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The Epitome of Bad Parents: Construction of Good and Bad Parenting

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The Epitome of Bad Parents: Construction of Good and Bad Parenting The Epitome of Bad Parents: Construction of Good and Bad Parenting, Mothering, and Fathering in Cases of Maternal and Paternal Filicide A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology of the College of Arts and Sciences by Amy Baumann Grau M.A. University of Cincinnati September 2009 Committee Chair: Anna Linders, Ph.D. Abstract. Motherhood, fatherhood, and parenthood are often treated as universal constructs. This is especially true in the construction of good and bad motherhood, fatherhood, and parenthood. However, as previous research such as that by Collins (2009), Glenn (1994), and Risman (1998) all demonstrate, parenting is affected by both race and gender. In this dissertation, I show that the social construction of motherhood, fatherhood, and parenthood are gendered and racialized. Specifically, I focused on media portrayals of the crime of filicide, or the murder of a child by its parents, to show the gendering and racialization of parenthood. I chose media portrayals of filicide as the focal site for this research precisely because it is divergent from “normal” parenting activities. I examined twenty-five cases of filicide that were committed by thirty-three parents. I conducted a qualitative content analysis of 372 stories about these thirty-three parents from stories that I collected from local television news affiliate websites. Cases were limited to those in which it was reported that the parent(s) had been convicted of a charge in relation to the death of their child between June 10, 2010 and June 10, 2012. ii iii Acknowledgements. I would like to thank first and foremost my family for their support, encouragement, and occasionally for forcing me to take breaks. To Bradford Grau, my husband, for being there, letting me talk things through and nodding when appropriate, and making sure that I survived. I will be eternally grateful for your love, support, and putting up with me when I least deserved it. To my mother, Margaret Baumann, who always knew I could do whatever I set my mind to and gave me every opportunity to do so. To my sister, Tricia Henson, who has always been a much bigger influence on my life than she has ever known. I would also like to thank my friends and all of those fellow grad students who have influenced me, my work, and my view on life in so many ways. To my cohort, for it is only through working together that any of us have made it out on the other side. I would especially like to thank Kelli Chapman, a great source of inspiration and her faith in my ability to move mountains. To my colleagues and friends at Eastern New Mexico University, who knew I could do this, provided unwavering support, and provided me with their own tales of surviving the dissertation years. I especially want to thank Dr. Suzanne Balch-Lindsay, Dr. Kathy Durand Gore, Dr. Dale Streeter, and Mr. Simon Chavez for lunch breaks, wonderful conversations, and so much more. Thank you to my committee, Dr. Annulla Linders, Dr. Erynn Casanova, and Dr. Jeffrey Timberlake. Your support, encouragement, and advice have made me and this work better. Finally, thank you, to all of those who have touched my life, my education, and have shaped who I am in ways both big and small. iv Table of Contents. Title Page i. Abstract ii. Acknowledgement iv. Table of Contents v. List of Tables vi. I. Introduction 1. II. Literature Review 21. III. Methods 60. IV. Racialization and Gendering of 81. Motherhood V. Racialization and Gendering of Fatherhood 123. VI. Racialization and Gendering of Parenthood 170. VII. Conclusion 220. References 244. Appendix A. Preliminary Data Collection 254. and Search Related Information 259. Appendix B. News Story Citations v List of Tables Table 3.1 Regional Distribution of Cases 77 Table 3.2 Distribution of Cases by Gender 78 of Victim Table 3.3 City or Regional Affiliate News Sites Employed 79-80 Table 4.1 Original Charges, Sentenced Charges, and Sentencing Outcomes for 120 Maternal Offenders. Table 4.2 Headline and Story Distribution of Direct and Indirect Parental References, 121 Black Mothers Table 4.3 Headline and Story Distribution of 122 Direct and Indirect Parental References, White Mothers Table 5.1 Original Charges, Sentenced 167 Charges, and Sentencing Outcomes for Paternal Offenders. Table 5.2 White, Paternal Filicidal Offender 168 Stories and Headlines Table 5.3 Black, Paternal Filicidal Offender 169 Stories and Headlines Table 6.1 Headline and Story Distribution of Direct and Indirect Parental References 216 Table 6.2 Charges and Sentences for Black 217 Filicidal Offenders Table 6.3 Charges and Sentences for