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Book part
Publication date: 2 August 2023

Denise Buiten

Filicide, the killing of a child by a parent, is one of the only crimes committed by women and men in roughly equal numbers. Women's violence against their children, however, more…

Abstract

Filicide, the killing of a child by a parent, is one of the only crimes committed by women and men in roughly equal numbers. Women's violence against their children, however, more profoundly confounds common understandings of the links between gender and family violence, leading to its ambivalent treatment within the media. When men kill their children, they are usually characterised as either monsters or as sad, failed men. When women kill their children, they are usually represented as bad mothers or mad mothers suffering under the burdens of the pathological female body. In both cases, a mental illness/distress lens is common, though how it manifests is inflected by gender. This chapter examines recent Australian news representations of maternal filicide-suicide. Focussing on the mental illness/distress frame in news, it examines the ideological work this frame does in decontextualising and de-gendering maternal filicide, framing women's mental illness/distress in ‘psychocentric’ terms that strip it of political or social significance and subjecting it to an individualised lens that obscures the gendered aetiologies of women's use of violence.

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The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-255-6

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Book part
Publication date: 2 August 2023

Abstract

Details

The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-255-6

Abstract

Details

The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-255-6

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