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

Abstract

How can journalism about parents killing their children improve public understanding of the factors influencing these filicide perpetrators? Three Australian cases occurring between 2010 and 2016 focus this question on stepfathers and foster fathers; a group recognised by international filicide research as of high risk for filicide. I consider questions of gender and masculine subjectivity in relation to Australian media coverage of filicide that involves these father figures so that a ‘disempowered man’, a figure introduced in previous work by Little and Tyson, is seen at the centre of journalism about filicide. The purpose of this study is to highlight the need to differentiate between this representational subject as an ideological construct of journalism about lethal family violence, and the perpetrators’ more fragmented and complex lives and social circumstances. It asks how the presence of a ‘disempowered man’ in media representation of filicide signals wider assumptions about appropriate gender role performance that need to be more fully accounted for and addressed as part of improving public understanding of the crime.

Keywords

Australian media filicide gender relations interpretive community journalism storytelling

Introduction

Given Australia’s relatively high rate of parents killing children, journalism’s ‘public mandate’ (Carlson, 2017) to explain filicide is a timely consideration (Brown et al., 2018; Pritchard et al., 2013). There are about 20 filicide cases recorded in Australia every year (Little and Tyson, 2017: 2), and mothers are shown to perpetrate filicide more frequently than fathers, unless stepfathers are included in the figures. When they are, men are shown to kill children in their care more often than women (Brown et al., 2018: 151). This ‘stepfather’ effect is noted by filicide research findings that name gender as a little understood but important factor in filicide (Eriksson et al., 2016; Kirkwood, 2012). To account for journalism’s role in falling into and at times revealing this gender-blind spot, I read Australian journalism about filicide from the cultural practice and storytelling perspectives (Bird and Dardenne, 2009: 208; Zelizer, 1993, 2017). My working assumptions are that journalism is always interconnected with other cultural representations, and journalists are also interpellated by the processes that form individual identities and social groups. Interpellation is Louis Althusser’s notion that every individual is ‘hailed’ by a particular ideological routine, construes their identity through it and does so unwittingly (Althusser, 2001 [1971]: 117). An ‘interpellative community’ is then always operating when the journalistic interpretive community publishes explanations of difficult social justice issues such as family violence and its various forms. This observation matters when we try to address gender and its influence on filicide because any ‘gender identity is constructed through a gender order, in which gender is not only a property of individuals but a process of institutions and a dynamic of power between groups’ (Kimmel, 2010: 23). As in comparable societies, this power dynamic has its historic and contemporary Australian expressions in what Michael Kimmel (2010) identifies as the public and domestic spheres of patriarchy sustained by ‘the threat, implicit or explicit, of violence’ (p. 23). How this power dynamic actually translates into the statistically higher rate of paternal filicide in Australia compared with other countries is yet to be explained. Filicide researchers note that very little is known about the sociocultural factors, including gender, that influence perpetrators. It is known that the risk of filicide is higher when the perpetrator is a stepfather or foster father. Journalism works with these conditions when it writes filicide into the longer Australian story of family violence and social justice. In this situation, journalism contributes to, and has the capacity to intervene in sociocultural factors influencing filicide. Qualitative accounts of how journalism operates in information-rich cases can assist with the development of finer interpretive practices in journalism that attempts to explain filicide to the public (Carlson, 2017; Zelizer, 2017).

A stepfather/foster father is identified as a ‘disempowered man’ in stories that also position these father figures alongside state institutions that are perceived to have failed child victims. This ‘disempowered man’ was suggested initially in a recent study of filicide in Australian media and culture published elsewhere (Little and Tyson, 2017). As a masculine subject, it is imbued with meaning because masculinity and femininity are co-constructed in representation in ways specific to place and culture (Lazar, 2005: 143). Reading the ‘disempowered man’ as a subject interpellated to reaffirm Australia’s particular versions of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995) through journalism about filicide is an extension of the interpretive community approach to journalism. It provides scope for both journalists and researchers to increase awareness of how filicide stories reflect wider cultural anxieties around gender and parental roles that are stirred by child murder (Wardle, 2006: 528).

Rationale

Cultural representations of fathers and father figures (step/foster fathers) who commit filicide include journalism as a practice that must be involved in developing knowledge of filicide and its prevention. Instances of ‘stepfathers acting alone or jointly with mothers’ are recognised as significant in Australian filicide numbers when compared with other countries (Brown et al., 2018: 162). Yet journalism about filicide is not often considered as itself a cultural factor that influences public perception of the crime. The influence of gender on filicide and stories told about filicide in Australia is also an underexamined phenomenon. Given this gap in knowledge, exploring how journalism interprets gender relations to its communities is part of challenging unhelpful assumptions about perpetrators and their social circumstances (Willnat et al., 2013; Zelizer, 1993, 2017).

