A Mystery Haunting Us All: Historicising Media Cultural Explanations of Family Violence Through Australia's Jaidyn Leskie Child Murder Case

• Published in: Hecate Vol. 45; no. 1-2; pp. 209 - 310
• Main Author: Little, Janine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: St. Lucia Hecate Press 01.05.2019
• Subjects: Child abuse; Child death; Children; Children & youth; Classroom observation; Cultural factors; Culture; Domestic violence; Families & family life; Gender; Ghost stories; Homicide investigation; Media coverage; Murder victims; Murders & murder attempts; Neoliberalism; Performativity; Postcolonialism; Prototypes; Violent crime; Australia
• ISSN: 0311-4198; 1839-4213

This paper demonstrates the historical importance of a notorious Australian child murder to developing research on cultural factors influencing public understanding of family violence. It shows how the 1997 disappearance of 13-month-old Jaidyn Leskie from his babysitter's house in a downcast regional Australian town still matters in media and cultural explanations of child murder as an extreme end point of such violence. The scene set is of a haunted postcolonial imaginary moving subjects through media cultural space as failures of class and gender performance. Its tableau of "freaks" forms when the child murder story is written and read from a late-twentieth-century aspirational vista, and its key subjects underperform, in neoliberal terms, their class and gender roles. I observe them as prototypes for more likely subjects in contemporary media attempts to explain violence against children, and family violence more broadly, as a problem of role performance in Australia's haunted media culture. I suggest deconstructive engagement with texts that capture this process, but also invoke particular ghosts as they strive to explain a tragic crime.