An 18-year-old woman died inside Victoria’s maximum-security women’s prison.
She was barely an adult, a teenager caged by the state, and her death should have prompted immediate questions about what happened to her inside Dame Phyllis Frost Centre. How does a teenager die in prison? What responsibility did the institution have for keeping her alive? What did staff know, what care was available to her, and what will her family now have to fight to find out?
Instead, one of the headlines that followed her death was: “The shocking charges faced by teenage mum who died in Aussie women’s prison.”
There is something profoundly disturbing about the journalistic instinct behind that headline.
A young woman has died while entirely under the control of the state and, before the public is invited to consider the circumstances of her death, we throw to the allegations against her. The subtext is clear: before you feel too much sympathy for this dead 18-year-old, you should know what she was accused of.
Even the description “teenage mum” sends that message. Her motherhood is important enough to be placed prominently in the headline, but not in a way that invites us to think about a young mother dying and what that means for her family or the child left behind. Instead, it becomes part of the spectacle surrounding her criminalisation.
This is not simply a problem affecting women. When a man recently died in custody in South Australia while awaiting trial, The Advertiser published a graphic announcing: “Accused double murderer takes own life in prison.” His alleged offending remained front and centre even in reporting his death.
Criminalisation seemingly gives us licence to withdraw empathy. However, for women, something else happens. Criminalised women are not only judged against the criminal law, they are also judged against deeply gendered expectations about what women are supposed to be. They can become bad women as well as “offenders”.
The criminal woman as spectacle
Think about the headline “Inside serial baby killer Kathleen Folbigg’s violent and tragic life.” Folbigg, who was later be pardoned and had her convictions quashed was reduced to a “Serial baby killer” in headlines without more nuanced analysis.
Elsewhere, we see headlines promising “Australia’s real-life femme fatales” and stories of the country’s “savage female killers.” One such article explicitly presented women who kill as exceptions to male violence and described them as “femme fatales”, before cataloguing women through labels including “vampire killer”, “toxic tea lady”, “Lady Leatherface” and “gore hounds”.
Ironically, while men overwhelmingly dominate homicide offending, we do not note their gender as interesting or part of the motive. The category “women killers” exists because violence is still imagined as a violation of femininity.
The particular punishment of the “bad mother”
Perhaps nowhere is the gendered nature of this reporting clearer than when the woman who has committed violence is a mother with headlines such as “Killer mum’s chilling searches before slaying kids”
The description “mummy murderer”, which has also appeared in reporting about a woman convicted of murder, makes the dynamic even more explicit. Motherhood is being fused with murder precisely because the combination is understood to be especially transgressive.
Feminists have spent generations interrogating the impossible standards attached to motherhood, the division of women into good mothers and bad mothers, and the ways women’s value is measured against their performance of care, sacrifice and respectability. Yet there is remarkably little feminist outrage when exactly these gendered tropes are deployed against criminalised women.
Where is the feminist outrage?
That silence is increasingly difficult to ignore. Feminist organisations and commentators rightly challenge victim-blaming, misogynistic reporting, the weaponisation of motherhood and media narratives that divide women into worthy and unworthy victims. There is now a sophisticated public language for explaining how headlines shape attitudes towards violence against women and how seemingly small editorial choices can reproduce deeply gendered assumptions. However, criminalised women frequently seem to sit outside the boundaries of that concern.
Where is the criticism when an 18-year-old woman dies in custody and the media immediately foregrounds the charges against her? Where is the analysis when women who commit crimes are turned into “femme fatales”, “killer mums”, “scalpers” and “mummy murderers”? Why is language that would immediately be recognised as gendered and dehumanising in almost any other context allowed to pass largely without comment once the woman being described has been criminalised?
Prison does not make patriarchy disappear
Women do not walk through a prison gate and cease experiencing gender. They do not leave behind misogyny, racism, poverty, disability, motherhood, histories of sexual violence or experiences of coercive control simply because the state has relabelled them “prisoners”. Nor does imprisonment somehow neutralise power. If anything, prison creates one of the most extreme power imbalances imaginable, placing almost every aspect of a woman’s daily existence under institutional control.
That is why feminist silence around prisons is so consequential. If our analysis of violence against women stops at the prison gate, we leave some of the women with the least institutional power on the outer.
Feminism has to include women we have been taught not to like
An 18-year-old does not lose her entitlement to dignity because she was facing serious charges. A woman who commits a violent act does not need to be transformed into a grotesque character for public consumption. And a mother who commits a terrible crime does not make “mummy” an acceptable term of ridicule.
Feminism has long challenged the idea that there are good women who deserve protection and bad women who do not. Yet prison remains one of the places where that binary is most powerfully reproduced, and where feminist resistance to it is often weakest.