anyone, an assumption at odds with research on maternal filicide.7 Filicide is one of the only forms of violence committed in roughly equal numbers by women and men, yet we are not implored to ask why beyond vague and universalised explanations of mental illness. As Salter argues, while men’s mental distress is often framed as the outcome of suffering masculinity (as seen in reporting on familicide and constructions of the disempowered man), women’s violence is more likely to be framed in personalised terms, their mental/emotional distress individualised; “women’s suffering is frequently privatised in public discourse, considered too routine to be noteworthy and a personal harm suffered by the victim without a political or collective resonance” (p. 73). This was certainly the case here. Representations of male filicide-suicide perpetrators were more scathing of offenders in contrast to both representations of mothers who killed and familicide offenders. They tended to be represented as more agentic, as rational—if evil—agents embarking on a goal-driven mission to achieve their own ends. John Edwards, especially, was framed not only as a monstrous killer (even before the full details of the history of his abuse emerged) but as an inherently unlikeable man—sullen, antisocial, and mean-spirited. In comparison to female perpetrators, male perpetrators, it appeared to be assumed, knew what they were doing. Where mental illness was raised or implied, it was still more invested with assumptions of rationality and reactivity to the circumstances, whether custodial, financial, or otherwise.

6

In the case of baby William, it was implied that a history of domestic violence was relevant, the murder taking place in the context of separation. John Edwards had a known history of violence, and while mental illness was mentioned in relation to Sharpley, a criminal history was referenced. 7 Saavedra and Cameira (2018) locate filicide within the formation of modern constructions of family and motherhood, with romanticised, insular family structure, and an idealised account of mothers as self-less and naturally equipped for the demands of parenting. This renders women caught between idealised notions of “good” mothering as natural and the realities of (unequal) parenting and family life.

Children, Beyond Tropes or Symbols …

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Children, Beyond Tropes or Symbols (and Why We as Feminists Should Care) German woman Tanja Ludwig, who died with her two-year-old daughter after going over the cliff at a lookout near Wollongong on Tuesday, loved walking in the rainforest under the Robertson Lookout at Mount Keira (Mardon, 2019).

The above extract from a news report by the Sydney Morning Herald reflects some of the most troubling aspects of the way filicide-suicide—including maternal filicidesuicide—was sometimes reported. Murder-suicide was romanticised. Children as full people were silenced. Passive language was used; women were not framed as agents, but as acting (if at all) on behalf of their illness. The murder of a child as part of an act of suicide remained largely unquestioned, reifying the notion of parents not only as custodians, but as absolute keepers of their children’s lives. In maternal filicide-suicide cases, especially, children’s lives were representationally wrapped into those of their mothers (Cavalgion, 2008) in a way that elided the harms done to them (Stangle, 2008). This article went on to describe the lives of mother and child leading up to murder-suicide in ways that romanticised the relationship and, by implication, the murder-suicide. Less than a fortnight ago, Ms Ludwig had walked along the pathway and mused at the beauty of her favourite place [..]. ‘She shared how much her daughter loved the trees and how she ran along the pathway, enjoying it so much’ [a friend] said. ‘She was just so bloody lovely. She loved that place so much’ (Mardon, 2019).

It then went on to detail Tanja Ludwig’s social media posts on mental illness. Within existing scholarship, there is still scant consideration of how news reporting on filicide reflects, reifies, and reproduces the hierarchical constructions of the family and children’s place within it (Nikunen, 2006), or on the pervasive silencing in news reporting of child victims as people (Grau, 2021). Yet, as with cases of familicide, filicide-suicide child victims were routinely pushed to the periphery of these stories. In one article, Tanja and Tilly Ludwig were first referred to as a “mother and child”, a “German woman” and “her toddler”, “Tanja Ludwig and her two-year-old daughter”, and a “woman” and “her toddler”, before the fifth mention of Tilly finally identified her by name (Bedo et al., 2019). Also silenced, in these accounts, was consideration as to what the children may have endured. As discussed in Chap. 11, the lived experiences of child victims of familicide, both in the moment of their death and in the lead up to it, were largely sidestepped in reporting. This, as I argued, reflects a wider silencing of children’s experiences and perspectives of domestic and family violence. So too it was in most cases of filicide-suicide, whether committed by women or by men. Children, where they were described, were usually described as happy (see, for example, Heartbroken Father, 2019), as if the context of domestic violence or mental illness and distress in the family left them untouched. The suffering of perpetrators or surviving adults was privileged over the suffering of child victims. Reporting turned away from the horror of children’s deaths, the tremendous fear many must have felt. As I said in

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Chap. 11, there are good reasons for this. Looking closely at children’s suffering can be unbearable (O’Hagan, 2014), and the impact of news reporting on surviving family members and friends needs to be kept in mind. Yet, I find the evasion of the issue of children’s suffering, side by side with a presentation of these stories as ones of adult pain, deeply disquieting. There must be a way to look the harm done to children squarely in the face without descending into sensationalism. Part of this is to contextualise it and discuss ways to holistically address it. As feminists, we should care about how child victims are portrayed, including child victims of maternal filicide-suicide. It is not a simple issue, however. There has, historically, been an uneasy relationship between feminism and critical childhood studies (Rosen & Twamley, 2018). In aiming to challenge naturalised notions of women and children’s oneness and chart a more nuanced understanding of their relationship to each other, tensions have sometimes arisen around simultaneously promoting the interests of women and of children (ibid). There has been a subsequent avoidance, Rosen and Twamley suggest, of research addressing the complex power relationships between women and children under patriarchy, given the difficulties faced in simultaneously addressing children’s struggles and women’s struggles. Questions around maternal filicide raise such tensions. From a feminist perspective, condemning women’s violence against children and emphasising women’s agency and accountability—in the way that is asked of representations of male perpetrators—may result in failing to contextualise women’s violence within interlocking gendered systems of oppression. This would be to ignore the insights of feminist criminology, which places women’s offending (and its subsequent treatment) in the context of patriarchy. At the same time, portrayals of women’s violence against children that seek to understand and contextualise it within women’s oppression might lead to some real concerns among child advocates around sympathetic portrayals of parental violence against children and the way harms to children are subsequently minimised. While these tensions arise, I would suggest that the issue is not as simple as an antagonistic relationship between women’s struggles and children’s struggles. There is a growing recognition, for instance, that taking violence against women seriously is critical in protecting children, especially in the context of domestic and family violence (Saunders, 2004). Violence against children is too often assumed to be a separate threat to violence against women, and many children die as a result (Nelson & Lumby, 2021; Saunders, 2004). The same gendered heteronormative relationship scripts that subjugate women can also operate to mask and silence male violence against children.8 In many ways, the interests of women and children, and their relationship to patriarchy, are intertwined. Understanding women’s unequal position in the home and the harms against women that are often done by modern figurations of the gendered nuclear family are essential to addressing many of the drivers of both paternal and maternal filicide (Saavedra & Cameira, 2018). Further, a feminist perspective on gender and power shares a commitment with a range of 8

See, for example, McLaren’s (2016) work on heteronormative dating scripts and their role in shaming and silencing women who discover their partners are sexually abusing their children.

References

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McCluskey, M. (2019). Parents who kill: Media constructions of male and female filicide cases [Postgraduate thesis]. Wilfred Laurier University. https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/2195 McLaren, H. J. (2016). Adult women groomed by child molesters’ heteronormative dating scripts. Women’s Studies International Forum, 56, 66–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2016.02.016 ‘My angels’: Dad left devastated after losing wife, son in ‘murder suicide’. (2018, August 23). Yahoo Sport. https://au.sports.yahoo.com/angels-dad-left-devastated-losing-wife-son-mur der-suicide-121646977.html. Naylor, B. (2001). Reporting violence in the British print media: Gendered stories. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 40(2), 180–194. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2311.00200 Nelson, C., & Lumby, C. (2021). Broken: Children, parents and family courts. La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. Niblock, S. (2018). “He just snapped”: Gendered narratives of parents killing their children in the UK press. Journalism Studies, 19(16), 2451–2469. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.135 0117 Nikunen, M. (2006). Parenthood in murder-suicide news. Idealized fathers and murderous mums. Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 7(2), 164–184. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14043850601029430. O’Hagan, K. (2014). Filicide-suicide: The killing of children in the context of separation, divorce and custody disputes. Palgrave Macmillan. O’Sullivan, T. (Magistrate, State Coroner). (2021, April 7). Inquest into the deaths of John, Jack and Jennifer Edwards. File numbers: 2018/209420, 2018/208842, 2018/208843. autiCoroners Court of New South Wales, Lidcombe. https://coroners.nsw.gov.au/coroners-court/download.html/ documents/findings/2021/Inquest_into_the_deaths_of_John_Jack_and_Jennifer_Edwards_-_fin dings_of_State_Coroner_dated_7_April_2021.pdf. Palin, M. (2019, May 23). Chilling detail behind mum and child’s cliff plunge: It was her ‘favourite place’. News.com.au. https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/chilling-detail-behindmum-and-childs-cliff-plunge-it-was-her-favourite-place/news-story/6417afa6a90abf9799827 0604d445b19. Quinn, F., Prendergast, M., & Galvin, A. (2019). Her name was Clodagh: Twitter and the news discourse of murder suicide. Critical Discourse Studies, 16(3), 312–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17405904.2019.1568896 Renzetti, C. M. (1999). The challenge to feminism posed by women’s use of violence in intimate relationships. In S. Lamb (Ed.), New versions of victims: Feminists struggle with the concept (pp. 42–56). New York University Press. Rimke, H. (2016). Introduction: Mental and emotional distress as a social justice issue: Beyond psychocentrism. Studies in Social Justice, 10(1), 4–17. https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index. php/SSJ/article/view/1407. Rosen, R., & Twamley, K. (2018). The woman–child question: A dialogue in the borderlands. In R. Rosen & K. Twamley (Eds.), Feminism and the politics of childhood: Friends or foes? (pp. 1–20). UCL Press. Saavedra, L., & Cameira, M. (2018). Deconstructing idealized motherhood: The extreme case of neonaticidal women. Feminist Criminology, 13(5), 543–559. https://doi.org/10.1177/155708511 6688779 Saunders, H. (2004). Twenty-nine child homicides: Lessons still to be learnt on domestic violence and child protection. Women’s Aid. http://familieslink.co.uk/download/jan07/twenty_nine_c hild_homicides.pdf. Stangle, H. L. (2008). Murderous Madonna: Femininity, violence, and the myth of postpartum mental disorder in cases of maternal infanticide and filicide. William and Mary Law Review, 50(2), 699. Tomi´c, B. T. (2019). How could a mother do that to her children? Filicide and maternal ambivalence in Croatian media and online discourse. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 3(1–2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/5921.

