Another great article - this time from Van Badham of the Guardian - about why these family annihilators are not "good blokes who snapped":
Yet, a local journalist covering these events, Robert Ovadia, denounced Dent and Ford as an “Outrage Brigade” in The West Australian. “Nobody is legitimising his actions,” Ovadia wrote of Peter Miles, but he “had a past ... why should we be afraid to report of what people thought of him before?”
There’s a single reason and it’s anything but outrageous: prevention.
Whatever may have transpired in Margaret River that morning, the narrative of the “good bloke” who “snaps” and kills his family is myth, whether it’s “what people thought of him” or not. And maintaining it as a frame for news reporting provides external validation to potential murderers that their inclinations towards violence are not unconscionable.
Indeed, “good bloke” memorialising around suspected killers instructs that you can both murder your family and retain your reputation.
We know it provides powerful affirmation, because we know that men who murder their female partners “continue to blame the deceased women after the killing”, “express a lack of remorse or empathy with the victim” and even see themselves as “victims who had been wronged”.
We also know that what domestic murderers have mostly in common isn’t the “heartache” that’s been speculated within Peter Miles. It isn’t tragic childhoods, substance abuse problems, persistent criminal behaviour or mental illness, either.
What perpetrators overwhelmingly share is the use of violence to enforce rigid stereotypes about gender roles where “being dominant in their relationships with women was central to their sense of manliness”. These men feel “belittled” by a partner’s desire to leave, because their understanding of masculinity is rooted in maintaining a unique power differential against women. We know “homicide is often triggered by a loss of control over the victim”. The intent to control a female partner informs many cases in which men murder their children.
We know these things not because we view them through “a kaleidoscope of causes”, but because armies of international researchers have spent years analysing the conditions that foster the violence, unpicking the social fictions of this criminality with study and data. It’s not to suit an agenda. It’s to keep women and children alive.
Canadian research discovered that 82.9% of these murders are no “snap” actions, but show elements of planning. A 10-year study in New South Wales that revealed 97% of women killed by their intimate partners “had been the victim of domestic violence during the relationship”. The pattern does not suggest tragic, personalised failure. It illustrates a syndrome in which masculinity, misconceived, asserts itself by scheming to destroy what it fails to control.