Kl Clifford

The thin blue line of mental health in Australia

While the shift from psychiatric custodial treatment and accommodation of mentally ill individuals to community living and community care may have been devised with good intentions, poorly implemented reforms have promulgated numerous deficiencies in Australia’s mental health system. Among these has been the troubling proportion of mentally ill individuals who have ‘fallen through the cracks’ into crisis as a consequence of a lack of access to services and care required. By virtue of the 24/7 nature of their work, Australian police officers have now become the primary, and often the only, responders to mental health crises in the community. The burden of filling these service gaps – often without the requisite knowledge, understanding, training, or resources to do so – has, at worst, culminated in the shooting deaths of a number of mentally ill individuals; resulting in long‐term traumatic impacts for both police and families associated with such events. More recently, initiatives have been developed to improve the capacity of police officers to respond effectively to mentally ill individuals, using less coercive methods of event resolution and interaction during mental health crisis interventions.

Amanda Knox: a picture of innocence

On 11 February 2014, three months after joining Twitter, Amanda Knox posted a black and white ‘selfie’ with the declaration SIAMO INNOCENTI (‘We Are Innocent’) handwritten on a placard held in front of her (Knox 2014a). The photograph would also be used as a homepage image for her personal website. The ‘we’ referred to Knox and her former Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, against whom an Italian appeals court had reinstated guilty verdicts for the 2007 murder of British exchange student, and Knox’s roommate at the time, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia. Lawyers for Knox and Sollecito had indicated they would appeal the decision, and a lengthy legal battle was expected for Knox’s extradition. Long before this, however, Amanda Knox had already become something of a news media fixation. As British media commentator Roy Greenslade (2011) explains, the murder of Meredith Kercher ‘had just the kind of ingredients that make headlines: a blood-soaked crime scene, supposed sexual depravity and, of course, Knox, the accused female, already on her way to being both demonised and celebrified’. The result was that the high-profile murder case was played out as much in international media as it was in the courtroom. For the most part, the mediated identity of Knox mirrored the stereotypical or stock subjectivities and standard meta-narratives that Morrissey (2003) identifies in relation to female deviance and criminality, specifically in the context of ‘women who kill’. She writes: ‘The media responses to women who kill are even more exaggerated than they are for men’, with female deviance often polarised between representations of the Madonna/whore, the gentler sex or the more deadly species (Morrissey 2003, p. 16). Within the first trial, such mediated representations were emboldened by the prosecution’s courtroom evidence, which depicted Knox as lascivious and slovenly; a drug-user and party-goer, who regularly brought strange men back to her room for sex and repeatedly left vibrators and erotic underwear on display, to the dismay of her housemates, particularly Kercher (Squires 2009). These exploits corresponded ideally, albeit regrettably, with the childhood nickname that Knox had earlier adopted on social networking site MySpace: ‘Foxy Knoxy’. It mattered little, as Black (2014) argues, that the name was a reference to Knox’s childhood football skills (Goodwin 2008) rather than a reference to her seduction technique, since the moniker was a tabloid media dream – a headline waiting to happen – which subsequently stuck in the popular imagination, and effectively served to reinforce Knox’s reputation as a ‘sinister temptress’. If, as Marshall (2014, p. 154) argues, the trope of celebrity has become a marker of the ‘proliferation of public self’, Amanda Knox’s SIAMO INNOCENTI tweet is therefore intriguing for the way in which it contributes to this proliferation by embodying the (re)construction and performance of a different self for public consumption; one that

The ‘Rosie Batty effect’ and the framing of family violence in Australian news media

When 11-year-old Australian boy Luke Batty was murdered by his father, his mother Rosie Batty used her authority as a high-profile victim to orchestrate a sustained and nationwide campaign to address family violence. Her efforts informed public and political debate as well as policy change at state and federal levels in Australia. This study examines news coverage of the Luke Batty case over a 20-month period following Luke’s murder on 12 February 2014. It traces the “framing” of family violence within Australian media (particularly in relation to gender and attributions of responsibility) over this period and as Rosie Batty increasingly rose to prominence as a family violence campaigner. Our findings suggest that the discursive tensions around whether family violence is “a gender issue” played a crucial role in shifting the debate towards an emphasis on the responsibility of the perpetrators of such violence, which in turn helped to reframe family violence as a national problem rather than a private matter that happens behind closed doors to nameless, mostly female, victims.

