Abstract
When three young children—Trey, Aaliyah, and Laianah—and their mother, Hannah Clarke, were killed in 2020 by Rowan Baxter, the children’s father and Hannah’s former partner, discussions about criminalising coercive control in Australia had already been bubbling. While most of the abuse had not involved physical violence, it ended in the most horrific act of violence, underscoring the need to take coercive control seriously as a matter of women’s and children’s safety. Unlike other cases of familicide-suicide, this case became a flashpoint for broader public and media engagement on the scourge of domestic violence. This chapter focuses on reporting in which familicide was represented through a domestic violence lens. It considers what it is that made the Baxter case more intelligible than other familicide cases as gendered domestic and family violence, how victims and perpetrators of domestic and family violence were constructed, and through what lens domestic and family violence (when it was recognised) was viewed in reporting on familicide.
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Notes
- 1.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 6.
- 7.
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.
- 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.
- 9.
This later stage of reporting, in 2019, is captured in Buiten and Coe (2022).
- 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.
- 13.
See also Nelson and Lumby’s (2021) book on the family court in Australia.
- 14.
See Chap. 2.
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Buiten, D. (2022). Framing Domestic and Family Violence. In: Familicide, Gender and the Media. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5626-3_13
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