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Toowoomba murder-suicide: ‘It was something I will never forget’ (2015, March 4). News.com.au. https://www.news.com.au/national/crime/toowoomba-murdersuicide-it-was-som ething-i-will-never-forget/news-story/63a9469e097b197ebe8139095610547d. White, D. (2021, April 10). The family that we failed: Coroner calls for action over deaths of Jack and Jennifer Edwards. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/thefamily-that-we-failed-coroner-calls-for-action-over-deaths-of-jack-and-jennifer-edwards-202 10409-p57hws.html. Wiest, J. B., & Duffy, M. (2013). The impact of gender roles on verdicts and sentences in cases of filicide. Criminal Justice Studies, 26(3), 347–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/1478601X.2012. 733873

Chapter 13

Framing Domestic and Family Violence

It’s Up to Us to Make These Lives Matter As Hill (2019) observed of the murder of Luke Batty by his father in 2014, “it’s hard to pinpoint why, after so many tragedies and decades of advocacy, one murder became such a decisive tipping point” (p. 3). But, according to Hill, Luke’s murder and his mother Rosie Batty’s subsequent dauntless activism catalysed a possibly unparalleled national conversation on domestic and family violence in Australia. Luke’s murder followed years of abuse against his mother, Rosie Batty, who was determined that her son’s death not be in vain. Dubbed the “Batty Effect”, Luke’s death and Rosie Batty’s advocacy work spurred significant social policy and legal reforms across Australia (Hawley et al., 2018; Walklate et al., 2019; Wheildon et al., 2021). There are many reasons that have been proposed for why this case, and this advocate, had such a far-reaching impact on the nation. Among them are the time and place in which Batty’s story was told, contextualised as it was within a rich history of feminist activism and the steady onslaught of reported cases of femicide (Walklate et al., 2019; Wheildon et al., 2022). Scholars have also pointed to the way Rosie Batty at once represented ‘everyone’ as a person many found easy to identify with, and an ‘ideal victim’ whose case garnered more attention and sympathy than women from more marginalised social groups would have (Walklate et al., 2019; Wheildon et al., 2022). Her embodiment of the key characteristics and strategies of an effective ‘policy entrepreneur’ (Wheildon et al., 2022) has also been credited. Importantly, this case became a flashpoint for deeper conversations about domestic and family violence. So, too, it has been in the case of the murder of young Laianah, Trey, and Aaliyah Baxter and their mother, Hannah Clarke, on the 19th of February 2020. While media coverage of some of the other familicide cases in this study was plentiful, none earned the level of coverage the Baxter familicide did. Nor have any of the preceding cases continued to garner such continued media interest. The Baxter familicide, like the murder of Luke Batty, became a defining case in national conversations about © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_13

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domestic and family violence in Australia. Indeed, it was a dramatic signifier of the dangers of a form of domestic abuse coming under increased scrutiny in respect to the need for legal reform—coercive control (Stark, 2007). Coined by Evan Stark in 2007, the term coercive control denotes how a range of patterned, abusive behaviours (many of them non-physical) are deployed by abusers to ‘entrap’ women.1 The term advanced already ongoing conversations about the need to move away from current legal approaches to (and cultural understandings of) domestic violence that focused primarily on physical violence and discrete ‘incidents’, at the expense of patterns of abusive behaviours. Legal reforms began to be debated and, in some contexts, introduced. In 2004, Tasmania made history by creating two new family violence offences, prohibiting economic abuse and emotional abuse and intimidation (Barwick et al., 2020). In 2015, England and Wales introduced a new offence—“controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship”—reflecting a shift in understanding of domestic violence spurred by the work of Stark and others (Wiener, 2020). When Hannah, Trey, Aaliyah, and Laianah were killed, discussions about criminalising coercive control in Australia had already been bubbling. Here was a case in which all the markers of coercive control were evident: surveillance, stalking, sexual coercion, attempts to isolate, and micromanagement of everyday activities such as dressing (Stark, 2007). Further, while most of the abuse had not involved physical violence, it ended in the most brutal and horrific act of violence—against the main intended victim, Hannah Clarke, and three young children—underscoring the need to take coercive control seriously as a matter of women’s and children’s safety. Unlike the other cases of familicide looked at in this book, the Baxter familicide emerged quickly as a clear case of domestic abuse and the dangerousness of the post-separation period for women and children—what may be classified as a livid coercive familicide (Websdale, 2010). This and the unfathomable cruelty of the crime, intentionally setting fire to three small children and their mother as they made their way to school, catapulted discussions of coercive control into the national spotlight. These discussions were, of course, also encroached upon by those seeking to draw on the affective resonance of the case to promote other concerns. Ongoing debates about whether and how domestic violence is gendered, and the role of the family court in ‘driving’ assumed disenfranchised fathers to acts of violence, for instance, also found fodder in news reporting on the story. While complex, the reporting on the Baxter familicide significantly extended discussions around domestic and family violence in a way that other familicide cases did not. Reporting on this case also far more frequently employed thematic reporting, using an individual case to draw attention to larger social issues (Iyengar, 1991). In this case, that issue was the scourge of domestic violence against women and children—coercive control in particular. As one headline in the Canberra Times said, “It’s up to us to make these lives matter” (Anonymous, 2020i).

1

See more on this in Chaps. 2 and 3

When Familicide Is Recognised as Domestic Violence

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When Familicide Is Recognised as Domestic Violence In previous chapters, I argued that cases of familicide without a clear known history of domestic violence or abuse (the Milne, Manrique, Hunt, and Miles familicides) were generally characterised as an unknowable mystery or as driven by internal experiences of mental illness/distress. They were represented as an understandable if tragic outcome of sad, disenfranchised men, or overburdened heads of houses caring for disabled children or partners. These cases, which may be categorised as “civil reputable” familicides (Websdale, 2010),2 tended not to be recognised as gender-based domestic and family violence, despite being both violent and intertwined with many of the same gendered drivers as other forms of domestic and family violence. The main spaces in which these cases were recognised as domestic and family violence were through talk-back editorial pieces, especially those offered up by feminist commentators, some of which sought to push back against the mental illness/distress frame or otherwise sympathetic narratives of perpetrators. In such talk-back pieces, however, a binary was often inferred between the issue of mental illness/distress and domestic and family violence. As one article on the Manrique familicide read, “This is not mental illness. It’s domestic violence” (Harvey, 2016). Despite this talk-back, episodic reporting around these cases prevailed, focusing on the forensic minutia of the crime scenes, the family circumstances that may ‘explain’ perpetrators’ actions, and the killers’ state of mind, trying to untangle each case as a unique tragedy. In this chapter, I focus on reporting in which familicide was represented as a manifestation of the broader social issue of domestic and family violence. This primarily involves an examination of the reporting on the Baxter familicide. However, I also reflect on some of the minority reporting on other cases that characterised them as instances of domestic and family violence. I consider what it is that made the Baxter familicide more intelligible as gendered domestic and family violence. I also examine how victims and perpetrators were constructed in cases that framed them as instances of domestic violence. Through what lens, I ask, was domestic and family violence (when it was recognised) viewed? I argue that the Baxter case was most consistently framed as a case of domestic and family violence, both because of the nature of the crime itself, and the fact that it occurred in a context of emerging understandings of coercive control, the features of which were clearly identifiable in the lead up to the killings. As such, the murders were not rendered as something that happened ‘out-of-the-blue’, as they often were in other cases, but as the outcome of a recognisable case of domestic violence. This is encouragingly reflective of the growing cultural intelligibility of coercive control as domestic and family violence (Wiener, 2020). At the same time, the fact that the Baxter familicide was the only case to more consistently be rendered through a 2

I say this with caution, however, knowing that patterns of abuse may not always be known to those outside the immediate family. Also, some cases—such as the Manrique familicide—blur the boundaries between civil reputable and livid coercive familicide, given that Manrique’s actions followed news of his wife’s intention to separate.

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domestic violence frame highlights the limitations around what is conceived of as gendered domestic and family violence; cases that did not present as exemplars of patterned abuse, such as the Miles, Hunt, Milne, and Manrique familicides, remained largely unintelligible as gendered family violence. Discrete categories were often implicitly constructed—between controlling, abusive, and violent men, on the one hand, and desperate, sad men, on the other—categories that elided the overlaps and interconnections between them. Such a binary risks overlooking the common gendered drivers that, as I showed in Chap. 4, propel not only different forms of familicide but domestic and family violence more broadly—how familicide, while extreme, works as part of the cultural logic of patriarchy. While episodic reporting (Iyengar, 1991) was sometimes employed, “[focusing] on the individual crime in isolation from social involvement” (Smith et al., 2019, p. 574), the Baxter case drew more extensive thematic reporting than is commonly observed in domestic violence reporting in the news (see, for example, Sutherland et al., 2019). Thematic reporting, in this case, focused on systemic failures to protect women and children experiencing domestic and family violence and drew regularly on domestic violence experts as sources. The case was utilised to advance an understanding of coercive control and of domestic violence as characterised by patterned (and not always physically violent) abuse. I consider how constructions of the ‘ideal victim’ (Christie, 1986), as with the case of Luke and Rosie Batty, enabled this advancement. While the prevalence and dangers of domestic and family violence were underscored, however, its gendered drivers and issues of primary prevention received less attention. Further, a ‘monster narrative’ prevailed in much reporting, in which Rowan Baxter came to signify domestic abusers as recognisably, incontestably, and irreparably monstrous. As such, news representations focused primarily on the need for systems to protect women and children from violent and abusive men. Left largely unproblematic was the everydayness of gender constructs that undergird male violence and control (and how, therefore, they may present on a continuum), how to prevent men from becoming abusive, and how men who commit violence often do not present as monsters. I observe that in some reporting on the other cases of familicide, too, commentators sought to counter the mental illness/distress frame by drawing on a simplistic ‘monster narrative’ that at once recognised the widespread nature of male violence against women while subtly individualising it as a problem of pathological men. I suggest that heightened thematic reporting on coercive control that attends to system changes demonstrates a responsiveness to (some) feminist knowledge on domestic and family violence. That said, I point to the limitations of a monster narrative in framing domestic and family violence, showing how its juxtaposition against constructions of the ‘ideal victim’ (Christie, 1986) problematically reinforces a pattern in Australian discussions on domestic violence that leave other victim-survivors largely ignored. Finally, I reflect on how, as discussed in Chap. 2, calling violence gendered is highly political. Recognisable as the horrendous outcome of a wider social problem that is domestic and family violence, the Baxter case was more politicised than other cases of familicide. It invoked greater contestation around the gendered nature of

