Rest in peace, invisible woman

September 3, 2016 12:06 PM

Rest in peace, invisible woman

There is a patriarchal narrative that runs through this entire story, from the act itself to the reporting of it, and we need to allow ourselves to see it if we are to find a way to prevent similar events from happening again.

Linnea Dunne writes about the media coverage of a murder-suicide in Cavan, Ireland. The hashtag #HerNameWasClodagh has a lot more reaction and thoughts.
posted by Fence (8 comments total)

As I learned from the Irish Times today, the Irish government doesn't even track murder-suicides and the fact that the perpetrator is dead means that the inquest will only go over the how and not the why. The article is worth a read, in conjunction with this: Irish society unlikely to learn from murder-suicide.

So, yes, this will not change anything and the next time it happens focus again will all be on the lovely father that no one expected this from, as it has in other stories. The Independent has just been fecking dreadful.

(Though in fairness to The Independent, although they're the worst at this, at least, unlike the Irish times, they've never run a sympathetic 'but they're such lovely people' story on a pile of racists refusing to allow Irish Travellers to enter a government sanctioned halting site after these Travellers had just lost 10 people in a terrible fire in their previous halting site.)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 12:28 PM on September 3, 2016 [6 favorites]

His mother in law. Not the murdered woman's mother. Not the children's grandmother.
....
posted by threetwentytwo at 1:29 PM on September 3, 2016 [8 favorites]

Well, that was appalling. :(
posted by mosk at 1:45 PM on September 3, 2016

From the FPP: There’s a study in here somewhere, comparing the reporting of events like this with the discourse surrounding abortion and mental health, with women being labelled murderers for ending pregnancies, stopping the growth of sometimes near-invisible clumps of cells, regardless how mentally tortured or suicidal they are.

This.

There was a murder-suicide in Pennsylvania this year (trigger warning for that plus animal abuse) and the reporting was very similar. "Why'd he do it?" everywhere, and then if you read enough articles, long enough after the original few days of "we just don't know", you find out his wife had spoken about abuse, and oh he murdered them the day she had planned to move out.
posted by fraula at 1:49 PM on September 3, 2016 [15 favorites]

The media should treat these murders the same way they would a case like that of Elizabeth Smart or Jaycee Dugard, if they had been killed by their kidnappers. She was killed while trying to escape.

you find out his wife had spoken about abuse, and oh he murdered them the day she had planned to move out.

The headline: "a young family's final anguish". You know, she was anguished by being killed and having her children killed, he was anguished by killing them, it's kind of the same thing.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 4:15 PM on September 3, 2016 [5 favorites]

Her Name Was Clodagh. She Mattered.
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 7:05 PM on September 3, 2016 [5 favorites]

This kind of coverage is especially frustrating to me, because the pillar-of-the-community-suddenly-massacres-everyone model of familicide is well-known and well-studied. (This is a truly great book on familicidal personalities, and the patterns they tend to follow.)

Of course the guy seemed perfectly lovely. Seeming perfectly lovely was probably the exclusive-to-all-else focus of his life, and I imagine that within the family, no failure of outward loveliness was tolerated.

And when the appearance of loveliness was threatened from the outside (in this case, by "work stress," which the guy cited in his suicide note) his response was to basically shake the whole family out like an etch-a-sketch.

There is no fascinating mystery here. This is bog-standard, John List/ Christian Luongo/ ad nauseum shit. The only truly compelling questions are: (1) How can we recognize these situations before they explode; (2) How can we make domestic violence support resources available to more people; and (3) How can we change reporting culture so that the media honors the victims instead of fixating on and valorizing the killers? And how, in the aftermath of something like this, can we reconstruct, communicate, and foreground the victims' experiences?
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 1:15 PM on September 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

I really dislike the, We always liked him better, mumph, feel to this, like the local biddies felt she deserved it. Women are treated as über criminals when they end abusive relationships by homicide. They get years and years more jail time than the men who kill spouses. Problem is many men who choose to kill their wives and children, also kill themselves, as if they are so crucial to the existence of them, they literally couldn't survive without their presence. I am sad she couldn't escape him. Often women have to run, with no notice at all, to escape abusers. I would say killing one's family is usually the end moment of a long chain of abuses.
posted by Oyéah at 10:06 AM on September 5, 2016