title: The Ogress, The Innocent, And The Madman: Narrative and Gender in Child Homicide Trials in New Zealand, 1870-1925

authors: Powell, Debra

subjects: child homicide

abstract: 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 meaning and achieve composure. Homicides involving children, though often disparate and deeply ambiguous events, were bounded by a narrow yet profoundly influential body of images, characters and representations. This repertoire of narrative conventions was not simply reflective of contemporary attitudes and understandings but worked actively to bolster and crystallise the meanings surrounding disturbing events. 
Utilising quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this study draws on a comprehensive dataset of reported child homicide incidents occurring in New Zealand between 1870 and 1925. Select cases from this database are considered as a set of narrative texts using gender as the primary category of analysis. The popular and legal discourses surrounding these incidents are analysed within a post-structuralist theoretical framework to examine the divergent representations of those who were implicated in the suspicious death of a child. The research includes an investigation of criminal data for evidence of quantitative patterning in criminal typologies and sentencing, as well as analysis of textual evidence such as trial transcripts, coronial inquest reports, parliamentary debates, and newspaper reporting and commentary. The findings of this study demonstrate that the discursive constructions of child homicide in nineteenth and early twentieth-century New Zealand were highly gendered. Ultimately, child murder was imagined as an offence perpetrated by mothers. However, the impact of gender on trial proceedings and outcomes was by no means straightforward or clear cut. Cultural understandings of race, class, morality, madness and criminality all fed into the narrative construction of murder events and were shaped and reformed in relation to each other. In unpacking the stories of child murder, this thesis exposes the highly constructed nature of criminal legal discourse within and beyond the courtroom, and provides a historical basis for a more nuanced critique of understandings of child homicide crime in the present.

text: The Ogress, The Innocent, And The Madman: Narrative and Gender in Child Homicide Trials in New Zealand, 1870-1925 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 meaning and achieve composure. Homicides involving children, though often disparate and deeply ambiguous events, were bounded by a narrow yet profoundly influential body of images, characters and representations. This repertoire of narrative conventions was not simply reflective of contemporary attitudes and understandings but worked actively to bolster and crystallise the meanings surrounding disturbing events. 
Utilising quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this study draws on a comprehensive dataset of reported child homicide incidents occurring in New Zealand between 1870 and 1925. Select cases from this database are considered as a set of narrative texts using gender as the primary category of analysis. The popular and legal discourses surrounding these incidents are analysed within a post-structuralist theoretical framework to examine the divergent representations of those who were implicated in the suspicious death of a child. The research includes an investigation of criminal data for evidence of quantitative patterning in criminal typologies and sentencing, as well as analysis of textual evidence such as trial transcripts, coronial inquest reports, parliamentary debates, and newspaper reporting and commentary. The findings of this study demonstrate that the discursive constructions of child homicide in nineteenth and early twentieth-century New Zealand were highly gendered. Ultimately, child murder was imagined as an offence perpetrated by mothers. However, the impact of gender on trial proceedings and outcomes was by no means straightforward or clear cut. Cultural understandings of race, class, morality, madness and criminality all fed into the narrative construction of murder events and were shaped and reformed in relation to each other. In unpacking the stories of child murder, this thesis exposes the highly constructed nature of criminal legal discourse within and beyond the courtroom, and provides a historical basis for a more nuanced critique of understandings of child homicide crime in the present.

year: 2013

title: Funding and providing social services: The good, the bad and the third way?

authors: Harris, Paul

subjects: New Zealand

abstract: The funder/provider split in the area of social services is now a long-established reality in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has been the subject of much debate and criticism see, for example, Boston et at 1996. However, it remains the principal means by which a range of NGO service providers gains access to State funding. At the same time, with the advent of a new Labour-Alliance coalition government in 1999, the possibility arises that one of the social policy reforms the government might consider would be to amend or even to abolish the funder/provider system.

text: Funding and providing social services: The good, the bad and the third way? The funder/provider split in the area of social services is now a long-established reality in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has been the subject of much debate and criticism see, for example, Boston et at 1996. However, it remains the principal means by which a range of NGO service providers gains access to State funding. At the same time, with the advent of a new Labour-Alliance coalition government in 1999, the possibility arises that one of the social policy reforms the government might consider would be to amend or even to abolish the funder/provider system.

year: 2001

title: In defence of mātauranga Māori: A response to the 'seven academics'

authors: Waitoki, Waikaremoana

abstract: On 28 July 2021, a group of academics from the University of Auckland published a letter in the Listener, a well-known, non-academic magazine. The letter writers expressed their moral outrage that the Government’s NCEA curriculum working group proposed that science would be taught to Māori students along with its colonising history.

text: In defence of mātauranga Māori: A response to the 'seven academics' On 28 July 2021, a group of academics from the University of Auckland published a letter in the Listener, a well-known, non-academic magazine. The letter writers expressed their moral outrage that the Government’s NCEA curriculum working group proposed that science would be taught to Māori students along with its colonising history.

year: 2022-04-01