How Domestic and Family Violence Is Usually Presented in News

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domestic and family violence and how such cases should be reported on. Various social actors, therefore, utilised the opportunity that reporting on the case offered to deploy common strategies to discredit feminist understandings of interpersonal violence (Flood et al., 2021). The spiralling of news reporting on the case into ‘culture wars’ (Baird, 2020) around gender and violence signalled the role of stories of domestic and family violence in ongoing contestations over meaning-making, not just within but beyond the news media.

How Domestic and Family Violence Is Usually Presented in News Reporting on the Baxter case must be contextualised within wider patterns of reporting on domestic and family violence. Much research in this area pulls out similar dominant themes, which I will outline briefly. Rigorously researching and documenting persistent dominant framings of domestic violence is important, but it is also vital to be astute to shifts and openings, especially how feminist knowledges are gradually affecting change to news reporting. In this chapter, I reflect on how reporting on the Baxter case embodies the tempering and reworking of some common representations of domestic and family violence, even as problematic narratives persist. To do this, it is important to highlight the common themes in the extant literature. Chesney-Lind and Chagnon’s (2017) overview of scholarship on news representations of domestic violence articulates the key themes succinctly: “News stories often blame victims, fail to convey its prevalence or explore its causes, or generally provide decontextualized accounts of domestic violence” (p. 2). Victim-blaming discourses in portrayals of domestic violence have been variously observed (for example, Berns, 2004; Bullock & Cubert, 2002; Gillespie et al., 2013; Lee & Wong, 2020; Lloyd & Ramon, 2017; Meyers, 1994; Taylor, 2009), including in recent Australian scholarship (Sutherland et al., 2019). This can include direct and indirect blaming of victims for the violence against them (Taylor, 2009), by focusing on the behaviour of the victim, by sympathising with or otherwise discursively absolving the perpetrator of responsibility for his actions (Easteal et al., 2019; Smith et al., 2019), or by implying the mutuality of violence (Easteal et al., 2019). De-contextualisation, or the omission of social context, is another key theme (Carlyle et al., 2008; Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017; Easteal et al., 2019; Fairbairn & Dawson, 2013; Smith et al., 2019; Sutherland et al., 2019). Decontextualisation is manifest in reporting that looks at each case or ‘incident’ of violence separately, failing to locate it within a history of abuse or wider patterns of gender-based violence (Smith et al., 2019). This is an important issue for feminist

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scholars.3 Despite extensive research to evidence the pervasiveness and gendered nature of domestic and family violence, domestic violence is almost consistently portrayed as an individual problem instead of a widespread social issue (Carlyle et al., 2008; Gillespie et al., 2013; Richards et al., 2014a). The media, however, has an important role to play in recasting private troubles into public issues (Mills, 1959). As Richards et al. (2014a) note, “news media have the unique ability to choose which ‘personal’ problems are ‘invested with a broader meaning’” (p. 25 citing Saccom, 1995). They emphasise that “the construction of social issues begins when a private problem is identified and invested with broader meaning for society”, a process with “important ramifications, influencing how society perceives the dynamics of such violence […] and most importantly, the public’s role in potential solutions” (Richards et al., 2014a, p. 25). There are a range of ways domestic violence can be reported on as an isolated incident or wider social problem, and feminist scholars have paid frequent attention to these in analyses of media. For example, a reliance on police sources rather than domestic violence experts, the omission of statistics on domestic violence or domestic violence support service information, and frequent reporting on individual cases at the expense of reporting on the wider social problem all contribute to episodic reporting (Carlyle et al., 2008; Fairbairn & Dawson, 2013; Morgan & Politoff, 2012; Smith et al., 2019). In contrast, the use of domestic violence experts, inclusion of statistics on domestic violence, and reference to wider contexts of abuse can contribute to thematic reporting (Simons & Morgan, 2018; Sutherland et al., 2019). Much feminist scholarship has focused on highlighting and critiquing the presence of episodic reporting. However, some scholarship has also measured the presence of thematic reporting on domestic violence (for example, Sutherland et al., 2019) and identified emerging feminist-informed framings of domestic violence as a social and political problem (for example, Comas-d’Argemir, 2015; Gillespie et al., 2013; Hawley et al., 2018). As Carvalho (2008) points out, noticing how the same sets of stories can be told in different ways helps to elucidate the discursive meaningmaking strategies that can be applied in news. Recognising thematic reporting around domestic and family violence is therefore worthwhile, and part of developing a body of work that charts changes in discourse responsive to shifting social environments— “the temporal evolution of media(ted) discourses” (Carvalho, 2008, p. 172).

3

As Blatchford and Morgan (2020) have argued, part of the reason for the pervasiveness of episodic reporting, beyond the cultural influences on such framings, may lie in legal restrictions. This is something, they argue, is not always appreciated in feminist media research. For instance, in Australia legal restrictions are placed on journalists that preclude inclusion of certain contextual information on cases that may be subject to criminal proceedings (ibid). That said, some strategies have been outlined by scholars and used by journalists to achieve thematic reporting. Further, in the case of familicide-suicide there is no surviving perpetrator to be subject to criminal charges.

The ‘Horrific Incident’: Early Reporting on the Baxter Familicide

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The ‘Horrific Incident’: Early Reporting on the Baxter Familicide While reporting on the murders of Aaliyah, Laianah, Trey, and Hannah largely characterised domestic violence as a pervasive social problem, much early reporting on the case bore the hallmarks of incident-based reporting. A “horrific incident” had taken place, and three children and a man had died in a “car fire” (Garcia et al., 2020). News of the event broke fast, and while some strong suggestions were made as to the cause of the fire early on—a witness telling reporters that Hannah Baxter had “run from the car screaming ‘he poured petrol on me’” (Anonymous, 2020h)— journalists were erring on the side of caution. Even as more credible information suggesting murder-suicide emerged, however, by the time Hannah Clarke had died of her injuries in hospital later that day much reporting still utilised passive language to describe what had happened. Three children among five dead in horror blaze” (Anonymous, 2020h). Three children and man die in ’horrific incident’ at Camp Hill (Garcia et al., 2020). Mother burnt in Brisbane car fire dies (Staff writers, 2020b).

The below excerpt from The Canberra Times illustrates a repeated use of passive, agency-concealing language, and the way the ordering of available information worked to obscure it as an act of male violence. Hannah Baxter, the mother who was badly burnt in a horrific incident that saw her three children and their father killed in Brisbane, has died. Queensland Police confirmed late last night the 31-year-old other involved in a fatal vehicle fire at Camp Hill in Brisbane has died in hospital from her injuries. Her husband Rowan Baxter died alongside his children Laianah, Aaliyah and Trey on a quiet suburban street in Brisbane’s east on Wednesday morning. Police said it was too early to tell whether it was a murder-suicide or an accident, although one witness told News Corp Ms Baxter had run from the car screaming ‘he’s poured petrol on me’ (Anonymous, 2020f).

The murders were framed as an “incident”, the father “killed” “alongside his children”. Given that the cause of the fire had not been confirmed by police, journalists would be understandably cautious not to assume the guilt of Rowan Baxter in this case, if not legally (given the alleged perpetrator in this case was no longer alive) then ethically. However, such pervasive use of passive language and implied mutuality of the deaths was problematic and quickly called out in the news and on social media (see, for example, Conoghan, 2020). Some social media users pointed out that it was not a ‘car fire’ that killed Hannah, Trey, Laianah, and Aaliyah—it was their father; it was murder (Conoghan, 2020). News outlets picked up on this social media commentary, which became part of the reporting on the story. Fierce criticism was also levelled against early reporting that emphasised Rowan Baxter’s sporting history and achievements, often in combination with passive language that erased his agency in the murders. Rowan Baxter was described in some headlines as an “Ex-NRL player” who died “alongside” his children in a “Brisbane

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Tragedy which killed three children” (see, for example, Conoghan, 2020 on this type of reporting).4 Criticism against such headlines was swift. It is difficult to ascertain how many news reports in the data set reported on here initially employed this kind of writing; online news is transient (Blatchford & Morgan, 2020), and news outlets can quickly modify content in response to negative feedback from audiences. Notwithstanding changes that may have been made to online news reporting, passive language was certainly deployed in much of the earlier reporting accessed, constructing a narrative of ‘tragedy’ rather than of violence. Baxter’s sporting career was also needlessly raised in some news reports. A compelling example of this, combined with the use of passive language, read: Former NRL player and CrossFit coach Rowan Baxter’s Facebook page is littered with photos and videos of his three children, Laianah, Aaliyah and Trey, who died along with their parents in the blaze in Camp Hill this morning (Craw, 2020).

