Crime's family tree: Conflating race, criminality and family in New Zealand

Abstract

This paper produces a critical reading of discourses of criminality, family and racialization circulating in an interrelated set of feature articles published in late 2006 in a major New Zealand newspaper. Through images, diagrams and written text, local crime is mapped as a familial aberration that threatens a whole city and region. Rather than demonstrating a novel approach to reporting crime, this paper argues that the representation of crime in these texts puts the body politic of the state, and good governance, at risk in ways that resonate with the new modes of subjectivity and responsibility that Nikolas Rose (2007) traces from contemporary biomedicine into populist discourses.