Should we take this mother’s grief with a grain of salt?

In a case that has become part of Australian mythology, Lindy Chamberlain (now Chamberlain-Creighton) was tried and convicted of the murder of her baby daughter, Azaria, after she disappeared from a camping ground near Ayers Rock in 1980.

Though she was eventually cleared, Chamberlain-Creighton received intense scrutiny because her public composure meant she did not fit the profile of a grieving woman. Thirty years on, not a lot has changed.  The attention and scrutiny the media and public continue to devote to women in these situations would suggest that we continue to judge women based on unrealistic expectations of ‘appropriate’ behaviour.

Dr Nicola Goc, Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Media at the University of Tasmania sees a clear pattern in these kinds of cases. “As time goes on and no clear suspect or explanation is forthcoming, the media speculation increasingly turns on the mother, with close scrutiny of the way she behaves interpreted as reflecting her guilt or innocence,” she says.

It’s a phenomenon that has international resonance. In the case of the disappearance of Madeline McCann, mother Kate McCann’s bereavement was interpreted as insufficient and as an indicator of guilt by the public, the media and even the police – who named her as an official suspect. Not even a global media crusade to find their daughter was enough to dissuade suspicions of the McCann’s involvement, suspicions she has consistently denied.

Closer to home, the experience of Joanne Lees would suggest that sometimes public suspicions are as much a reflection of our expectations of mothers as our expectations of women in general. During investigations into the abduction and murder of her boyfriend Peter Falconio in the Australian outback, Lees was never officially considered to be a suspect. Yet a considerable number of Australians believed Lees may have been involved because she apparently didn’t behave the way we expect a victim or grieving woman should behave. “I didn’t know there was a rule book or a manual on how to behave . . . I think whatever I did I would have been criticised,” Lees said during an interview with Andrew Denton in 2006.

No matter how women in these situations behave they are inevitably going to fall short of the public’s expectations of how they should behave – mostly because there is nothing appropriate about their situation. Having written extensively on motherhood, murder and ‘bad mummies’ Dr Goc concedes that our expectations of these women are determined by unrealistic notions of how they should express their grief.

“When the mother of the missing/dead child does not behave in the way society and the media dictate (suitably emotional – but not too emotional; sober in dress and actions, but not unkempt etc) she is quickly put in the frame,” she says. “Lindy Chamberlain was described as a “strange, emotionally detached woman” . . . and Kate McCann was “unnaturally cold and distant”. These were “unnatural mothers”, deviant mothers, because of the way they performed through the camera’s lens.”

In a society where women – and mothers especially – are expected to do it all, it may be that passing judgment on women like Chamberlain, McCann or Abrahams provides a small scrap of reassurance. “Their worst fears are realized in someone else’s tragedy, and this provides a relief valve that allows them to feel, in the knowledge that at least their child is safe, that they are not such ‘bad’ mothers,” says Dr Goc. But the intense scrutiny these women are held up to is also a reassuring sign that anyone connected to a disappearance will be investigated.

Parents do kill their children. In 95.8 per cent of the cases where a child died as a result of an assault between 1999 and 2005 in NSW, the fatal injuries were known to be inflicted by parents, spouses or domestic partners or other family members. So when investigations hinge on the safety of a child, we can never be too suspicious, and you don’t need to be a mother to know that – a realist is enough.

Like the women before her, had Kristi Abrahams forgone the tearful denial of involvement in her child’s disappearance, she probably would have been scrutinised anyway.

But just as we shouldn’t let our own understandings of what is appropriate behaviour for a grieving mother fuel our judgements, we shouldn’t let our own understandings of motherhood stand in the way of our suspicions – tears or no tears.