Pub Date : 2021-04-20DOI: 10.1177/17416590211009275
Denise Buiten, Georgia Coe
Familicide – the killing of a partner and child(ren) – is a rare and complex crime that, when it occurs, receives intense media coverage. However, despite growing scholarly attention to filicide in the news, little research to date has looked at how familicide is represented. Situated at the intersection of filicide, intimate partner homicide and very often suicide, how the knotty and confronting issue of familicide is reported on is telling of the discourses available to understand complex forms of family violence. In this article, we argue that reporting on familicide mirrors broader feminist concerns about the tendency to frame fatal family violence at the hands of men in individualised terms – often as driven by mental illness – at the expense of an accounting of gender and power. Here, we seek to elaborate on and contextualise what we call the mental illness/distress frame as part of the broader tendency towards psychocentrism. This is amplified in cases of familicide where cultural signifiers for the increasingly publicly conceived of issue of ‘domestic violence’ are often not apparent, leading to popularised psychological explanations to be assumed. The mental health/distress frame operates not only to obscure the role of gender and power in domestic and family violence; it obscures the connection between gender, mental distress and violence, naturalising (and gender-neutralising) mental distress and violence as a response to it. We argue that intersecting discourses – of gender, age, disability and the heterosexual nuclear family, for instance – operate in important ways to suggest, support and rationalise this frame. We illustrate these ideas through a detailed case study analysis of news reporting on a case of familicide in Sydney, Australia.
{"title":"Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility: Familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news","authors":"Denise Buiten, Georgia Coe","doi":"10.1177/17416590211009275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211009275","url":null,"abstract":"Familicide – the killing of a partner and child(ren) – is a rare and complex crime that, when it occurs, receives intense media coverage. However, despite growing scholarly attention to filicide in the news, little research to date has looked at how familicide is represented. Situated at the intersection of filicide, intimate partner homicide and very often suicide, how the knotty and confronting issue of familicide is reported on is telling of the discourses available to understand complex forms of family violence. In this article, we argue that reporting on familicide mirrors broader feminist concerns about the tendency to frame fatal family violence at the hands of men in individualised terms – often as driven by mental illness – at the expense of an accounting of gender and power. Here, we seek to elaborate on and contextualise what we call the mental illness/distress frame as part of the broader tendency towards psychocentrism. This is amplified in cases of familicide where cultural signifiers for the increasingly publicly conceived of issue of ‘domestic violence’ are often not apparent, leading to popularised psychological explanations to be assumed. The mental health/distress frame operates not only to obscure the role of gender and power in domestic and family violence; it obscures the connection between gender, mental distress and violence, naturalising (and gender-neutralising) mental distress and violence as a response to it. We argue that intersecting discourses – of gender, age, disability and the heterosexual nuclear family, for instance – operate in important ways to suggest, support and rationalise this frame. We illustrate these ideas through a detailed case study analysis of news reporting on a case of familicide in Sydney, Australia.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"282 - 300"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/17416590211009275","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46841472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-11DOI: 10.1177/17416590211005512
Tua Sandman
This article contends that contemporary writings on the representation of offending women provide a simplified outline of ‘available’ representations. To nuance and further complicate our understanding, this study lays bare the most salient media characterisations of women perpetrators in Swedish press. In contrast to much previous research, it covers various offence types and an extensive period of time (1905–2015) and moves away from the focus on mega-cases and cases of extreme deviance. First, the study illustrates that characterisations are contingent and that there is a greater variety in ‘available’ representations than previous research suggests. The characterisations rather tend to move between and beyond the categories of bad, mad and sad. Second, the study makes visible the narrative continuities (across cases and over time) and analyses the social and cultural work of gendered characterisations. While steering attention to sense-making and the construction of familiarity, the article complicates the assumption that women’s deviance primarily or necessarily is represented as otherness.