Baxter was portrayed, in this extract, first as a successful sportsman, career man, and doting father and then as a mutual victim of the events in which his children died. Other articles also highlighted career details inconsequential to the case, for instance that “Baxter once played for the New Zealand Warriors rugby league club in a preseason match against NRL club the Parramatta Eels. He had previously played as a winger for Bay of Plenty in the New Zealand rugby competition” (Layt, 2020a). The former NRL player angle was sometimes drawn on to invest the story with greater newsworthiness, a consequence of which was to present Baxter as a successful and seemingly loving father—and his violence therefore as unforeseen. Some of these reports, however, also took on a darker tone in discussing Rowan’s sporting prowess and fathering, referencing a video made available online in which he was filmed ‘play’ wrestling with his children and “pretending to snap his son’s neck” (Craw, 2020). Mr Baxter’s social media shows tributes to his children, including one video from January 8 where he wrestles with his young son and pretends to break his neck. A woman filming the video can be heard laughing along with the children as they play, however the youngest boy, Trey, ends up in tears. The video is captioned: ‘Sweet dreams my babies xo. Love you to the moon and back #nowords #dad #myworld’ (Craw, 2020).

As with reporting on the Manrique familicide,5 prototypically ‘masculine’ success was cast as a veil to the detection of violent men, a reason not to foresee it. At the same time, a sinister undertone was applied to normatively ‘masculine’ behaviours in this piece—such as ‘play fighting’. Baxter’s violence was cast, therefore, as hidden in plain sight. Yet, the plain sightedness of connections between normative masculinity and violence went uninterrogated. His sporting career and physically aggressive approach to fathering were largely presented as a prop to the newsworthiness of 4

These headlines were not reflected in the data set under study. However, it is worth pointing out that this reporting was present in other publications and that it was subject to critique. Further, as I go on to say, it is not clear whether such reporting did initially exist in the publications under study or not, since some outlets may have changed their reporting in response to this criticism. 5 See Chap. 9.

Thematic Reporting and the Recognition of Patterned Abuse

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the story, an unexpected and sinister ‘twist’ to pique reader interest rather than in indication of the need to examine gender constructs.

Thematic Reporting and the Recognition of Patterned Abuse While violence-minimising language was evident in some news reporting as shown above, the Baxter case soon came to be characterised as one of domestic and family violence and Rowan Baxter as a perpetrator of violence. Kozol (1995) noted nearly three decades ago that the news media is “continually rediscovering (and forgetting) the problem of domestic violence” (p. 646), despite evidence of its pervasiveness and the media’s own coverage of the topic for many decades. This in many ways continues to be the case (Chesney-Lind & Chagnon, 2017), these ‘rediscoveries’ often happening in response to especially newsworthy cases of domestic homicide. The murders of Hannah, Trey, Laianah, and Aaliyah on a quiet Brisbane street on a weekday morning were certainly such a case. It presented an indelible image of violent cruelty that, like the murder of Luke Batty, had been administered in broad daylight rather than behind closed doors, literally and symbolically hauling the menace of domestic violence into the public sphere once again (Hill, 2019). While reporting on the Baxter familicide may perhaps not be described as a ‘rediscovery’ of domestic violence—there had already been increased coverage of the issue over the past decade and a “trajectory” (Hawley et al., 2018) towards more thematic reporting on domestic violence propelled by Rosie Batty’s advocacy6 –it was a significant event. In many ways, reporting on the case, and Hannah Clarke’s parents’ active role in this, helped much of the mainstream public ‘discover’ coercive control specifically. The case therefore represented a “critical discourse moment” (Carvalho, 2008) in which the “specific happenings […] may challenge the ‘established’ discursive positions” (Carvalho, 2008, p. 166). Critical discourse moments present points at which arguments may shift, or alternative lenses may surface. Nearly as many print news articles discussed coercive control in the year following Aaliyah, Laianah, Trey, and Hannah’s deaths as in the five years prior.7 Some of this reporting involved debate about the merit of criminalising coercive control that was happening during this time. Many such news reports, however, also referenced back to Hannah Clarke; the case and the question over the criminalisation of coercive control dovetailed during 2020 in a way that spurred greater media engagement with the issue of coercive control. About a third of all news reports on the Baxter case gathered during this research study had headlines embodying a thematic style of reporting, much higher than thematic reporting in any of the other familicide cases. Below are some examples. 6

See also Simons and Morgan (2018) and Wheildon et al. (2021). A search of the Australia and New Zealand Reference Centre shows 250 articles on coercive control between February 2020 and March 2021 and 283 articles on coercive control from January 2015 to January 2020, the month before the Baxter familicide.

7

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More than 70 children killed by a parent post-separation (Anonymous, 2020f). 84 domestic violence orders broken every day in Queensland (Lynch and Crockford 2020b). ’Full of despair’: Rosie Batty calls for leadership on family violence (Anonymous, 2020g). The tragedy of Hannah and her children should be a catalyst for change (Baxter, Sydney Morning Herald, 46). Brisbane murders prompt men to seek help (Cormack, 2020). Vigils call for action on family violence (Wuth & Bunch, 2020). Coercive control and domestic abuse: what might have saved Hannah Clarke and her children? (Anonymous, 2020e). Rosie Batty describes Rowan Baxter’s actions as ’final act of revenge’, as it’s revealed domestic violence orders were breached more than 30,000 times last year in Queensland (Chang, 2020a).

Thematic reporting was more prevalent in some news outlets, notably politically left-leaning publications (such as The Guardian) and politically centre publications (such as Sydney Morning Herald).8 While the Sydney Morning Herald began with mostly episodic reporting, it used the case to produce a high volume of thematic articles on domestic violence with the Baxter case as a reference point during late February and early March 2020, in what appeared a concerted effort to advance the issues in the news. The outlet with the lowest proportional thematic coverage of the case was the widely read online news outlet, News.com, known to be prone to sensational and tabloid-style stories. Thematic reporting on the Baxter case was achieved through a range of news writing strategies: language, the provision of context, and use of sources (Gillespie et al., 2013). The use of language often more explicitly linked the events to the national issue of domestic and family violence. For instance, as seen in Table 13.1, the terms ‘domestic violence’ and ‘family violence’ were present in more articles and with more overall mentions in reporting on the Baxter case across just two months than in reporting on all the other familicide cases combined. 19 headlines also directly used the term ‘domestic violence’. In addition to more unambiguous language around domestic and family violence, more articles on this case cited statistics on domestic and family violence. For instance, the Canberra Times reported that “the latest federal government report into domestic violence reveals one woman was killed every nine days by a partner between 2014 and 2016” (Anonymous, 2020g). There was also more consistent reference to domestic and family violence support services, such as 1800 Respect. These features operated to create a sense of context; they linked a single event to a broader social issue, converting a private trouble into a public issue (Mills, 1959) by contextualising it as part of a broader pattern. 8

It is difficult to access clear data on political leaning and bias in Australian news media, but USC Library Guides (2021) has backed an online barometer of political leaning of Australian new, both television and print.

Thematic Reporting and the Recognition of Patterned Abuse Table 13.1 Direct references to domestic and family violence in reporting

281

Use of terms

Baxter case reporting

Other cases combineda

‘Domestic violence’

103 articles 456 mentions

28 articles 89 mentions

‘Family violence’

72 articles 144 mentions

35 documents 51 mentions

a

Hunt, Miles, Manrique, and Milne familicides

The reporting on the Baxter case also more frequently used experts from the field of domestic and family violence as sources than reporting on the other cases. Australian and international scholarship has recurrently highlighted how an over-reliance on law enforcement and neighbours as sources in reporting on domestic and family violence stories drives episodic reporting on the issue (Morgan & Politoff, 2012; Simons & Morgan, 2018). On the other hand, drawing on researchers and other experts from the domestic and family violence sector as sources is more likely to result in thematic reporting (Morgan & Politoff, 2012; Simons & Morgan, 2018). News on the Baxter case more frequently quoted researchers, survivor-advocates, and people working in the domestic and family violence sector. This included seeking quotes from domestic violence experts even before it was confirmed a murder-suicide (see, for example, McGowan & Smee, 2020a). Such experts, when utilised, often drew attention to the gendered drivers of domestic and family violence and the dimensions of control and power. An expert on children killed in the context of separation, for instance, spoke of the dangers of post-separation for women and children: We know separation is the key point of escalation, as he [the perpetrator] loses control, he will increasingly seek to exercise different ways of control because they’re moving out of traditional or known ways of control. [..] What happens in these cases is that children are an extension of control over women.. children become the tool of control and of course they’re an instrument of revenge (Anonymous, 2020f).

Coercive control, patterns of abuse, and abuse escalation prior to homicide were a particular focus. Domestic violence researchers and service providers were frequently used as sources to articulate what coercive control can look like and contextualise the Baxter murders within patterns of (often non-physical) abuse— something that is commonly lacking in news reporting on domestic and family violence (see, for example, Sims, 2008; Sutherland et al., 2019). An article by domestic violence reporter Jess Hill, for example, connected Rowan Baxter’s history of abuse to common patterns and signs of coercive control (Hill, 2020). Another article detailed diverse forms of abuse illustrated through Hannah’s story—controlling behaviours, social media surveillance, sexual coercion, punishment, threats, belittling, and social isolation (McPhee, 2020b). The domestic violence advisor whose inputs drove this news piece noted that Hannah Clarke “‘had never thought of being in a domestic violent relationship’ because, she explained ‘he never hit me’” (McPhee, 2020b).

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In another piece, the story of Hannah Clarke was juxtaposed with research on the common features of coercive control and its escalation to murder, and Baxter’s actions were described as “playing out in three familiar acts” (Anonymous, 2020k) that were then described in depth. The article went on to explore a range of related issues— police attitudes to domestic violence and public underfunding, for example. Indeed, numerous news reports drawing on experts from the field, such as this one, were unusually lengthy and detailed, using the public’s appetite around the case to propel feminist-informed understandings of domestic and family violence. Reporting on the case became not only a tool for political advocacy but also for public engagement and education. As one source was quoted saying: “My hope is that [through this case] people are more aware of domestic violence… just because you haven’t been beaten doesn’t mean there is no domestic violence” (Ireland, 2020b). Reporting frequently highlighted failures of the ‘system’ to protect Hannah, Trey, Laianah, and Aaliyah, as epitomised in the headline below: ‘Failure of our system’: After Hannah Clarke and her children’s murder, experts call for action (Anonymous, 2020a).