SIAMO INNOCENTI: Twitter and the Performative Practices of the ‘Real’ Amanda Knox

This chapter examines the intersections between crime, celebrity culture, and the changing mediascape in relation to the constructions of guilt and innocence associated with Amanda Knox (‘Foxy Knoxy’) in the Meredith Kercher murder case. Clifford situates these practices in the context of Knox’s online declaration of innocence—the SIAMO INNOCENTI tweet—published by Knox on Twitter in the fortnight after the Italian appeals court had reinstated guilty verdicts against her and former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. Clifford concludes that, whilst its aesthetic appeal and the conventions of the medium imply access to a more authentic or ‘real’ Amanda Knox, the persona constructed in the tweet was no less performative, stage-managed, or contestable than the identities constructed for Knox within legal, media, and publicity discourses before it.

For the lifestyle and a love of creativity: Australian students’ motivations for studying journalism

A number of studies have examined why students choose to study journalism at university, but overall, this area is still relatively underexplored. Yet, understanding why students choose journalism, and what career expectations they hold, is important not only for educators but also for wider society and public debates about the future of journalism and the value of tertiary journalism education. This article examines the motivations of 1884 Australian journalism students enrolled across 10 universities. It finds that hopes for a varied lifestyle and opportunities to express their creativity are the most dominant motivations among students. Public service ideals are somewhat less important, while financial concerns and fame are least important. These motivations also find expression in students’ preferred areas of specialisation (referred to in Australia as rounds): lifestyle rounds are far more popular than politics and business rounds or science and development rounds.

Book Review: The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral PanicsKrinskyCharles (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics, Ashgate, Farnham, 2013, ISBN 9 7814 0940 8116, 500 pp., £90.00.

Michael Keane describes this book as being about ‘culture, innovation and creativity in the People’s Republic of China’, and he examines the notion of creative clusters as they have developed in China in recent years. This examination includes looking into what creativity means within the hegemonic culture and both the political and governance framework within China. He discusses how creative clusters function and in the process, he prompts us to innovative thought about the catalysts of creativity. Keane defines a cluster as ‘a geographically defined space where cultural activities occur or where businesses assemble to produce products and services’, and uses a number of distinct clusters in which he spent time, interviewed and surveyed to demonstrate his arguments, including examples in Shanghai and Beijing. China’s New Creative Clusters is the 28th book published as part of a series on aspects of media, cultural and social change in Asia. Keane was one of the two editors of the first in the series, Television Across Asia, and his previous book, Created in China: The Great New Leap Forward, was the 11th. Keane has done an excellent job of defining his terminology – not easy when one is discussing creative and cultural industries, and the terms differ from district to district, and with the inclusion of various ideological positions. He has also, in his choice of division of chapters, stepped his reader through a process that, rather than being merely chronological or geographical, provides an unfolding of insight and uncovering of layers. This is a very readable book, which does not require a depth of previous knowledge on the subject. In his final chapter, Keane focuses on how creativity in China interacts with reform and economic development − the themes consistently addressed and developed throughout the book. Some readers will find this book an effective amalgamation of information from a range of disciplines. It references a very wide discourse for one book. Keane explores themes and disjunctive themes in his examination of creative clusters with some comparison to Western creative clusters. His study includes comment on creativity and innovation as it emerges from individuals or collectives; whether co-location does spur the activity of creativeness; whether that is a significant rationale for clusters in China where workforces are less mobile; the economic drivers of colocation with respect to rising land values; issues of individuality as a hegemonic idea in the West; and whether that encourages novelty. The book discusses policy, economic benefit and investment returns as they apply to creative or cultural industries in such a way as to invite consideration of the issues involved rather than to lead to a firm conclusion. − Andrea Roberts, Communication, International Studies and Languages, University of South Australia

Review: The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11MonahanBrian A., The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11, New York University Press, New York, 2010, ISBN 9 7808 1479 5552, 240 pp., US

Review(s) of: The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11, by Monahan, Brian A., New York University Press, New York, 2010, ISBN 9780814795552, 240 pp., US

24.00.

24.00.