{"title":"Familiar felons: Gendered characterisations and narrative tropes in media representations of offending women 1905–2015","authors":"Tua Sandman","doi":"10.1177/17416590211005512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211005512","url":null,"abstract":"This article contends that contemporary writings on the representation of offending women provide a simplified outline of ‘available’ representations. To nuance and further complicate our understanding, this study lays bare the most salient media characterisations of women perpetrators in Swedish press. In contrast to much previous research, it covers various offence types and an extensive period of time (1905–2015) and moves away from the focus on mega-cases and cases of extreme deviance. First, the study illustrates that characterisations are contingent and that there is a greater variety in ‘available’ representations than previous research suggests. The characterisations rather tend to move between and beyond the categories of bad, mad and sad. Second, the study makes visible the narrative continuities (across cases and over time) and analyses the social and cultural work of gendered characterisations. While steering attention to sense-making and the construction of familiarity, the article complicates the assumption that women’s deviance primarily or necessarily is represented as otherness.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"242 - 264"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/17416590211005512","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43998682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-09DOI: 10.1177/17416590211005520
Antony Stephenson
Despite the popularity of Australian television drama and reality series featuring police, there has been a paucity of research into what these programs communicate about real world policing. These ‘cop shows’ are productive forms of public relations for police agencies, particularly the co-produced reality TV variety, and as such are valuable broadcasting and policing commodities. As complex audio-visual texts, cop shows can generate myriad meanings and messages. As cultural objects these programs also rely upon and generate expressions of national identity. Drawing on 25 interviews with policing students and serving and retired police officers, this qualitative research provides insight into how prospective, current and retired police interpret televisual representations of the profession. It was found that interviewees more deeply embedded in the police culture were more cynical of the public relations messages and contested the role of women, while aspirants to the profession were more likely to endorse depictions of a diverse work force. Although interviewees regarded Australian cop shows as reflecting national attributes and cultural context, they reflected on aspects of cop shows produced in other countries to articulate what locally produced cop shows were not.
{"title":"Police as cop show viewers","authors":"Antony Stephenson","doi":"10.1177/17416590211005520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211005520","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the popularity of Australian television drama and reality series featuring police, there has been a paucity of research into what these programs communicate about real world policing. These ‘cop shows’ are productive forms of public relations for police agencies, particularly the co-produced reality TV variety, and as such are valuable broadcasting and policing commodities. As complex audio-visual texts, cop shows can generate myriad meanings and messages. As cultural objects these programs also rely upon and generate expressions of national identity. Drawing on 25 interviews with policing students and serving and retired police officers, this qualitative research provides insight into how prospective, current and retired police interpret televisual representations of the profession. It was found that interviewees more deeply embedded in the police culture were more cynical of the public relations messages and contested the role of women, while aspirants to the profession were more likely to endorse depictions of a diverse work force. Although interviewees regarded Australian cop shows as reflecting national attributes and cultural context, they reflected on aspects of cop shows produced in other countries to articulate what locally produced cop shows were not.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"265 - 281"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/17416590211005520","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42230357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-24DOI: 10.1177/17416590211005926
Marnie Ritchie
{"title":"Book Review: Brendan McQuade, Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision","authors":"Marnie Ritchie","doi":"10.1177/17416590211005926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211005926","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"150 - 152"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/17416590211005926","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47195344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-23DOI: 10.1177/17416590211004664
E. Campbell
10 Rillington Place names the site of temporally extensive practices of murder (1943–1953), and offers an empirical entry point for critically advancing the conceptual innovations of relational approaches to the criminological study of ‘home’. In so doing, the paper, firstly, (re)conceptualises serial homicide as practice, more specifically as a mode of domestic labour which materialises in and is enacted through the relational dynamics of everyday residential life; and secondly, rejects the notion of ‘home’ and argues for the concept of dwelling to better capture the active, generative and fluid dynamics of domestic life. This subtle shift in conceptual approach acknowledges how domus horribilis is etched from, and woven through the topological entanglements of everyday and extreme practices, and moves us toward an alternative set of conceptual commitments in our research of domestic space. Drawing from a mixed portfolio of cultural media (including archival, epistolary, journalistic, photographic, filmic, architectural, museological and dramaturgical data), the paper takes forward Schatzki’s site ontology as an organising framework for practice-based analytics, and advances the critical insights of an embryonic criminology of the domestic.