References to ‘the system’—the ‘judicial system’, ‘legal system’, and ‘court system’ in particular—were prolific, shaped by domestic and family violence sector sources and editorial content. Even the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, issued a statement on system failures that was incorporated into the news: I believe state, territory and national governments, all of us, and our agencies and importantly the judiciary, we must all reflect again on these terrible murders. We must reflect on how and where the system failed Hannah and her children, as it has failed so many others. It is so frustrating. It’s so devastating’ (Lawsoon, 2020).

Various publications drew particular attention to the ineffectiveness of Domestic Violence Protection Orders (DVOs), for example: A domestic violence order was broken 84 times a day on average in Queensland in 2019, police statistics show. A total of 30 796 domestic violence protection orders (DVO) were breached last year (Lynch & Crockford, 2020b).

Going on to detail the murders of Hannah, Trey, Aaliyah, and Laianah, the article confirmed that domestic violence orders had been taken out during Baxter and Clarke’s separation, pointing out that “this shocking act of violence shows that for some women, a DVO does nothing to stop a deadly attack” (Lynch & Crockford, 2020b). The article linked the Baxter case to numerous other intimate partner homicides occurring with DVOs in place, sketching a picture of the prevalence of domestic violence and structural factors that need addressing to protect women and children. Overall, one of the prevailing narratives around the case was of systemic failures to protect women and children from violent men, representing a wider shift away from victim-blaming discourses and episodic reporting on domestic violence (Fairbairn & Dawson, 2013).

A ‘Gutless Monster’

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A ‘Gutless Monster’ Multiple news outlets delivered a clear provocation to the tendency to blame victims and conceal the responsibility of perpetrators, situating Rowan Baxter and his actions front and centre in reporting. Rather than questioning Hannah Clarke’s conduct, most journalists cast their eyes on systemic failures to protect her and on Baxter’s decision to act in violence. Enmeshed in much of the emphasis on perpetrator agency, however, was a monster narrative—that is, a construction of family violence perpetrators as distinctly monstrous and aberrant. The ‘system’ had failed to protect a woman and children from an evil man, it was reported. The role of the ‘system’—largely used to refer to the criminal justice system—was portrayed principally as offering a barrier between potential innocent victims and violent men, who were cast largely as distinct from ‘ordinary’ members of society. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison’s speech, as reported in the news, illustrates this. “Governments”, “agencies”, and “importantly the judiciary” had failed to keep “evil” at bay, he said (Lawsoon, 2020). In this section, I suggest it is worth approaching the monster narrative critically. Doing so involves recognising its emergence as shaped by well-founded criticisms of news coverage that sympathises with perpetrators or obfuscates their responsibility for violence, while maintaining caution in respect to the limitations of a monster narrative. Specifically, I wish to show that a monster narrative perpetuates individualistic understandings of gender-based violence, enables men to distance themselves from violent ‘others’, and commonly relies on the assumption that violent men have failed at personifying normative masculinity (rather than typifying it). Consider the following headlines: Brisbane mother, three children, taken by ‘disgusting human’, ‘monster’ Rowan Baxter (Ireland, 2020a). Attacker was scum, monster, say family (Anonymous, 2020g). ‘How does such evil happen in our land?’: Parliament pays tribute to slain Brisbane family (Clarke, 2020). ‘Rot in hell you putrid scum’: Killer dad’s Facebook page became a memorial of rage (Anonymous, 2020b).

One article titled “Good blokes don’t kill” countered the inclination in news reporting to quote sources depicting familicide perpetrators as “good blokes” (Hill, 2019) by describing Baxter in the most scornful of terms. Some crimes are so incomprehensibly evil that they can traumatise an entire nation. […] Three beautiful children and their mum were burnt alive by a cowardly monster who spared himself the same torturous death. […] In the past there’s been a level of sympathy for family annihilators, but this is only a final insult to their victims. Family annihilators are gutless monsters and should be remembered as such (McElroy & Wuth, 2020a).

Rowan Baxter’s actions were, of course, entirely cruel and inhumane. He was also in many ways a prototypical villain with years of documented abuse of women and children behind him. The image of him as a monster came in part from victims’ own

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families, those who had to deal directly with his actions and their consequences. In pointing to the limits of a monster narrative, therefore, my aim is not to diminish the horror of what he did or dismiss how family members dealing with the aftermath of his actions characterised him. As Mack and McCann (2021) note about survivor accounts of perpetrator monstrosity, “rage toward and dehumanization of victimizers is a reasonable response” (p. 107), both to trauma and to perpetrators’ dehumanisation of their victims. The aim, however, is to consider some of the dominant framings of gender-based violence circulating in the media and reflect on their implications for public understandings of familicide and domestic and family violence more broadly. One of the limits of monster narratives is that they are largely individualising. Violent action is attributed to individual pathology, rather than gendered social, cultural, and structural drivers. To point to silences in respect to larger drivers of problematic behaviours associated with masculinity should not, as Waling (2019) reminds us, “position men as victims of a broader vague entity” at the expense of “highlighting their agency in the reproduction of masculinity” (p. 363). There needs to be a “recognition that masculinity can be both culturally imposed and individually negotiated” (Waling, 2019, p. 371). However, similarly to the application of vague labels such as “toxic masculinity” to problematic behaviours, the trope of the monster “individualizes the problem to the character traits of specific men” (Harrington, 2021, p. 350). Therefore, ‘systems’ come to focus on keeping bad men at bay rather than asking difficult questions about the aetiology of this monstrosity within everyday gendered discourses and structures. As McDonald (2005) writes, discourses of individual pathologising in respect to domestic violence reflect and reinforce the “the ascendancy of neoliberalism [that] has individualised and pathologised public issues” (p. 275). Constructions of the monster are also essentialising and ahistorical. Like a mental illness/distress frame, lacking in social context, monster narratives rely on internal explanations, assuming perpetrators are “fundamentally” that way, that it is an “essential monstrosity” (Mack & McCann, 2021, p. 108). Baxter was often framed as if he “was always a monster” (Mack & McCann, 2021, p. 109). This was particularly the case in tabloid newspapers such as News.com. Some referenced his childhood, for instance, hinting at a violent upbringing but framing his pathology largely as internal and always there. A cousin of killer Brisbane dad Rowan Baxter says he was an ‘angry’ child growing up who showed signs of ‘cruelty’.. ‘[He was] f***ed in the head. There was a lot of violence. The Baxters had a hard life’ (Graham 2020b).

Sometimes, in eschewing male violence, journalists reinscribed the very norms of hegemonic masculinity that underpin it. In attempting to dismantle constructions of Baxter as a successful sportsman and loving father, for instance, some news reporting presented him as a failed man in conventional gendered terms. Articles calling Baxter “killer scum” subtly derided his sporting career, nothing that while “[Hannah] Baxter was a trampolining champion”, “[Rowan] Baxter had trialled with the New Zealand Warriors NRL squad in the mid-2000s but did not play a first-grade game” (Wuth, 2020). When Hannah Clarke’s family rightly called out some news media portrayals of Baxter as an “NRL star”, one newspaper pointed out that, in fact, he had only

A ‘Gutless Monster’

285

played one trial game for the New Zealand Warriors back in 2005 (Garcia, 2020). Rejecting Baxter’s idealisation as a sporting star in the news was achieved, therefore, by inferring he had been a low-grade—even failed—sportsman. Similarly, one byline read: “Killer who torched his family to death was jealous of his estranged wife because she was fitter and more qualified as a trainer” (McMahon, 2020a). Another piece refuted previous news reporting directed at failed systems by saying that the ‘system’ had not failed, the “killer dad is the only failure here” (Palin, 2020). Baxter was portrayed as a failure in strikingly gendered terms, suggesting a weak man with a tepid career. Moving away from abuser sympathising and adoration appeared at the heart of such portrayals. However, this was sometimes done in a way that reinscribed conventional ideas about gender and manhood and framed domestic and family violence as the outcome of personal failure. This was similar to the “bad dad” narrative (Buiten & Coe, 2022) that emerged in reporting on the Manrique familicide after the coronial inquest findings were released.9 Early reporting on the Manrique familicide in 2016, as I discussed in Chap. 10, assumed that Manrique had been overcome by the struggles of raising autistic children. However, when the 2019 coronial inquest found that he had planned the family’s murder following Maria’s stated intention to separate, and that he has been having an affair with a young woman in the Philippines for several years (Truscott, 2019), the narrative shifted. The mental illness/distress frame was replaced with another individualising frame—Manrique was a “gas killer” (Caisley, 2019) dad with a “teenage lover” (O’Sullivan, 2019b), living a life of “Viagra, Botox and infidelity” (Harvey & Benny-Morrison, 2019). As Coe and I have observed elsewhere: Rather than making connections between the case and broader issues of domestic and family violence, a new figure of the selfish cheating father emerged [post-inquest], solidifying the individualisation of the crimes even as the narrative shifted. No longer portrayed as mentally distressed, Manrique was a ‘murdering father. . . more interested in having unprotected sex overseas [and] getting a ‘sleeve’ tattoo. . . than helping his wife. . . care for their two autistic children’ [...] His violence was recast, somewhat seamlessly, as a symptom of intrinsic immorality. […] As Manrique went from being ‘mad’ to ‘bad’ [...], his actions were still rendered understandable at an individual level (Buiten & Coe, 2022, p. 14).

Baxter’s monstrosity was often similarly cast in individualising terms as an innate personal failing. As McPherson (2016) writes, by continuing to categorise men’s violence against women and children as either the aberrant acts of a few ‘bad’ men or the mental snaps of ‘good’ men, we effectively deny that acts of violence take place in a broader patriarchal culture. Another limit of monster narratives is that they permit and encourage readers (and especially men) to distance themselves from violent expressions of masculinity. Monster narratives help to “[collapse] act and agent”; as Mack and McCann (2021) explain, “Whereas the relationship between a man and his acts may be complex, the relationship between a monster and its acts are immanent. In other words, there is no distinction” (p. 108). Accordingly, it is only ‘bad men’ who are assumed to do bad 9

This later stage of reporting, in 2019, is captured in Buiten and Coe (2022).