Filicide research recommends a direct focus on perpetrators in scholarship seeking clarification of gender and cultural conditions affecting violence against children (Dobash and Dobash, 2018: 81–82; Kirkwood, 2012; McKenzie et al., 2016). This recommendation informs my reference to the stepfather/foster father figure as a masculine subject appearing consistently in Australian journalism about filicide. I argue that this masculine subject exists for an interpellative community that includes journalists but not only journalistic representations of symbolic masculinity (White, 1994: 120). Interpellation describes how ideology constructs subjects and, according to Althusser, how subjects constitute ideology. It ‘draws journalists into ideological structures’ (Matheson, 2005: 6) that privilege fatherhood as a masculine ideal and through which a ‘popularized paternal identity’ is affirmed (Lazar, 2005: 139).¹ In the three cases discussed in this article, these gendered subjects affect journalism’s ‘public mandate’ (Carlson, 2017) to deal with social injustice when news reports describe child killings as ‘inexplicable tragedies’ (Brown et al., 2017: vii). The following section suggests a theoretical method of improving journalism’s engagement with filicide as a complex crime.

Methodology

I deploy a qualitative textual analysis (Barnett, 2016: 5) extending from semiotics, one of the five strains of media research described by Nick Couldry (2010) and ‘developed in the context of European structuralism and poststructuralism’ (pp. 35–36). Following Barnett’s (2016) study of infanticide and journalism, a qualitative method is selected because it centres on the workings of language and power in the public deliberation of social problems. My theoretical approach is consistent with Barbie Zelizer’s (2017) observation of the merits of drawing from literary and cultural theory to develop the ‘interpretive community’ theory of reading journalism, and follows that line (p. 152). I do so by viewing the perpetrator–subject, constructed in filicide stories, from the Althusserian perspective of the subject as an ideological formation, recognising, too, that subjectivity is neither fixed nor stable. Rather than applying the media practice method that Couldry (2010) advocates to ‘decentre the media text’ (p. 37), I focus on text in the filicide story that is a journalistic model. It ‘links individual actions and “other” discourses, as well as their interpretations, with the social order’ (Van Dijk, 1993: 258). For this reason, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to the stories told about filicide perpetrators is appropriate.

CDA is defined as ‘fundamentally concerned with analysing opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language’ (Wodak, 2001: 2). It is analytically appropriate for newspaper articles about the three filicide cases because of its emphasis on the way power is exercised and resisted in social relations, and how texts about such relations represent the people and processes involved (Fairclough, 2010; Matheson, 2005). CDA’s analytical emphasis is on critical engagement with language and relational contexts rather than on content without ‘including aspects of linguistic form and style’ (Fairclough 2010: 56). It assists with locating the filicide perpetrators as gendered subjects in stories of violent crimes against children, and with reading those subjects in a more complicated matrix of private/public relational power (Van Dijk, 1993: 252). CDA shares its emphasis on culturally constructed meaning with the storytelling practice approach to journalism (Berkowitz and Liu, 2014; Bird and Dardenne, 2009; Zelizer, 2017). A reading of what stories that journalists write about filicide do with perpetrator representation, in working contexts where ‘subjectivities, histories and cultures are not only split along the lines of gender, but fractured across multiple differences’ (Thornham, 2000: 197), is therefore appropriate. It directs my selection of a purposive sample of newspaper texts for a theory-based method aiming to develop work on filicide in Australian media and culture published elsewhere (Little, 2015; Little and Tyson, 2017). Purposive sampling involves selection of information-rich cases that illustrate a particular issue or event (Patton, 2002: 230). I concentrate on newspapers for their ‘critical role, as they often set the agenda for television and other mass media outlets’ (Davies et al., 2017: 755; Hove et al., 2013: 106). The theory-based sampling method is used to select texts that suggest patterned assumptions about gender role performance that invoke the ‘disempowered man’. In theory-based sampling, texts from a larger collection are selected for their illustration of important theoretical principles (Patton, 2002: 238). The selected texts can be seen to reflect a continuous sense of the complexity of Australian filicide that becomes more visible when narratives about the criminal prosecution of perpetrators continue over time.

