Janine Little







'Not available on the evidence': Australian narratives of violence against women in legal and media texts

The murders of Allison Baden-Clay and Jill Meagher and the drug-related death of Dianne Brimble proved to be three of Australia's biggest news events, offering more than their value as sensational 'true crime' stories. Key texts that report and interpret criminal procedures following the women's deaths reflect some of the cultural conditions for public interest in violence against women. This paper discusses some of those texts, referring to examples of journalism advocating for justice for the three victims, up to the day in 2016 when the High Court of Australia reinstated a murder conviction against wife-killer Gerard Baden-Clay.[1] The cruise ship death of Dianne Brimble occurred a decade before the 2012 domestic violence murder of Allison Baden-Clay, and rape and murder of Jill Meagher by a predatory stranger that same year. Brimble's death did not itself, or specifically, bring legal punishment to a perpetrator but is still a compelling presence at the edge of a media cultural space that expands across the Baden-Clay and Meagher cases into the Australian cultural narrative of violence against women.
Considering Dianne Brimble's posthumous media-legal persona alongside those of Allison Baden-Clay and Jill Meagher enables a view of violence against women, a complex problem of gender and power, through an ethical lens. It positions journalism as a navigator of meaning for this perspective, especially when what is 'not available on the evidence' in legal terms is hypothesised in public conversations about individual perpetrators and victims that rely on media texts for the extension of such discussions towards violence against women as a matter of relational ethics.

Keywords: violence against women, journalism, Allison Baden-Clay, Jill Meagher, Dianne Brimble, legal narrative


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Note on the contributor

Janine Little is a senior lecturer in communication (journalism) at Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.