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things. In this way, the trope of the monster perpetrator fails to encourage readers to reflect on themselves, distancing normative gendered attitudes and behaviours from the extreme violence on display and denying how violence and control work as part of the “cultural logic of masculinity” (Mack & McCann, 2021, p. 114). Patriarchal and controlling behaviours along the continuum of gender-based violence can be ignored because they are not observably monstrous nor those of a monster. The monster narrative also fuels the notion that perpetrators of domestic and family violence are easy to spot, making people (and the justice system) less likely to ‘read’ a potential perpetrator as one if they do not present as a monster. They bolster assumptions that controlling, abusive, or otherwise violent men will be recognisable, including to family and friends. While reporting drew attention to the prevalence and drivers of domestic violence, therefore, a binary was often fashioned between nice, ordinary men (who, if violent, were assumed mentally ill and therefore acting outside of their character) and alwaysmonsters (who, if violent, were acting out their nature). This binary was visible in the way some talk-back pieces seeking to counter perpetrator sympathising or mental illness/distress frames resorted to a monster narrative instead. This strategy was observed in reporting on the Manrique familicide (for example, Harvey, 2016). It was also observed in reporting on the Miles familicide, where a focus on “the perpetrator’s background and personal issues as excuses” for his violence was replaced with a characterisation of Miles as a “violent, selfish thug”, with readers urged to “accept that beneath the veneer of normality, a monster lurks” (Moody, 2018). The dual presence of two dominant discourses—of system failures to protect women and children from violent men and of violent men as deviant—meant that questions of primary prevention of domestic and family violence were largely sidelined. That said, there were examples of reporting on the social drivers of domestic and family violence, notably from centre and left-leaning publications. Such pieces pointed to broader gendered patterns in the perpetration of domestic and family violence (for example, Henriques-Gomes, 2020; Layt, 2020b), connecting these with gender ideologies and suggesting a collective responsibility to address it. As The Guardian said in one by-line, “It’s our responsibility to challenge any cultural suggestion that the performance of force or control against women is somehow ‘masculinity’” (Gearing, 2020). It went on to suggest this is a responsibility “as a society”, that “[we] have watched too many men seize upon this falsehood and use it to justify the unjustifiable, while women and children die” (Gearing, 2020). In this way, perpetrator agency was acknowledged while also contextualising it within broader cultural narratives around gender. Within the limitations of mainstream news reporting conventions, a sociological framing of individual violence as connected to gender identity and structure (Anderson, 2009) was tacitly forged. Similarly, a piece by Jess Hill had a title and by-line as follows: Headline: “Patriarchy and power: How socialisation underpins abusive behaviour”. By-line: “Men don’t abuse women because society tells them it’s OK. They do it because society tells them they are entitled to be in control” (Hill, 2020a).

‘Ideal Victims’

287

In some spaces, therefore feminist, sociological framings did pierce mainstream media. Even news.com, prone to episodic reporting and known for its sensational news content, published an article citing a domestic violence advisor saying “Domestic violence is about power and control” (McPhee, 2020b). News media coverage reflected a mix of competing discourses at the intersection of struggles over meaning-making around questions of gender and violence.

‘Ideal Victims’ Rosie Batty has said that one of the reasons her story resonated so fully, and why she was able to advocate so effectively, was that she was a white, middle-class, welleducated woman (Wheildon et al., 2022). Had she not been, she pointed out in her Witness Statement (2015) to the Royal Commission on Family Violence, she may not have been heard. She was, in many senses, an ‘ideal victim’ (Christie, 1986; Walklate et al., 2019; Wheildon et al., 2022). As I showed in Chap. 10, detailed sympathetic coverage of Maria Lutz was inflected by her representation as an ideal victim in markedly gendered terms—a self-sacrificing mother, charity worker and active member of her local community. Constructs around the ‘ideal woman’— usually rendered synonymous with the ‘ideal mother’—have been shown to significantly shape news reporting on femicide. Women who match these ideals—selfless mothers, white, middle class and ‘respectable’—are not only generally regarded as more newsworthy (Gekoski et al., 2012) but are portrayed more sympathetically and subject to less victim-blaming (Lloyd & Ramon, 2017). This is enhanced where women have been undertaking a ‘respectable’ task at the time they were attacked and when they are conventionally ‘attractive’ in gendered terms (Christie, 1986). Women such as these are second only to (white, middle class) children as ideal victims and newsworthy subjects (Gekoski et al., 2012). In many ways, Hannah and her children represented (and were represented as) ideal victims—a white, middle-class family, on their way to school on a weekday morning on a sub-urban street. Hannah was reported to have done everything she could to protect her children, a brave, strong, and doting mother who put her children first (Anonymous, 2020c; McPhee, 2020a). She had been subject to years of abuse and, seeking refuge at her parents’ home, was trying to start life anew. She had left the relationship, but still agreed to enable the children’s father some access to them, thus adhering to the dual expectation of mothers to take responsibility for getting out of an abusive relationship and protecting their children while also facilitating (abusive) fathers’ access to and relationship with their children (Nelson & Lumby, 2021). Part of the narrative of a systems failure relied on reports that Hannah Clarke had done everything she could do to protect her children and herself, down to her “brave final act” (McMahon, 2020b) of driving the car forward to escape Baxter, while she burned. She “did everything” for her kids (Graham, 2020a). Her conduct was beyond reproach. These stark, demanding, and often incompatible requirements of women were not called into question, however. Pictures of a beautiful family beamed out

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from the pages of the news. Photographs of three young smiling children enjoying time at the beach sat beside reports they had been strapped into their children’s car seats—entirely helpless—when they were set on fire by their own father. In turn, Baxter presented as even more monstrous.10 As was observed in the Hunt, Miles, and Manrique cases, domestic violence was represented as piercing the protective shell of the idyllic middle-class nuclear family life. One headline read: “A nation mourns innocents lost in suburban street” and went on to say: The life of Hannah Clarke and her then-husband Rowan Baxter had built for themselves seemed idyllic. They had three beautiful children […]. She was a former trampolining champion [..] He was a former NRL hopeful […]. Together they owned and operated a local gym. But there were domestic violence issues lurking under the surface, which came to a head in horrific deadly fashion in a Brisbane suburban street (Layt, 2020a).

Like reporting on Luke and Rosie Batty, a family murdered in such an ‘ordinary’ middle-class, public setting was part of what rendered the case a flashpoint for serious consideration of domestic and family violence: it could happen anywhere, to anyone. Even to a dedicated, intelligent, attractive young mother of three beautiful children, who had access to the support of her extended family and had done ‘all she could’. This is partly what gave the case its affective and political potency. Extensive coverage of the murder of Hannah, Laianah, Trey, and Aaliyah was in so many ways productive and important. At the same time, a tendency to treat cases involving ‘ideal victims’ as more newsworthy, and to rely on (gendered) constructions of ‘ideal’ mothers, children, and families to effect sympathetic reporting, is problematic. The familicide cases looked at in this book all involved white families,11 making comparative claims about the racialisation of familicide reporting difficult. As mentioned in Chap. 4, familicide is also more common in white middleclass families. That said, as research on Rosie Batty in the media has shown, race is implicit in the way domestic and family violence cases are presented (Wheildon et al., 2022). The effect of foregrounding highly personalised coverage of white, middleclass victims and survivors, at the expense of stories of women and children who do not fit within the ideal victim trope, is not limited to understandings of familicide. It sets contours around public images of what ‘real’ family violence victims look like and must be contextualised within racialised depictions of domestic violence more broadly. Research on news coverage of domestic violence in Australia tells us that, in contrast to stories of brave, loving white mothers as victims, Aboriginal women are often portrayed as “hopeless and helpless, [silencing these] women’s stories at the same time as it judges them as being culpable in the crimes that have been committed against them” (Cripps, 2021).12 10

In cases where the family was less ‘perfect’, the monster narrative was far less common and far less powerful. See for instance Chap. 11 for a discussion of how children and partners’ having a disability lead to more sympathetic mental illness/distress frames in relation to perpetrators. 11 Maria Lutz and Fernando Manrique were described as immigrants from Colombia, but not in notably racialised terms (Buiten & Coe, 2022). 12 Alarmingly, little research is dedicated to how domestic violence representations in the Australian news are racialised. More research on this is needed.

The Arndt Affair

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The Arndt Affair It is worth noting some of the “culture wars” (Baird, 2020) that played out in reporting on the Baxter familicide. As discussed in Chaps. 1 and 2, the gendering of domestic and family violence, and contested interpretations over its aetiology, are politically live issues in contemporary Australia as elsewhere. When newsworthy cases of domestic and family violence arise, media reporting can become a key site through which competing discourses around these issues are articulated. This was certainly so when news of Trey, Aaliyah, Laianah, and Hannah’s murder by Rowan Baxter broke. Within a day, a “culture war” around domestic and family violence had broken out (Baird, 2020), with anti-domestic violence and feminist advocates discursively positioned on one end, and conservative commentators and men’s rights activists discursively positioned on the other. As Julia Baird, who reported on this phenomenon, wrote: How on Earth did an abhorrent crime like family violence become entangled in Australian cultural wars? It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment commentators began to talk about the domestic violence ‘industry’ comprised of ‘feminazis’ who complain too much about men, and to imply, without evidence, that hordes of women like to fabricate stories of abuse. But every time we lose another life in this outrageously predictable and perennial onslaught against women, these voices emerge (Baird, 2020).

Baird’s comments follow a controversy that emerged in response to a police statement about the Baxter familicide. One day after the murders, a Detective Inspector on the case said in a press statement that police were keeping an “open mind” as to the cause of the murders, investigating whether it was “an issue of a woman suffering significant domestic violence and her and her children perishing at the hands of her husband, or […] an instance of a husband being driven too far by issues that he’s suffered by certain circumstances” (Baird, 2020). His words lead to an angry response from audiences, politicians, and domestic violence advocates—expressed through print news, television, and social media— against what was regarded as victim-blaming and perpetrator-excusing. The heated response to his comments came on the heels of a similar incident involving police statements around the rape and murder of Melbourne comedian, Eurydice Dixon, in a public park less than eighteen months before. In June 2018, a man followed Eurydice Dixon as she made her way home one night from a comedy gig, raping and strangling her in a park (Alcorn, 2018). On the day Eurydice Dixon’s body was discovered, a superintendent on the case advised the public: take responsibility for your safety. [..] Just make sure you have situational awareness, that you’re aware of your surroundings. [..] If you’ve got a mobile phone, carry it; if you’ve got any concerns, call the police (Alcorn, 2018).