Literature review

When homicidal fathers face criminal prosecution, mental illness and family violence are the most frequently used Australian media ‘frames’ for negotiating filicide’s disturbing reality (Kitzinger, 2007: 135). Yet Australia’s National Homicide Project analysis of interviews with filicide perpetrators found that there is still a ‘disproportionate focus on the psychiatric status of perpetrators’ at the expense of sociocultural considerations (Eriksson et al., 2016). That project also identified an ‘almost exclusive focus on maternal filicide’ by Australian researchers despite higher instances of men killing children (Eriksson et al., 2016: 18). At the same time, Australian media’s coverage of maternal filicide reflects a ‘Medea-tizing’² of homicidal mothers as mad/abnormal while they also co-construct particular versions of masculinity. These constructions of homicidal mothers rely on the accompanying representations of men and masculinity (Kimmel, 2010: 23) in what Judith Butler (1988) describes as the ‘performative accomplishment’ of gender (p. 520). Australian journalists have not been able to describe one’s deviant behaviour without implying it for the other, as the Smith and Torney case analysis in the next section shows. The ‘appearance of substance’ of the mother and stepfather perpetrator identities is relational and constructed specifically in Australian journalism that calls for critical attention to its ‘social temporality’ (Butler, 1988: 520). In the 2010–2016 timeframe of the three cases, only the male perpetrators and accused perpetrators are positioned in media coverage alongside state institutions responsible for child protection. Standing the perpetrators alongside these agencies deflects attention from structural conditions onto an individual’s formal crimes and, following Butler (1988: 522), the informal consequences of not getting their gender right. In this textual/cultural dynamic, ‘violence is viewed as one of the many possible behaviour patterns for men’ and ‘masculine violence is articulated, glorified, even fetishized’ (Jewkes, 2015: 109, 133).

Kirkwood (2012) finds ‘significant difficulties with the way in which mental illness is identified in filicide perpetrators’, associating it with ‘a failure to recognise societal factors that are more important’ (pp. 30–31). Kirkwood (2012) and Eriksson et al. (2016) note that fathers’ reasons for murdering their children are not the same as those of mothers but share complexities of gender that need further attention. Wilczynski (1997) finds stereotypes of male perpetrators as ‘bad and normal’ and women as ‘mad and abnormal’ reflected in the case narratives and outcomes for filicide perpetrators prosecuted through British courts (p. 419). British research evidence also indicates that stepfathers with histories of violence are the most dangerous to children, with a 2013 study finding that they killed 740 times than other men of the same age (Pritchard et al., 2013: 1423). An earlier American study notes that stepchildren are more vulnerable to lethal violence from stepparents than are those parents’ biological children (Barth and Hodorwicz, 2011: 90). In Australia, stepfather involvement in children’s deaths is recognised as enacting the man’s frustration with the parental role created by his relationship with the mother (Brown et al., 2014: 84). With foster children killed while in state care, institutional failure is aligned in media representation with masculine gender role failure when filicide is represented as a crime about certain individuals who should have been monitored more carefully. Relatedly, Australian filicide research has found that stepfathers ‘may be less able to cope with the demands of parenthood’ (Brown et al., 2014: 84). Robert Smith’s case illustrates how those demands were revealed as having led Smith to participate in his stepdaughter Keisha Weippart’s murder by her mother (Bibby and Davis, 2013). The next section illustrates how journalism about their crimes invokes a ‘disempowered man’ who attempts (but does not succeed at) specifically Australian masculinity. This is a masculine individual and group identity forged as a ‘celebrated culture of silence and emotional repression’ (Pease, 2001: 195). Smith’s case reveals how filicide’s gendered complexity is readable in journalism in places where ‘men’s violence [is] a prime site where patriarchal relations are generated and preferred’ (Pease and Pringle, 2001: 1).

Case selection

I chose Robert Smith, Rick Thorburn and John Torney for this study because they are father figures/stepfathers involved in Australian filicide cases that attracted heavy media attention. Father figures/stepfathers have not been the focus of much research attention as ‘neither Australian nor overseas research has focused strongly on stepfathers, despite their disproportionate representation, but this is changing’ (Brown et al., 2018: 151). The media portrayals of Robert Smith and John Torney, the stepfathers who did not kill but were involved in the killing of children, bring a better critical focus onto the gender ideological factors at work in journalism about their criminal prosecution. Smith and Torney were tried on homicide charges involving girls aged 2 and 12, respectively. A third case involving Queensland man Richard Thorburn and his 2018 life prison sentence for murdering his 12-year-old foster daughter Tiahleigh Palmer (Horn et al., 2018) contrasts one form of disempowerment (for the ‘disempowered man’ as an interpellative effect) with another also inflected by stereotypical gender role assumptions. With Thorburn, the masculinity of the father who killed his foster daughter to conceal her sexual abuse by his son is problematised by the same protective/provider construction that defines it. Placed alongside the figures of Robert Smith and John Torney that of Thorburn contrasts stereotypically violent and aggressive masculinity with a passive and submissive form that is (equally stereotypically) normalised as feminine. The contrast enables a language-focused reading of ways that gender ideological constructions of parenthood inflect media coverage of filicide through a 7-year period that includes a major national policy initiative to address family violence.

