July Was a Terrible Month for Children

Of the 17 children killed by violence in Australia so far this year, 8 were allegedly killed by women — 7 mothers and a sister — and 10 of the 17 were boys. You would not know this from reading the coverage. The dominant media framing this year has been “violence against women”, with child deaths folded in as an extension of that story rather than examined on their own terms. That framing erases male victims, erases female perpetrators, and gives us a distorted picture of what’s actually driving this violence.

July was a brutal illustration of the gap between the reality and the coverage.

The month began and ended with knife killings involving a child. On July 1st, 15-year-old Darweish Mohamed was allegedly killed in Craigieburn; a 16-year-old boy has been charged, along with a 20-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl. On July 28th, on the Central Coast, a 15-year-old allegedly stabbed a 22-year-old man nine times “during an argument over a hat”.

At least six children died violently in July that the media reported:

Darweish Mohamed, 15, Craigieburn (July 1)

A 4-year-old boy also on the Central Coast, allegedly murdered by his mother (July 4) — this drew brief attention due to suggestions of cannibalism

A 17-year-old Yolŋu girl on Elcho Island, NT, murdered by a 34-year-old member of her community with whom she had some kind of domestic relationship

Layla Jeffrey, 13, Victoria, who went missing July 4th and whose remains were found July 9th; a 16-year-old boy has been charged with her murder

Hazel Wright, 23 months, and Lewis Wright, 3 months, in Port MacDonnell — both dead in what is being investigated as a double-murder-suicide by their mother

Three boys, three girls. Much of this is familiar: domestic violence in a remote Aboriginal community, knife crime in Melbourne, most deaths tied to domestic violence, half the child deaths at the hands of mothers, mostly socio-economically depressed communities, fathers absent or ignored in the initial reporting. There’s no single thread — poverty, mental illness, both, neither — but the pattern in identifying who died and who perpetrated the crimes is consistent.

It wasn’t only child victims. A 16-year-old boy allegedly killed his mother in Bentley, Perth, on the 16th. Another 16-year-old was charged with murdering a 36-year-old man in Taree on the 6th — a case that seems to have been ignored by the media entirely.

July was bad across the board: seven females died violently, including the three girls above and the mother killed in Bentley. Three more — Jana Armstrong, Lavanya Chappa, and Brooke Stephens — are believed to have died from intimate partner violence. A 73-year-old Fitzroy North woman’s death is also being treated as suspicious. At least ten adult males were also killed, if anyone’s counting — because the media coverage largely isn’t.

Six minors dead. Seven minors charged with murder, others as accessories. Here’s how the media handled it.

The most basic fact — that roughly twice as many males as females died violently in July — went unmentioned. Male victims, as a group, simply aren’t a category the media is interested in.

The children were similarly ignored as a group. Individually, yes: there were pieces on child-protection failings, on gang crime, on adolescent violence “on the rise” after the Bentley case (he was known to police, the family was in “crushing poverty”, the early intervention that was needed and sought never came). The mother who allegedly killed her two children was covered as a “tragedy”. But nowhere were these treated as instances of the same problem. The fathers, apart from those of Layla Jeffery and the Wright children, were rarely mentioned.

Females as a group, by contrast, were the explicit subject of at least two Guardian pieces in July — one on the 17th, one on the 22nd — both citing four female deaths in a short period and both attributing them squarely to “male violence”. Both ignored that as many children had died in a similar period. The second piece included this:

These are not isolated tragedies. This year, nine women have died in Victoria, while across Australia, 37 women have allegedly been killed by men. Shockingly, 17 children have died as a result of violence in 2026 – the youngest victim was an eight-week-old baby. With a woman dying on average every 11 days in Australia in 2024-25, we are left feeling that we are in a crisis we cannot escape.

At least “every 11 days” is more accurate than the usual “one a week”. But the subtle technique of following the women’s death toll immediately with the child death toll invites the reader to regard those 17 children as more female victims of male violence — when in fact close to half of them were allegedly killed by women, and more than half were boys.

This matters beyond the count. Boys are more likely than girls to be victims of murder, and of most forms of child abuse other than domestic sexual abuse. Subordinating them to a “violence against women” narrative doesn’t just misrepresent who died — it obscures the mechanism. Most abused or neglected children survive, but they carry that trauma, and some grow into adults who go on to commit violence themselves. Given that boys are more likely to be abused and traumatised in the first place, the fact that men go on to commit more violence as adults shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s a pattern the “male violence” framing of the media and feminist groups ignores.

Framing distorted more than the statistics in July — it shaped how individual cases were told. Layla Jeffrey’s death saw, in the words of the local Mayor, “suspicion and innuendo that probably has no basis”. Coverage assumed the boy charged with her murder was a spurned or unrequited suitor — plausible, given how often crimes of passion drive our murder statistics, but unsupported by any actual evidence. In the absence of that evidence, some reporting leaned instead on secondhand characterisations of Layla herself, offered by adults who knew her, as though her personality had any bearing on who killed her. It doesn’t. The rush to fill an evidence gap about the accused with narrative detail about the victim is itself worth identifying — not because it makes her responsible for what happened to her, but because it shows how thin the actual reporting was underneath the story being told.

The causes of these acts of violence are complex. Poverty, mental illness, absent fathers, under-resourced child protection are just some of the common threads.

What the media offers instead is one collective explanation — “male violence” applied with enthusiasm everywhere it fits and quietly ignored where it doesn’t. That approach doesn’t get us any closer to understanding what’s happening to our children, let alone addressing it. Their deaths are simply subsumed under the mantra “women and children harmed, men are the cause”.

Children are the most vulnerable members of our society. For their sake, we must call out this ideological deception.

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