These comments sparked a similarly furious and frustrated response from various quarters, including the Premier of Victoria at the time, captured in the news headline: “Women don’t need to change, men do” (Pearson, 2018). Reporting on Eurydice Dixon’s murder thus became “a flashpoint for an intense, often angry conversation

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about violence against women in Australia, and how it is men—not women—who need to change” (Alcorn, 2018). When the Detective Inspector on the Baxter case made his comments, therefore, it was already in the context of an evaporating tolerance for any suggestions that victims of gender-based violence are responsible for the crimes against them, or that perpetrators’ responsibility is in any way diffused. The Detective Inspector stood down from the Baxter case, expressing remorse at the way he had worded his statement. Wider parts of his statement, in which he sought to clarify what he had meant to convey, are illuminating in respect to the ‘culture wars’ into which they were encircled. “[T]o put it bluntly”, he said, “there are probably people out there in the community that are deciding which side, so to speak, to take in this investigation”. When asked about his comments about Baxter potentially being “driven too far” he emphasised that “I’m not leaning towards that at all. What I was trying to illustrate by my comments were that, um, you do see, both in public commentary and in general, you know, responses from the community that people will make those allegations” (ABC video, in Baird, 2020). He hinted as part of this that some commentary may come from “scorned members of the community” who had been subject to accusations of domestic violence (ABC video, in Baird, 2020). His comments speak to the divisions—the ‘sides’ taken—around issues of domestic and family violence as part of the Australian ‘culture wars’ (Baird, 2020). These divisions are especially sharp around questions of child custody in the context of separation, which are central to the gender(-based violence) wars in Australia (Nelson & Lumby, 2021). Frequently, men’s rights activists and fathers accused of domestic abuse have claimed that women routinely alienate children from loving fathers, wielding false domestic abuse accusations as a tool to do so (Laing, 2017; Wyeth, 2021).13 The Detective Inspector’s statement appeared to be both in response to, and in further anticipation of, this division in social commentary on the case, an attempt to avoid claims of police partisanship launched from either side. In doing so, however, his comments unwittingly gave credence to discredited claims that fathers are habitually subject to unwarranted deprivation of access to their children (Humphreys et al., 2019) and that this can lead them to ‘snap’ and kill their children (Elizabeth, 2016). It reproduces a dangerous discourse in which fathers in this context, assumed victims of a system that favours mothers and their claims of abuse, are “morally compelled to press claims for justice and even to engage in heroic risk-taking in pursuit of closer relationships with their children” (Elizabeth, 2016, p. 110). It also (re)constructs the binary observed in news reporting: that familicide is either a case of gendered domestic and family violence or of a mentally distressed man. Within the matrix of circulating discourses available to interpret terrible acts of violence such as those committed by Rowan Baxter, these dominant and opposing positions have tended to crystallise, epitomised in—and reinscribed by—his statement. A furore ensued. The angry response to the Detective Inspector’s comments was drawn on by some political actors and social commentators to launch a counter to 13

See also Nelson and Lumby’s (2021) book on the family court in Australia.

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feminist framings of domestic and family violence. ‘Men’s rights’ activist Bettina Arndt, for instance, weighed in on social media by commending Victorian police for “keeping an open mind” (Anonymous, 2020d) on the case. In response, senators from various parties voted in favour of a motion condemning Arndt’s comments and calling for her to be stripped of her Order of Australia Award14 (Anonymous, 2020d). Conservative politician Pauline Hanson subsequently came to Arndt’s defence, appearing on breakfast television and, in discussing the Baxter case, arguing that people can indeed be ‘driven’ to such acts and deriding “the misplaced outrage..”: “How dare police deviate from the feminist script of seeking excuses and explanations when women [kill partners and children] but immediately judging a man in these circumstances as simply representing the evil violence that is in all men” (Hanson as cited in Graham, 2020a). Extensive coverage of the murders was, therefore, fodder and fuel for existing gendered political contestations around domestic and family violence I introduced in Chap. 2. The ‘Arndt affair’ as it played out in news media reporting is reflective of both the considerable backlash against, and support of, the mainstreaming of feminist responses to domestic and family violence in Australia.

Tentative Progress: More Work to Be Done In February 2021, I was sitting in a café when an anniversary news special on the murders of Hannah, Laianah, Aaliyah, and Trey by Rowan Baxter came onto the news. As I watched, I noticed a man seated near me watching the same show over his coffee. He was crying, shaking his head, and wiping away tears. This case made an impact. Hannah Clarke’s parents, Lloyd and Sue Clarke, have worked determinedly during a time of unthinkable grief to ensure that their story continues to remain in the public consciousness, not only to remember Hannah, Laianah, Aaliyah, and Trey, but as a way to understand and better address domestic violence, especially coercive control. The inquest was finalised in 2022. Outside the coroners’ court, Sue and Lloyd Clarke said of the inquest that if just one more life could be saved by this process, it would be worth it (Siganto, 2021). Familicide should not have to be the catalyst for national condemnation of, conversations around and improved policy responses to domestic and family violence. However, such cases do act as flashpoints through which advocates and specialists can better be heard, and through which various social actors can wield news media to tell stories that go beyond individual cases. Attaching discussions of domestic and family violence primarily to individual stories of ‘ideal victims’, and primarily to fatal acts of violence—those that leave no direct survivors—is limiting to our understanding and reinforces hierarchies in responses to violence. As Hunnicutt (2009) says, “a common patriarchal value is the protection of women. Patriarchal ideologies carve out havens of protection for some women but not others” (p. 565). When these 14

See Chap. 2.

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stories do arise, their potency and potential to produce new forms of meaning around domestic and family violence cannot be ignored. Like the murder of Luke Batty, the murder of Hannah, Aaliyah, Trey, and Laianah has left an enduring mark. How their story and the issues to which it speaks are framed can shape and amplify the social impact of these cases. News reporting on the Baxter familicide reveals the growing role of feminist ideas about domestic and family violence in mainstream media (even while these remain highly contested), a move away from more pervasive victim-blaming, and the capacity for more substantive thematic reporting that draws on domestic and family violence researchers, practitioners, and advocates as sources and expands the scope for what is considered ‘domestic violence’. At the same time, the newsworthiness of the case and its treatment in the news was reliant on constructions of ‘ideal victims’ and ‘monstrous’ perpetrators. Thematic reporting focused, therefore, on failures of the ‘system’ to keep ‘evil’ men at bay, reinscribing individualistic understandings of domestic and family violence and distancing abusers from everyday members of society. A binary was present in much reporting on familicide-suicide, between ‘ordinary’ men suffering deep mental illness/distress in the case of civil reputable (Websdale, 2010) offenders, and violent monstrous abusers in cases in which offenders could easily be recognised as livid coercive perpetrators (Websdale, 2010). Such representations assume that violent men are easily distinguishable and create artificial boundaries between experiences of mental illness/distress and gendered power and control.

Later Reporting: A Post-script Reporting on high profile cases, especially those subject to legal action or coronial inquests, can potentially involve waves of later reporting as new information comes to light. Sometimes, with the benefit of more information, more input from domestic and family violence experts, and an opportunity for grieving family and friends to process the events, simplistic interpretations of cases are reconsidered. Fernando Manrique, for instance, was recast in the news during the coronial inquest as a ‘bad dad’, the familicide as an act of selfishness rather than of distress or the assumed ‘burdens’ of raising children with disabilities (Buiten & Coe, 2022). While still problematically reliant on an individualised lens, the deeply ableist lens that characterised earlier reporting was thoroughly challenged by this latter narrative. This short post-script offers a reflection on how reporting on the Baxter familicide emerging during the inquest in 2022 (after the period of the study) recasts aspects of the case in some important ways, notably in relation to the greater complexity with which coercive control was rendered, and the emphasis placed on children’s experiences of domestic abuse. Sadly, cases with a lower profile are seldom subject to this opportunity to revisit earlier assumptions, more information in hand. The default explanations applied in reporting on new cases, therefore, are of central importance to disrupt. That said, there is hope that this later reporting on the Baxter familicide,

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so on the forefront of public images of domestic and family violence, could serve to shape early reporting on other cases in some small way. The coronial inquest into the murders of Hannah Clarke, Aaliyah, Trey, and Laianah was concluded in April 2022. During the inquest, a deep interrogation of the abuse leading up to the murders was submitted to the coroner, with inputs from various experts in the field as well as detailed historical accounts from Hannah’s parents, Sue and Lloyd. This crafted a more robust and layered account of the complexities of domestic abuse, including the diverse ways it can manifest and the challenges faced by survivors in accessing meaningful and effective support and safety options. This aspect of the reporting, less so than changing the themes arising in earlier reporting, added more depth and the opportunity for readers engage with the dynamics of domestic and family violence and the systems that fail to protect victim-survivors. While the monster narrative was not completely disrupted during this period, the texture with which domestic and family violence was rendered dulled some of the over-simplifying tendencies of this narrative and placed Baxter’s most monstrous actions into the context of a wider web of everyday acts of coercive control and the systems that enable them. As a rare example of temporally elongated reporting on a particular case, this opportunity was significant. Perhaps the most notable shift, however, was the way the coronial inquest process revealed uncomfortable details about the experiences of Laianah, Trey, and Aaliyah that challenged the tendency to represent children as passive witnesses to domestic and family violence as seen in earlier reporting. Rather than relying on accounts of ‘happy’ children untouched, until the end, by intimate partner violence, the experiences of children as direct victim-survivors of domestic and family violence—and their agency in the midst of this—were granted greater attention. This was tremendously painful to read. However, it was also incredibly significant in disrupting problematic constructions of children and their relationship to domestic abuse. Readers were told of how Aaliyah sought to resist her father’s abuse of both her and her mother. They were told the details of how Laianah was kidnapped by Rowan Baxter in the weeks preceding the murders, something that would have been incredibly frightening for a young child. They were told of young Trey being subjected to an ice bath as a ‘joke’ at the hands of Baxter, an experience he found terrifying. They were told about the different ways the children responded to the abuse. In concluding this chapter, some extended excerpts are included here. They are examples of how news representations can shift over time, influenced by wider processes beyond the media such as coronial inquests. While not all cases will be so high profile or subject to a comprehensive coronial process, richer reporting is possible, and the voices and agency of victim-survivors can be furnished with greater care. I include these quotes here, importantly, to bring some of these children’s experiences to the fore. Aaliyah: “Six-year-old Aaliyah Clarke feared her father. But despite her youth, she would fight back and scream at the man who would ultimately burn her, her younger siblings and her mother alive. […] ‘She had seen so much that she would stand up to her father. [Baxter] would yell at Hannah and storm out of the house, and she would slam the door behind him and say: “And don’t come back”.’ Suzanne told the coronial inquest. ‘And on days when he