Robert Smith was found guilty of manslaughter and of being an accessory to his partner Kristi Abrahams’ 2010 murder of her 6-year-old daughter Keisha. John Torney was acquitted in 2016 of the murder of his girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter Nikki Francis-Coslovich a year before. Richard Thorburn decided against going to trial and in May 2018 pleaded guilty to murder. A transcript from Smith’s court hearing and conviction on an accessory to murder charge is also included in my reading of the way that Keisha Abrahams’ murder was interpreted as the consequence of a ‘disempowered man’s’ failure to perform as a father figure. Reading the legal and media texts in juxtaposition shows how journalism translates legal narrative into public discussions of the difficult social problems of child abuse and protection (Walsh, 2017). Through comparison of the three cases, the gender ideological constructions of individual and state responsibility for children are narrativised through a theme of collective community ‘ownership’ of children.

Analysis of the filicide cases

Robert Smith/Kiesha Weippeart (Abrahams)

Kiesha Weippeart was reported missing from her home in Mount Druitt, on the low socio-economic fringe of Sydney, on 1 August 2010. Her mother Kristi Abrahams, 28, and stepfather Robert Smith, 31, made media appeals for information about Kiesha’s whereabouts. Smith took on the role of public spokesman for the family, as police searched in vain for Kiesha in the months before the couple’s arrest on 11 April 2010. Three years later, Smith started a 16-year jail sentence with a 12-year minimum for manslaughter and accessory to murder after admitting to watching Abrahams’ fatal assault of Kiesha, who died in her bed overnight on 13 July. He confessed to packing the 6-year-old girl’s body into a suitcase before dumping it into a bush grave, setting fire to and then burying it (Bibby and Davis, 2013). After she confessed to murdering Kiesha, Abrahams was sentenced to 22 years jail with a 16-year minimum to be served.

Robert Smith is described by investigating police in media interviews as submissive in his relationship with Abrahams, quiet and compliant alongside Abrahams’ ‘dominant and aggressive’ personality (Bibby and Davis, 2013). Historical gender stereotyping has associated quiet submissiveness with an appropriate ‘femininity’ (Barnett, 2016) that conveys meaning in language through its opposition to the ‘masculine’ assumptions of domination and aggression. Smith, the ‘quiet fellow who barely says “boo”’ (Howden, 2011) argued at his sentence appeal that Abrahams physically abused him, making him too scared of her to intervene to save Kiesha.³ Rejecting Smith’s appeal, the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal said Smith’s ‘active and purposeful participation’ in covering up Kiesha’s murder was not ‘spontaneous or ill-considered or carried out in a panic’³ but a 9-month plan where he had ‘play[ed] the role of the distraught parent’⁴ to police and journalists. The decision shows how Smith’s fatherly role-playing for journalists who wrote about the case was an essential aspect of the court’s finding of his criminal culpability for negligent manslaughter (Bibby, 2013b). Smith had also told police that he felt ‘trapped’ as he tried to wake Kiesha after Abrahams had knocked her unconscious, and wondered ‘how the f … can this shit happen to me? I must have the worst luck’ (Hills, 2013). This representation of Smith’s sense of disempowerment as he chose loyalty to Kristi Abrahams over acting to save Kiesha are crucial for journalism that seeks to reconcile Kiesha’s ongoing abuse by Abrahams with hegemonic constructions of motherhood. It connects this particular filicide case, where the child’s mother killed her daughter, to other cultural representations of men experiencing disempowerment as ‘masculinity is never the undivided, seamless construction it becomes in its symbolic manifestation’ (White, 1994: 120, citing Segal 1990: 102). Smith’s perception of himself as a passive victim of circumstances belies the provider and ‘family man’ social status associated with ideas about fatherhood in Australia (Russell, 1978; White, 1994: 123).

