Barbara Barnett, 2006, “Medea in the media”. Barnett examined U.S. newspaper coverage of women who killed their children and found that reporting repeatedly relied on the cultural myth of the “perfect mother.”
Explanations involving postpartum illness, poverty, addiction, unplanned pregnancy, and hopelessness were often filtered through expectations that mothers should be naturally loving and nurturing.
Wiest & Duffy, 2013, The impact of gender roles on verdicts and sentences in cases of filicide. They note that even though mothers and fathers both commit filicide, maternal cases tend to attract more media attention and community outrage, and they explicitly connect media representations and public responses to traditional gender-role expectations.
Mary McCluskey, 2019, Parents Who Kill: Media Constructions of Male and Female Filicide Cases. This study directly compared male and female perpetrators. Its conclusion: media continued to reinforce traditional gender constructions, with men interpreted through hegemonic masculinity while women’s actions were more often medicalized.
Rachel Rearden, 2022, Media Portrayal of Filicide Offenders. Rearden analyzed 80 newspaper articles covering 10 cases specifically to ask whether perpetrator gender affected reporting. She found “subtle but clear differences” between coverage of male and female offenders.
Amie Simington & Clare Farmer, 2024, Australian news media portrayals of filicide. They analyzed 103 news articles and found that for female offenders, coverage prominently featured the “flawed mother” narrative, mental illness, and parenthood. For male offenders, they found a general disconnect from their role as a parent.
quotingWell FWIW: that’s media framing.
nevent1q…k3sg
Researchers have repeatedly found that media coverage of parents who kill children is gendered.
Women are more likely to be interpreted through motherhood, femininity and mental health,
while men are more often framed around individual criminal behavior, violence, control, or masculinity.