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would sulk and not speak to Hannah, [Aaliyah] would actually say to him: “Daddy, Mummy said sorry, can’t you talk to her?” But she would then be in trouble for coming into adult business. He [Baxter] disliked her out of his three children, because she was strong and would stand up’” (Crockford, 2022). Laianah: “Baxter had been allowed to have the children visit and appeared to have deliberately taken a favourite soft doll from Laianah and kept it despite the child needing it to go to sleep. [When] Hannah rang Baxter to ask for the doll back, he told the child that he needed it to sleep and they never saw it again” (Callinan, 2022). Laianah and Aaliyah: “‘She [Ms Clarke] had Trey on her hip and she was holding Aaliyah’s hand, among skateboards and other things. Rowan was holding Laianah. […] They got to the middle of [the] Street, and he asked to have the children for the night and Hannah said no. And with that he took off back across the main street. [Hannah] raced to the car, threw the kids’ stuff in and then chased after him. Aaliyah was screaming: “Please Daddy, drop her, please Daddy.” Laianah was recovered on [three days later] when police found them in northern NSW, served Baxter with a police protection notice and took Laianah back. But Suzanne Clarke said the memories of the abduction stayed with the children. ‘Aaliyah was angry. Very angry. The whole time she was angry that Laianah had been taken. I think in her little mind she didn’t stop him, she had been begging him to put her down. She was so angry that she was just little fists’ (Crockford, 2022). Trey: “’Rowan held him [in the ice bath] and didn’t just dip his toes, he held him right up to his neck and Trey was frantic. His eyes were bulging in fear […]. [Rowan Baxter] thought that was funny enough to post [on social media]’ (Callinan, 2022).

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Chapter 14

Conclusion: Working with Complexity

The Argument The aim of this book has been twofold: to propose and clarify the concept of genderbased violence as a means through which to understand familicide, and to examine how familicide is represented in the news, including when and how it is rendered an act of gender-based violence. In relation to the first aim, I have sought to illustrate the potential of what Yates (2018) has called a “little g” approach to gender, understanding violence as shaped by gender identity, interaction, and structure (Anderson, 2005, 2009). I have also sought to illustrate how the potential to understand the complex workings of gender and violence is amplified by the use of continuum thinking (Boyle, 2019). When continuum thinking is applied to extant research on familicide, useful typological distinctions can be maintained while recognising it as a form of gender-based domestic and family violence that shares many of the cultural drivers that connect myriad other forms of gendered violence (Kelly 1987, 1988). Boyle says that “continuum thinking is an important way of theorising the interrelationships of gender and violence, but it also demonstrates that not everything is related in the same way and distinctions are important” (p. 32). ‘Civil reputable’ familicide offenders, specifically, embody some significant distinctions from most male perpetrators of coercive control and intimate partner homicide. There are, however, complex interrelationships between types of familicide perpetrators, and between familicide and other forms of domestic and family violence. While familicide-suicide is the focus of this book, filicide is a related form of violence in the family. A gender lens is helpful to understand many different forms of violence, including those that do not appear, on the face of them, ‘gendered’ because of an overreliance on “big G” (Yates, 2018) approaches to gender that treat it as categorical and innate rather than social. As Boyle (2019) says, continuum thinking in relation to gender-based violence takes us beyond a sole focus on who (in terms of sex) targets who, looking at the meanings and contexts of violence beneath the patterns. In so doing, we can “make gendered sense of behaviours which do not © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 D. Buiten, Familicide, Gender and the Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_14

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seem to fit comfortably” (Boyle, 2019, p. 29) on the continuum of violence against women we have become more familiar with. So, too, it is with the issue of filicide, whether maternal or paternal. Through a layered approach to understanding gender-based violence (Anderson, 2005, 2009), we can recognise violence by women, against men, against LGBTQI + persons and against children as gendered, even as we work to address the most prevalent form of gender-based violence, that is male violence against women and children. We can attend to different forms of violence without losing sight of how (different) men and (different) women are disparately positioned in relation to it, and the role of patriarchy as a system of interlocking hierarchies (Hooks, 1984; Hunnicutt, 2009). Continuum thinking enables us to move beyond the artificial binary often constructed between individual mental illness/distress and the social issue of genderbased violence against women and children. A feminist sociological lens on mental illness, I have argued, enables us to appreciate the porousness between (and gendered workings of) personal feelings of distress and structurally produced and supported violence. This lens involves moving away from psychocentrism (Rimke, 2016), which sees mental illness and distress as internal and innate, and towards thinking about the social and structural aetiology of human distress, including when and why it may be mobilised in practices of violence (River & Flood, 2021). In respect to the second aim of this book, I have shown that familicides without a known history of violence or abuse by men who perpetrate them were more likely to confound the public, not as easily read as a gender issue or as an issue connected to the broader scourge of domestic and family violence. Less intelligible as gender-based violence, these cases were first framed as unknowable (and therefore unpreventable) mysteries. In the continued face of no obvious or “speakable” (Guerin, 2017, p. 9) cause, internal, mental causes were attributed as the mainspring of the violence. The mental illness/distress frame was also reliant on intersecting discourses—of white, middle-class, nuclear families, conventionally masculine fathers and idealised mothers, and disability, especially children with a disability as burdens. Since ‘ordinary’, ‘nice’ families were framed as an unexpected site of patriarchal violence, the mental illness/distress of perpetrators became a fall-back explanation. Reliant on essentialised accounts of caring for people with disabilities, and especially raising children with disabilities, as deeply distressing, the lens on violence rotated away from gender and power and a mental illness/distress lens was further rationalised. The representation of people with disability in these cases, in which people with disabilities were often victims, was particularly jarring, and something that needs further work to address. While the mental illness/distress frame was prevalent, I highlighted the fact that ‘talk back’ in the news media generated a more dynamic news environment in which significant feminist counter-narratives were given air and dominant representations were directly challenged from within the mainstream news media itself. Further, while it is problematic that the Miles, Hunt, Manrique and Milne cases were less readily represented as acts of gender-based violence, the reporting around the Baxter familicide showed that the news media in Australia is engaging progressively with

Concluding Remarks

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issues of coercive control, non-physical forms of violence and abuse, and their connection to the murder of women and children. The power of these shifts is, I suggested, undermined somewhat by an overreliance on monster narratives around domestic and family violence, the gendered reification of ‘ideal victims’, and the pitting of issues of mental illness/distress against feminist accounts. In almost all coverage, the voices and experiences of children remain brutally silenced.

Concluding Remarks We need to consider “varieties of patriarchy within a larger field of hierarchy” (Hunnicutt, 2009, p. 553)—hierarchies between children and adults, women and men, ‘undeserving’ and ‘ideal’ victims, people with disabilities and able-bodied people, men who more closely embody hegemonic masculinity and those who struggle to achieve or maintain it. Even the hierarchical privileging of the middle-class nuclear family— against more diversified affective connections and forms of family (Kay, 2020)— operates to convince perpetrators of the impossibility of their lives, children’s lives, and women’s lives outside of it. These everyday hierarchies make familicide possible, just as they make so many more harms on the continuum of violence possible. Media representations of familicide reinforce our blindness to the everydayness, the ‘typical’ nature, of patriarchal gender constructs and their connections to violence. Until their final aberrant acts, civil reputable (Websdale, 2010) familicide perpetrators, in particular, present as non-violent and embrace conventional, seemingly benign gender performances. As such, the capacity for violence is ‘hidden in plain sight’ (Boyle, 2018). For most men, the cultural prescriptions of gender and family do not devolve into violence; too often, however, they do. Patriarchal taxes (Oliffe et al., 2015) claim the emotional and physical lives of far too many men, and far, far too many women and children. While it may be more emotionally and intellectually comfortable to divide monstrous men from benevolent family protectors, this leaves the ‘typical’ that is embedded within the aberrant uninterrogated. Continuum thinking “establish[es] the ways in which ‘typical’ and ‘aberrant’ male behaviour shades into one another […] This demands that we pay attention not only to […] the behaviour itself [but] how it is rendered meaningful for men” (Boyle, 2019, p. 29). Familicide, like other forms of violence committed mostly by men, is a social practice that means something— something that on the superficial face of it may not always seem deviant. Culture makes available justifications for familicide, even if it is the choice of only a small handful of men, and only one amidst the multiplicity of options on the continuum of violence and control. Gender (as it is intersected by a range of other social forces) scaffolds the sense of need and right to control women and children that makes the choice of familicide possible—whether out of revenge and a desire to dominate, or as a way of preserving a particular version of family (in-tact, able-bodied, financially prosperous, unblighted by suicide).

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The aim in highlighting these issues is not to ‘demonise’ or homogenise ‘men’ or ‘the family’ as is often suggested in the gender(-based violence) wars. Indeed, a feminist sociological lens approaches gender with an appreciation of its complexities and malleability. The aim is to implore us to take a peek behind poeticised constructs that surround ‘men’, ‘women’ and ‘the family’—beyond the canola fields, picket fences and French doors, the suits-and-ties, good farming blokes, hand built suburban homes and idealised mothers—to consider the vast and varied continuum of harms (to self and others) that can, and sadly often do, arise from too steadfast an investment in these.

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