Smith’s presence as a quiet but willing accomplice in Keisha’s murder is central to my application of Althusser’s view of individual subjects as aggregations of ideas gathering around certain actions to interpellate what appears to be fixed identity. Reading journalism about the case develops understanding about why journalists turn to problematic masculine identity to explain filicide, even when the men involved in the crimes have not themselves killed the children. Smith is the not-real dad (the subject) who fails in his gender performance by not saving the child (actions) who signifies, for the community interpreting the story, appropriate family relations (ideas). He is the ‘disempowered man’ around whom journalism draws an interpellative community of parents and commentators who explain the child’s death through normative gender role assumptions. For example, in the representation of Smith’s passive step-fatherhood, the domain assumption about Australian men holding authoritative and protective roles in families also classifies Kristi Abraham as a monstrous mother who outdoes Smith in performing masculinity. While Smith is the weak accomplice to murder, Abrahams is the mother who is ‘easy to hate’ (The Northern Daily Leader, 2013). Both form as representational subjects who compel the community to claim ownership of Kiesha as a ‘little angel’ let down by the state (Howden, 2011; Thomas, 2013). News stories about her murder note that Keisha had 3 years earlier told child protection workers of the abuse she had suffered for much of her short life (Bibby and Davis, 2013; Sixty Minutes Australia, 2013). Her case is therefore absorbed into the longer Australian filicide narrative that now claims Keisha as a ‘lost child’ who reflects extensive cultural anxieties around parenthood and family (Campbell, 2002). When ‘our’ family values are contrasted with the difficult sociocultural conditions of Mount Druitt (Bell, 2011; Bibby, 2013a; Devine, 2013), the constructed masculine subject places attention on individual failures more than structural conditions. Even when failures in a state’s foster childcare system are the focus of journalism about filicide, the foster father’s disempowerment in his ‘deeply divided’ family (Schliebs, 2016) becomes a key explanatory motif.

Rick Thorburn/Tiahleigh Palmer

In the Tiahleigh (Tia) Palmer filicide case, media coverage connected failures in Brisbane’s foster parenting programme to the placement of the 12-year-old in a dangerous family environment. Nearly a year after he acted as a pall bearer at her 2015 funeral, Tia’s foster father Richard (Rick) Thorburn was charged with murder and interfering with a corpse after Tia’s body was found by fishermen beside a Gold Coast river in November 2015 (Levy, 2016). In March 2018, Thorburn, 58, announced that he would plead guilty to both charges, after initially pleading not guilty (Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 2018). Thorburn’s wife Julene, 55, and son, Joshua, 21, pleaded guilty in November 2017 to charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice and perjury, receiving 18- and 15-month jail terms.⁵ Trent Thorburn, 19, pleaded guilty to incest with Tia in the days before his father murdered her on 29 October 2015, to cover up his son’s crime. He also pleaded guilty to two perjury charges and a count of attempting to pervert the course of justice and was sentenced to 4 years in jail with a 16-month minimum.

Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper coverage of the case turned to the deficiencies in official procedures that placed the murder victim in the home of a perpetrator who had ‘claimed to have killed someone previously’ and whose son’s ‘legitimate fear of his father’ had led ‘the young man to lie to authorities about the schoolgirl’s disappearance’ (Schliebs, 2017). Tia Palmer’s murder compelled Queensland’s State Government to conduct a review of programmes for managing children in foster care, when it was found that ‘many children didn’t even know their disgraceful treatment was wrong’ (Marszalek and Vogler, 2017). The 137 recommendations of the review include checking foster carer histories of domestic violence and conducting interviews with foster children placed previously in the foster homes proposed for other children. The same Courier-Mail story reports that child harm in foster care had become more prevalent in 2015–2016, with 163 children reported as ‘emotionally, physically or sexually harmed or neglected’, compared with 144 and 137 in the two previous years. These deficiencies of the state’s processes for protecting children by regulating foster parenting and monitoring family dynamics are mediated into public narrative through the normative assumptions of collective community responsibility for children on which journalists draw.

