UK members might have read of the horrific murder of 11-year-old Luke Batty from Melbourne, whose father stabbed and then battered him to death with a cricket bat in front of onlookers, including Luke's mother Rosie, at a junior cricket practice on Wednesday. The father was then shot by police as he came at them with a knife, and later died in hospital.
Greg Anderson had an extensive history of domestic violence, had threatened to kill Rosie Batty, who had an AVO against him, and was only permitted contact with his son in public places. Police believe the murder was premeditated - i.e., he took a knife to one of the few places he knew he would be able to get close to his son, killed him, and then carried out 'suicide by cop'.
I want to discuss the incredibly disturbing way the media here has covered the case. I'd do it in an Australian forum, but unfortunately we don't have any large online feminist spaces, and my impression is that the coverage is not that different to the way the UK media covers similar cases. I think it's important to talk about, because the implications for the feminist campaign to end male violence against women and children are grave if this is how public discussion of such crimes is allowed to proceed.
First off, every major news outlet has emphasised how much Anderson 'loved' his son, and was loved by him in return. In fairness, they took their lead from a statement given by Luke's mother which said exactly that. The other major emphasis has been on Anderson being allegedly mentally ill - again, this angle comes from Rosie Batty's interview, in which she speculated that her estranged husband had 'an undiagnosed mental illness'.
I am not going to pass judgement on anything a mother whose child has just been murdered in front of her says or feels in this situation, except to note that she is no doubt in shock and perhaps trying to rationalise what has happened. Regardless, this does not exculpate the media from reconstructing the brutal and premeditated murder of a child as the 'inexplicable' act of an otherwise 'loving father'.
Rosie Batty also told reporters of the years of violence and intimidation she had suffered at Anderson's hands, and that Luke 'felt pain and sadness and fear for his mum' - but this was all lost in the determination by the media to portray Anderson as a vulnerable man whose untreated mental illness was to blame for his act of violence against a son he 'loved more than anybody'. Notably, the word that has been used over and over again to describe this case is not 'crime', but 'tragedy' (Prime Minister Tony Abbott used the word five times in his comments on the case). A tragedy, it is implied, in which Anderson was as much a victim as the boy he murdered, and the partner he has left childless.
Such narratives are essentially a wholesale reversal of the truth. Anderson was not the victim of an unforeseeable tragedy, but the perpetrator of a brutal crime. This crime was not indicative of a hurt father's loss of control, but rather the ultimate assertion of his right to total control over his family. He was not 'vulnerable' and 'lost' - his partner and child were vulnerable to his deliberate and sustained violence. People with mental illnesses are much more likely to harm themselves than others, and, if they are experiencing violent psychosis, they lash out at random targets rather than carry out coldblooded murders of specific ones. Lastly, and most obviously, fathers who love their children do not annihilate them in order to get back at their former partners.
I believe such false framing of male violence against women and children is a political act. When a state-controlled media circulates lies in order to justify the violence of the state, we understand this for what it is: propaganda. The difference is that the kind of propaganda which seeks to justify and excuse male violence is not disseminated by a central controlling body - rather, it circulates in the cultural body of a patriarchal society, which subscribes, at its core, to the same belief that drove Anderson's decision to murder his son, one which asserts the primacy of a man's will and feelings over the actual lives of women and children. And so such a society must endlessly repeat back to itself stories that uphold this tenet, and seek to prevent the naming of truths that would expose it.