Jill Meagher CCTV

Abstract

“Jill Meagher CCTV,” the security camera recording of Melbourne woman Jill Meagher's last minutes alive, registered more than 677,000 views on YouTube by early 2014. Little happens for most of its 232 seconds and, as would be expected with surveillance footage, there is no sound. In Australia, “Jill Meagher CCTV” forms part of a haunting iconography of a rape and murder victim that not only resonates with fictional narratives in other places, but also influences the way the Jill Meagher story, as a whole, is read. As Melissa Jane Hardie (2010) suggests of the “true crime” story (citing Bronski 2005, 29), the public reaction to high profile stories of violent crime “is often an emblematic cultural citation that represents a social problem or fixation.” This article considers “Jill Meagher CCTV” as such a cultural citation and goes further by highlighting its gothic tendencies. Highlighting the gothic aspects of “Jill Meagher CCTV” resonates with surrounding narratives of violence and gender justice, which have material consequences for women in the way that the most prevalent forms of violence against women continue to be downplayed in those narratives.

Keywords::

• gothic
• narrative
• violence against women
• gender justice
• surveillance
• news

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to acknowledge her mother, Rita Mary Little 25.6.37–22.11.13 for inspiration – and the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments on this article.

Notes

^1. At June 18, 2014, there were 677,020 views.

^2. Public calls for law reform to strengthen penalties for “one punch” killers after a spate of alcohol-fuelled assaults by men on other men outside nightclubs in Sydney and Melbourne are a prominent example.

^3. I do not want to immerse this essay in psychoanalytic discussion of Irigaray's work but merely to point to this direction as a potential for further analysis.

^4. This was reflected by the crowd attending the commemorative memorial street march for Jill Meagher on Sept 29, 2013 ABC, N. (2013, Sept 30). Jill Meagher Remembered as Thousands March Down Sydney Road in Melbourne. ABC News, Australian Broadcasting Corporation., and by the 30,000 who marched down Sydney Road, Brunswick, a week after she died Australian, T. (2012, Sept 29). March For Jill Meagher. Galleries.

^5. See Burris, 2011, for an analysis of Caché/Hidden (2005). I am interested in its visual resonances for the YouTube and news consumers in Australia but I am not suggesting that the viewer familiarity with the film itself is assured. Viewer familiarity with narrative treatment of surveillance and “sub-veillance” is highly probable, see Lake, J. 2010. “Red Road (2006) and Emerging Narratives of ‘Sub-Veillance.’” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24 (2): 231–240.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janine Mary Little

Janine Little's most recent book is Journalism Ethics and Law: Stories of Media Practice (2013). She has published internationally on media representations of women, race and class, journalism, and literary studies. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. E-mail: [email protected]