{"title":"Extreme dwelling: Assembling domus horribilis","authors":"E. Campbell","doi":"10.1177/17416590211004664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211004664","url":null,"abstract":"10 Rillington Place names the site of temporally extensive practices of murder (1943–1953), and offers an empirical entry point for critically advancing the conceptual innovations of relational approaches to the criminological study of ‘home’. In so doing, the paper, firstly, (re)conceptualises serial homicide as practice, more specifically as a mode of domestic labour which materialises in and is enacted through the relational dynamics of everyday residential life; and secondly, rejects the notion of ‘home’ and argues for the concept of dwelling to better capture the active, generative and fluid dynamics of domestic life. This subtle shift in conceptual approach acknowledges how domus horribilis is etched from, and woven through the topological entanglements of everyday and extreme practices, and moves us toward an alternative set of conceptual commitments in our research of domestic space. Drawing from a mixed portfolio of cultural media (including archival, epistolary, journalistic, photographic, filmic, architectural, museological and dramaturgical data), the paper takes forward Schatzki’s site ontology as an organising framework for practice-based analytics, and advances the critical insights of an embryonic criminology of the domestic.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"163 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/17416590211004664","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45541014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-18DOI: 10.1177/17416590211002246
Jessica C Oldfield, D. McDonald
In the wake of movements such as #MeToo, greater scrutiny has been brought to bear on the everyday nature of sexual violence. This has manifested in a global phenomenon of survivors speaking out publicly across a diverse range of platforms. This article explores one such Australian case that went on to become highly publicised against the backdrop of #MeToo. In May 2013, an 18-year-old woman named Saxon Mullins met 21-year-old Luke Lazarus on the dancefloor of a nightclub in the inner Sydney suburb of Kings Cross. Lazarus claimed he was the part-owner of the club and offered to take her to a VIP area. Instead, he led her to a dark alley and had sexual intercourse with her. Mullins has always described this as non-consensual. In 2018, after a complex legal process comprising two trials, both of which were overturned in response to successful appeals, the New South Wales Court of Appeal ordered against a third trial on the basis that it would be oppressive and unfair to Lazarus. In response, following widespread media interest in the case, Mullins spoke out publicly in 2018 on a national current affairs program, Four Corners. While the sidelining of victims from formal criminal justice processes has been widely documented, we explore how this can also occur in media coverage accompanying a case. Identifying a shift in the status afforded to the victim in the wake of her speaking out publicly, we argue that this raises broad questions about the impact of victim anonymity provisions and highlights how a survivor’s capacity to speak out in the wake of institutional failures is highly contingent. A tension between the tangible value of anonymity, set against the perverse effect of once again silencing victims, is a dilemma that remains unresolved.