Journalism’s role as the conduit for those assumptions had been affirmed by that narrative in the unsolved 1997 Jayden Leskie murder case. When the 13-month-old’s body was found at a lake outside the regional Victorian town of Moe in January 1998, his stepfather Greg Domaszewicz was charged and tried for murder, but was found not guilty. Melissa Campbell (2002) argues that in the Leskie media coverage, and that of comparable cases, ‘community parenthood ideology erases signifiers of class in the children concerned’ so that their social recognition as ‘like us’ sustains attempts by the media to explain the crime (p. 117). News coverage of Rick Thorburn as the filicide perpetrator provides an opportunity to see journalism as at times deconstructive of cultural myth and ritual around both ideal and perverse notions of masculine behaviour. For instance, community responsibility appears in journalism’s attempts to interpret paternal filicide to the public as the act of a ‘mad man’ who should have been monitored more carefully (Little, 2015). Yet this interpretation does not resolve Thorburn’s perversion of the foster/father role. Thorburn’s motivation for killing his foster daughter, then dumping her body and concealing the incidents leading up to Tia’s murder, is illustrated in media coverage as one borne out of a protective impulse towards his biological sons. Brisbane’s Courier Mail tells how police lay murder charges against Thorburn when it was discovered that he acted to conceal his son Trent’s sexual involvement with his foster daughter (Stolz and McKay, 2016). A day later, the newspaper ran stories about Thorburn’s arrest and charging of his wife and two sons with offences relating to his concealment of Tia’s murder, occurring on ‘just like any other morning for the Thorburn family’ (McKay, 2016). While police told the newspaper that ‘the local police station had been flooded with support’ from the public, another story on the same day refers to the ‘ex-truckie’s heavy load’ as he swore his family to silence and ‘began looking for other children to fill his house’ (Kyriacou, 2016). Almost a year later, District Court Judge Chowdhury, sentencing Trent Thorburn after he pleaded guilty to incest, perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice, said the 20-year-old had participated in ‘a sustained, immoral and disgraceful plan’ with other family members to cover up Tiahleigh’s death (Silva and Field, 2017). At the sentencing of Joshua Thorburn, 21, Judge Chowdhury told Thorburn he accepted that ‘you are fearful, legitimately, of your father, and in no small part from your sudden awareness of what he is actually capable of, as well as statements he made about killing someone else’ (Schliebs, 2017).

Newspaper reports tell how Thorburn’s biological sons were fearful of their father, and of the weight given to this evidence by the Thorburn brothers’ sentencing judge. The stories depict Thorburn’s authoritarian behaviour as a perversion of the father-protector role. His violent history and aggression are mentioned in stories that attempt an explanation for his murder of Tialeigh. Yet these can be read as also deconstructing notions of violent masculinity as normal, or socially acceptable, as its private enactments as family violence lead to Thorburn committing, and admitting publicly to, murder. The explanatory efforts by journalists also reflect wider assumptions about community responsibility for child protection in their translations of the criminal prosecution of Thorburn’s family to the public. Similar patterns recur in journalism around the third case, involving Victorian man John Torney and his 2-year-old stepdaughter.

John Torney/Nikki Francis-Coslovich

Medical reports showing that Nikki Francis-Coslovich, 2, was beaten to death at her home in the northwest Victorian town of Mildura in August 2015, did not lead to a murder conviction for her stepfather, John Torney, nor any criminal charges against her mother Peta-Anne Francis. Torney, then 32, was acquitted of murdering the toddler but admitted to hiding her body in the roof cavity of the family home and accused Francis of killing her daughter (Le, 2016). After his acquittal, Torney told the media that, ‘for the record, I think I am a low, inconsiderate person’ (Murphy, 2017). Consistent with representations of Rick Thorburn and Robert Smith, Torney assumes the role of a panicked and ‘disempowered man’ who told journalists that he acted to conceal another family member’s crime (Murphy, 2017). His subjectivity contrasts with that of Thorburn but compares usefully with that of Smith by forensic texture when news media and legal narratives intersect. The trial jury, as primary fact-finder in this filicide story (with news the secondary fact-finder) concluded that Torney was not guilty of killing Nikki. After the trial verdict, Torney’s self-abasing comments to journalists work in the developed story to maintain the ‘disempowered man’ as a subject unable to enact an appropriate masculine identity. Torney recognises himself, in comments to journalists, as unable to fulfil a stepfather role. In media coverage, he is ‘hailed’ by his own criminal past, but also by the pasts of the ‘mad/bad men’ who represent paternal filicide in Australia. In Torney’s home state, Victoria, the past decade before Torney’s case includes heavily reported crimes such as the Farquharshon Fathers’ Day murders (2005, father convicted 2010), the Freeman murder (2009) and the Luke Batty murder (2014).

Yet the gender ideological processes that enable journalism’s attempts to explain Nikki Francis-Coslovich’s violent death are more complicated than this representation of the perpetrator as a ‘disempowered man’, in two ways. First, construction of Torney’s disempowerment relies on legal and news discourses that construct Nikki’s mother, Peta-Ann Francis, as a liar (The Age, 2016) with a history of hitting her daughter (Sparkes, 2016). Torney’s weakness in the stepfather role he assumed via his relationship with Francis is significant to journalism’s longer storytelling of filicide and its navigation of masculine–feminine gender relations. Torney is in effect conflated with Robert Smith, whose passive failure to stop Kristi Abrahams’ murder of her daughter, 5 years before Nikki Francis-Coslovich died, was important to interpreting the crime to the public. However, Torney’s prior criminal history develops the filicide story through this 2016 case, as it comes to determine his masculine subjectivity as the main problem.

