Denise Buiten

• DPhil Sociology
• Lecturer at The University of Notre Dame Australia

This paper explores feminism as a site of explicit struggle and implicit sense-making for young men. Through an analysis of interviews with twenty young people at two Australian universities, it considers how popularised feminist (and anti-feminist) discourses shape discussions of men, boys and masculinity. Actively grappling with the place of boys...

Ableist necropolitics can be seen no more starkly than in news portrayals of the murders of disabled people by family or caregivers. When such murders are reported in the news, disabled people as full subjects fade away, portrayed as objects of care and suffering; their murders are routinely presented as an understandable if tragic response by ‘ove...

In the face of high levels of male violence against girls and women in South Africa, a prolific body of work exists analysing the role of masculinity in producing gendered violence. As part of this, a burgeoning body of literature specifically examining boys and male youth has been produced in recent years. In this chapter, we undertake a critical...

The aim of this book has been twofold: to propose and clarify the concept of gender-based 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. As has been shown, we must consider “varieties of patriarchy within a l...

Calling domestic and family violence ‘gender-based’ invokes a decades-long set of debates and must be contextualised against the contested position of feminism more broadly. This chapter seeks theoretical clarity on what we mean when we call violence gender-based. Drawing on feminist scholarship and the example of intimate partner violence, it cons...

This chapter draws 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. While familicide is complex and may not always neatly resemble other forms of domestic and family violence (for example, a known history of preceding abuse), this chapter seeks...

This chapter introduces key overarching themes around the complexities of news framing on familicide. It discusses the complex ways news framings reflect not just journalistic practices, but processes of interpellation—the ways journalistic practices are positioned within a wider discursive environment that shapes the framing possibilities availabl...

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 and analysed in Part Two of this book. Outlining what was known about each case helps to provide the background for exploring the complex dynamics of representation in the r...

This chapter examines the mental illness/distress frame in news reporting on familicide – the way familicide was framed as the outcome of perpetrator mental illness or emotional distress. It contextualises the mental illness/distress frame within evolving discourses of mental illness in Australia and the broader rise of ‘psychocentrism’ (Rimke, 201...

Davidson deaths: Was it all too much for tragic parents?

It is often asked in the context of discussions of family murder-suicide: “what about women who kill their children?” While this book focuses on representations of familicide-suicide, committed almost exclusively by men, this chapter reflects briefly on representations of filicide, a crime committed in roughly equal numbers by men and women. Specif...

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. in Trends and issues in crime and criminal justice 568, 2019). However, as a public issue, it is less often discussed or understood. Research suggests that women and men kill their children in...

This chapter outlines the contested position of a gendered account of violence that forms the context for media representations of familicide. Offering illustrative examples of the contradictory position of gender in Australian political debates about domestic and family violence, it considers the paradoxes highlighted in the political sphere again...

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 horrif...

This chapter explores how the representation of familicide cases in which there was no known preceding history of violence or abuse by perpetrators had commonly framed them as a mystery. The relatively intelligibility of such crimes, it is argued, operates to render them mysterious family tragedies in a way that perpetuates an “internal myopia” (We...

This chapter addresses 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? The question of mental illness or distress of perpetrators is commonly raise...

This chapter on ‘Tackling Gender-Based Violence in South Africa: Organizing, Calling Out, Embracing #Me Too’ focuses on selected issues that hinder progress in addressing violence against women and girls and that challenge the development of collective solidarities capable of pushing hard enough to effect meaningful change. To fully understand or i...

Terms such as “gender-based violence” are connected with a range of evolving discourses that are not merely descriptive, but interpretive and political in nature. Yet, what makes violence “gender-based” is often implicit rather than explicit. In this Debates we argue that there needs to be greater specificity about what is gendered about gender-bas...

With rates of rape in South Africa among the highest in the world, the significance of context has surfaced repeatedly in South African scholarship on rape. Most commonly, rape is understood as a symptom of deep and pervasive gender inequality, historical, social and economic legacies of apartheid as well as post-apartheid state discourses that hav...

South African feminisms have been shaped as much by struggles for political and racial equality as by national and transnational struggles for gender equality. Forged in the context of anti-apartheid struggles, early feminist concerns were largely subsumed by, and mobilized in the service of, African and Afrikaner nationalisms. The transition to de...

Despite apparent feminist advancements within contemporary South Africa, gender transformation in the media industry has been both limited and irregular. Based on interviews with journalists and editors from three weekly newspapers – the Sunday Times, the Sunday Sun and the Mail & Guardian – this article explores how journalists articulate their un...

The South African print news media have witnessed a sharp rise in tabloidised news forms and newspapers in recent years. While tabloidisation offers interesting possibilities in terms of contesting and transforming traditional masculinised news forms, it also raises serious questions with regard to the appropriation of these forms of news towards r...

The increasing recognition of the importance of integrating gender into transport research, policies and strategies is underscored by the need to refine theoretical frameworks around gender and transport and to link gender and transport research to a strong feminist agenda. It is argued that issues pertaining to gendered power relations (in communi...

Children and youths under the age of eighteen have received remarkably little attention in transport and mobility studies in low income countries, apart from limited work on road safety. This is an extremely important omission given that over half the population of many such countries consists of children and young persons. Improving mobility and a...

Copyright: 2007 Unisa Press Transport plays a significant role in the lives of children and young people, facilitating or constraining their ability to discharge their domestic responsibilities, providing opportunities for earning an income, supporting or inhibiting the development of social networks, and influencing their health and educational ac...

Traditional transport planning has tended to focus on addressing the needs of mainstream commuters through the provision of improved transport infrastructure and services, leaving out a significant number of existing and prospective users especially rural and peri-urban dwellers. However, in recent years there has been a relatively strong consensus...

While transport is a significant enabler of sustaining livelihoods among poor communities, it is clearly also increasingly deemed important to deliver the benefits of greater inclusion of persons with disabilities into society, enabling them to participate more fully in every day activities, particularly in developing and transition countries. Inte...

Through the evolvement of gender and development theory, a recent shift can be observed away from specific projects for women towards the integration of gender analysis in all research and planning. Development in engendered transport research theory reflects this shift, and yet much needs to be done to mainstream gender into quantitative transport...