White Filicidal Offenders 218-9 Table A.1 Distribution of Cases by Region with States Identified 257 Table A.2 Story Breakdowns 258 vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The November 14, 1994 cover of Time Magazine reads “How Could She Do It?” and depicts an emotional Susan Smith as well as a photo of her two sons (Bonner 1994). Weeks prior, Smith went to police alleging that she had been carjacked by a black man with her two sons in the car. After a nationwide search and extensive media attention portraying Smith as a distraught mother and victim, Smith admitted that she strapped her one and three year old sons in the car and drove it into a nearby lake, drowning her sons. As Bragg reports, “They [the jurors] said that in the end, as they sat at a table talking to one another of how they felt, they found Mrs. Smith more pitiful than evil” (1995: lines 41-42). On June 20, 2001 Andrea Yates drowned her five children, ranging in age from six months to seven years, in the bathtub in their Houston, Texas home. Yates, who suffered from postpartum psychosis, was tried in 2002 for her crimes and was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison (Huckerby 2003). In 2006, Yates was retried and found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a Texas state mental health facility. The March 4, 2002 cover of People magazine, for example, depicts Yates in an orange jumpsuit with the eye- catching headline of “After bouts with mental illness, Andrea Yates drowned her five children. Now a jury must decide: Villain or Victim?” (Hewitt 2002). While an article by Newman after Yates’ retrial describes that Yates had “told police that Satan was inside her and that she was trying to save them from hell” (2006: lines 46-47). In 2008, another mother made headlines in connection with the death of her daughter. Described as the “most hated woman in America” (Boroff 2013, line 1), Casey Anthony was accused of murdering her daughter Caylee. Anthony was found not guilty of the murder in 2011 1 and as Alvarez reports “the young mother whose seemingly heartlessness at the disappearance of her daughter transfixed America for three years, was found not guilty on Tuesday of killing the girl, Caylee Marie” (2011: lines 1-4). These three women and the coverage of their cases are notable for numerous reasons. Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, and Casey Anthony are some of the most notorious names when it comes to the crime of filicide. All three garnered national and international attention for killing their children, yet the coverage of these women is widely disparate. Susan Smith is portrayed as pitiful while Andrea Yates is presented as mentally disturbed and Casey Anthony is despised and heartless. The specific goal of this dissertation is to show how the media construct the concepts of motherhood, fatherhood, and parenthood with a particular focus on the use of racialized and gendered themes. I chose to focus on filicide, an extreme case, as it is the most likely to depict the most variation in these constructs as opposed to more routine or normal activities in which parents engage. Homicide is an oft discussed topic in the media from crime-solving television shows to news media coverage of real-life crimes. The attention that murder merits in the media is vast but some cases garner more coverage than others. Certain elements have been found to make some crimes and cases more newsworthy than others, such as if the victim is female, a child, or elderly. Meanwhile cases involving blacks, Hispanics, or those with less than a high school education receive less media attention (Sorenson, Manz, and Berk 1998). Cases of children being killed, particularly when the culprit is the parent of the victim, are one type of homicide that is often fodder for the news media. 2 The murder of a child by a parent or parents is known as filicide. Although this term is not commonly used in the mainstream media, it is a succinct way of describing the crimes that I cover in this dissertation. Between 1980 and 2008, 63% of homicides of children under the age of five were perpetrated by their mother or father (Cooper and Smith 2011). While the work of scholars such as Sorenson, Manz, and Berk (1998) suggests that filicide is generally newsworthy, media attention devoted to cases of filicide varies widely, with some receiving little or no attention while others becoming a part of national or international coverage. Cases like those of Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, and Casey Anthony may be widely known, but as examples of filicide these cases are atypical. Furthermore, the attention given to these cases, and others like them, reinforce an image of filicide as a crime committed only by women, and then only rarely.
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