{"title":"‘I Am That Girl’: Media reportage, anonymous victims and symbolic annihilation in the aftermath of sexual assault","authors":"Jessica C Oldfield, D. McDonald","doi":"10.1177/17416590211002246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211002246","url":null,"abstract":"In the wake of movements such as #MeToo, greater scrutiny has been brought to bear on the everyday nature of sexual violence. This has manifested in a global phenomenon of survivors speaking out publicly across a diverse range of platforms. This article explores one such Australian case that went on to become highly publicised against the backdrop of #MeToo. In May 2013, an 18-year-old woman named Saxon Mullins met 21-year-old Luke Lazarus on the dancefloor of a nightclub in the inner Sydney suburb of Kings Cross. Lazarus claimed he was the part-owner of the club and offered to take her to a VIP area. Instead, he led her to a dark alley and had sexual intercourse with her. Mullins has always described this as non-consensual. In 2018, after a complex legal process comprising two trials, both of which were overturned in response to successful appeals, the New South Wales Court of Appeal ordered against a third trial on the basis that it would be oppressive and unfair to Lazarus. In response, following widespread media interest in the case, Mullins spoke out publicly in 2018 on a national current affairs program, Four Corners. While the sidelining of victims from formal criminal justice processes has been widely documented, we explore how this can also occur in media coverage accompanying a case. Identifying a shift in the status afforded to the victim in the wake of her speaking out publicly, we argue that this raises broad questions about the impact of victim anonymity provisions and highlights how a survivor’s capacity to speak out in the wake of institutional failures is highly contingent. A tension between the tangible value of anonymity, set against the perverse effect of once again silencing victims, is a dilemma that remains unresolved.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"223 - 241"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/17416590211002246","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49009792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-10DOI: 10.1177/17416590211000388
Jackie Hogan
The rape law reform movement in the U.S. has made significant progress since the 1970s. All fifty U.S. states and the District of Columbia have now made changes to their rape statutes. Nonetheless, the incidence of reported rape has increased substantially since the 1970s, and rape conviction rates have remained frustratingly low. Such statistical evidence suggests that amending legal statutes has not proven sufficient to curb endemic sexual violence in the U.S. Effective prevention requires a deeper understanding of rape culture, the conglomeration of discourses, ideologies, and practices that normalize sexual assault. Of particular interest here are mass mediated representations of rape, and their power to authorize or critique sexual violence, its root causes, and its consequences. This paper interrogates and seeks to disrupt rape culture by critically analyzing three media texts with narratives based on real-world cases of sexual violence and secondary victimization, the films Anatomy of a Murder, 1959 and The Accused, 1988 and the Netflix miniseries Unbelievable, 2019. With roughly thirty years between these texts, they provide snapshots of shifting attitudes and practices around sexual violence and secondary victimization in the U.S., from the pre-reform era to the #MeToo era. The analysis reveals some heartening changes but also some disturbing continuities in the real-world ideas and practices that media texts reflect and amplify.
{"title":"Anatomy of a rape: Sexual violence and secondary victimization scripts in U.S. film and television, 1959–2019","authors":"Jackie Hogan","doi":"10.1177/17416590211000388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211000388","url":null,"abstract":"The rape law reform movement in the U.S. has made significant progress since the 1970s. All fifty U.S. states and the District of Columbia have now made changes to their rape statutes. Nonetheless, the incidence of reported rape has increased substantially since the 1970s, and rape conviction rates have remained frustratingly low. Such statistical evidence suggests that amending legal statutes has not proven sufficient to curb endemic sexual violence in the U.S. Effective prevention requires a deeper understanding of rape culture, the conglomeration of discourses, ideologies, and practices that normalize sexual assault. Of particular interest here are mass mediated representations of rape, and their power to authorize or critique sexual violence, its root causes, and its consequences. This paper interrogates and seeks to disrupt rape culture by critically analyzing three media texts with narratives based on real-world cases of sexual violence and secondary victimization, the films Anatomy of a Murder, 1959 and The Accused, 1988 and the Netflix miniseries Unbelievable, 2019. With roughly thirty years between these texts, they provide snapshots of shifting attitudes and practices around sexual violence and secondary victimization in the U.S., from the pre-reform era to the #MeToo era. The analysis reveals some heartening changes but also some disturbing continuities in the real-world ideas and practices that media texts reflect and amplify.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"203 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/17416590211000388","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43889267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1741659019889300
G. Maglione
{"title":"Film review: Lars von Trier (dir.) The House That Jack Built","authors":"G. Maglione","doi":"10.1177/1741659019889300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659019889300","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"5 1","pages":"153 - 156"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81532526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1741659019890429
A. Young
{"title":"Book review: Katherine Biber, In Crime’s Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Evidence","authors":"A. Young","doi":"10.1177/1741659019890429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659019890429","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"17 1","pages":"145 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1741659019890429","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41430833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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