This ‘disempowered man’ as the main problem marks the second way in which journalistic interpretation of the crime relies on a hegemonic form of Australian masculinity characterised by silence and unexpressed emotion (Pease 2001: 195). Victoria’s criminal justice system prohibits material facts relating to an accused’s history from presentation during trial. Despite this and Torney’s acquittal, the story of Nikki’s fatal beating links Torney’s violent past to the poor moral judgement he demonstrated in his de facto relationship with Nikki’s mother, and connects both to state institutions that failed to take decisive action. Torney tells a television news reporter that while he did not kill his stepdaughter, he was ‘deeply ashamed of placing Nikki’s body in the ceiling’ after concocting a story with Francis about finding the girl missing (Murphy, 2017). News stories describe Torney’s agreement with a suggestion that the jury should have been told about his criminal past, even though the law reserves his right to be tried on the current charge without such evidence being disclosed:

Asked if disclosure of his violent history – including a conviction for beating a police officer with a hammer – could have led to a guilty verdict, Mr. Torney said: ‘Maybe. I guess the jury would have to decide whether the person I was 13 years ago is the same as the person I am now’. (Murphy, 2017)

The Victorian jury’s role as murder trial fact-finder does not involve assessment of a defendant’s history. However, family violence advocates have called for juries to be told about the family violence contexts of some homicides (Naylor and Tyson, 2017). In media coverage, Torney’s self-abasement is drawn out by journalists pursuing an explanation for Nikki’s still unsolved case. The journalists are ‘hailed’ in an interpellative process that includes the public in a need to hold someone responsible for each child killing. Torney is placed beside the state institution responsible for monitoring children at risk when news reports state that Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS) knew Nikki’s stepfather was ‘a violent criminal, two months before her murder, but closed their case on the vulnerable girl’ (Hamblin, 2016). As with the death of Queensland’s Tia Palmer, Nikki’s death prompted a state government inquiry into how the Victorian DHSS handled her case, in the same year that it conducted Australia’s first Royal Commission into Family Violence (RCFV).⁶ Torney, like Smith, is positioned within public patriarchy through a responsibility discourse that invests the wider Australian community in all parenting and childcare. Stories tell, for example, how ‘We Owe Nikki So Much More’ (Hamblin, 2016) and how ‘We Must Learn from Nikki’s Death’ (Bice, 2016).

Discussion

I have argued that a ‘disempowered man’ is interpellated by journalism about the three Australian filicide cases involving Robert Smith, Rick Thorburn and John Torney. In addition, I suggest that journalists are themselves interpellated by the Australian gender ideological assumptions about families and parenthood, as their stories also make it possible to deconstruct some of those assumptions. In the Smith, Torney and Thorburn cases, the father figure is ascribed agency only through perceived gender role perversion. The ‘disempowered man’ is not ‘hailed’ to the world as a father outside journalism’s storytelling process (Althusser, 2001 [1971]: 117–118). Louis Althusser’s (2001 [1971]) concept of interpellation names this difference between the person who lives in the world in fragmented and contradictory ways, and the identity, or ‘concrete subject’, who performs/fails to perform according to gender ideological rules (p. 117). The ‘concrete subjects’ are consistent in filicide representation not because journalists choose to reproduce gender assumptions, but because they are themselves interpellated by gender ideological notions of what ‘normal’ Australian families, fathers and mothers are meant to be. This critical perspective is similar to the view of the process through which a journalistic interpretive community as ‘united through its shared discourse and collective interpretations’ (Zelizer, 2017: 164).

My argument is supported by recent Australian scholarship that observes the filicidal father or step/foster father represented in news reports as an aberration, a perverse masculine identity who must be either ‘mad, or bad’ (Little, 2015; Little and Tyson, 2017). It is a representation correlating with American journalistic characterisations of homicidal mothers as ‘deceptive, destructive, and deviant women’ in news reports asking ‘how any sane woman could kill her children’ (Barnett, 2016: 111). The Australian representation ritualises shared values and beliefs around fatherhood and families through journalistic routines that negotiate the contrasting circumstances of each filicide case into public narratives about the crime (Van Zoonen, 2006: 37). Primarily, the ‘mythical and ritual function’ (Bird and Dardenne, 2009; Van Zoonen, 2006: 41) of journalism distinguishes the perpetrator from fathers who identify with the gender ideological ideal through the family role that forms their outward identity. Socially acceptable family relationships and ideals are unsettled by filicide perpetrators but are reaffirmed through narratives that compel collective community parenting of child victims through the ‘too little, too late’ discourse of blaming the state (Tin, 2016). The perpetrator’s subjectivity in journalism about filicide is constructed by this interpellated community in simplistic villain stories, underwritten by an ‘ongoing and fragile social process’ of gender performance that is always implied by the criminal ‘other’ (Van Zoonen, 2006: 37).

