The Ogress, The Innocent, And The Madman: Narrative and Gender in Child Homicide Trials in New Zealand, 1870-1925
Journal: Research Commons (The University of Waikato)
Year: 2013

The murder of a child represents one of the most perplexing and unimaginable of crimes. This thesis, the first legal-historical investigation into child homicide in New Zealand, seeks to uncover some of the ways that people have ‘imagined’ and made sense of this complex crime in the past. The conclusions emerging from this study suggest that nineteenth and early twentieth-century observers of child homicide trials relied heavily on the interpretive power of familiar cultural narratives to convey