Conclusion

Interpellation is one way of viewing journalism’s representation of the filicide perpetrator to the public as a figure who perverts, and simultaneously reaffirms, gender role expectations around Australian parenthood and family. The perpetrator’s violent criminal acts are interpreted by journalism that functions ‘at the unstable point where the “unspeakable” stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture’ and turn out to be more complicated than reductive gender binaries tend to suggest (Hall, 1987: 44, cited in Thornham, 2000: 197). There is the horror ‘dad’ defying hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995; Pease, 2001; Pringle, 2001) with his lack of fathering capacity but affirming them with his choice to use violence against a child. But there is also the ‘monstrous mother’, who appropriates an aggressive and dominant form of masculinity when she neglects and/or kills her child, and involves the stepfather in her crimes. Their media representation demonstrates how ‘there is no ideology except for concrete subjects’ but does not extend far into the material conditions in which filicide occurs (Althusser, 2001 [1971]: 115–116). The individuals who might be living more the Australian nightmare than the dream are the figures that journalists writing about high profile filicide cases might examine more closely in this light. Doing so means also recognising factors such as class, and (in other cases not discussed in this essay) race, on not only filicide perpetrators but also on the communities that conflate mainstream family values and gender role assumptions with collective ownership of all parenting and children. In doing so, journalism might open the door a little further into the space where ‘the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live’ becomes part of a deeper cultural analysis of filicide that can account for the multiple forms of difference that fragment, more than fix, identities (Althusser, 2001 [1971]: 111).

As previously suggested in Little and Tyson (2017), the presence of a ‘disempowered man’ in Australian filicide media representation signifies assumptions about appropriate masculinity and gender role performance. Considering this ‘disempowered man’ as a media cultural construction suggests that it is possible for journalists to challenge those assumptions in stories that discuss perpetrators and their possible motives. In this study, the stepfather/foster father is identified as a ‘disempowered man’ in stories that also position these father figures alongside state institutions that are perceived to have failed child victims (Little and Tyson, 2017). This masculine subject is imbued with meaning because masculinity and femininity are co-constructed, and also differentiated as opposites, in ways specific to place and culture (Lazar, 2005: 143). Reading the ‘disempowered man’ as a subject interpellated to reaffirm Australia’s particular versions of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995) through journalism about filicide is an extension of the interpretive community approach to journalism that allows for a focus on how language works to produce these effects.

I have suggested that one way of identifying this process is to view this ‘disempowered man’, aligned with the fixed perpetrator–subject, in terms of its role in reproduction of hegemonic notions of gender identity in Australian journalism about lethal violence against children. Furthermore, I have done so in keeping with the fact that such ideological processes are not confined to journalism and are constitutive of all ‘recontextualisations of social relations’ (Butler, 1988; Lazar, 2005: 142). My aim has been to illustrate how extending the interpretive community and storytelling approaches to journalism about filicide means taking up this challenge. Filicide’s complexity requires collaborative efforts by journalists and filicide researchers to distinguish between the fixed subjects in filicide stories, and the men and women who kill children for reasons that are as yet little understood, in conditions that might not be as we imagine.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers for their generous comments and suggestions for developing this essay.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

ORCID iD

Janine Little

Author biography

Janine Little is a Former Journalist researching media, legal and creative representations of violence and disadvantage to critique the processes of explaining significant social justice issues to the public. She is the author of Journalism Ethics and Law: Stories of Media Practice (Oxford University Press, 2013), a co-author of So You Want to Be a Journalist? Unplugged (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and ‘Filicide in Australian Media and Culture’ (Little, J and Tyson, D) Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2017). A Senior Lecturer in Communication, Janine chairs the undergraduate and graduate media law and ethics units at Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.

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

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Rationale

Methodology

Literature review

Case selection

Analysis of the filicide cases

Robert Smith/Kiesha Weippeart (Abrahams)

Rick Thorburn/Tiahleigh Palmer

John Torney/Nikki Francis-Coslovich

Discussion

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

Notes

ORCID iD

Author biography

References