Homicide Inquiry Reports as Active Texts

Inquiries into adverse events make a significant contribution to the way risk is understood in modern society. Reports produced by panels of inquiry represent an important textual development, yet some aspects of such texts remain relatively underresearched. In particular, it is the manifest functions of inquiry reports that receive attention rather than their latent symbolic functions. This paper focuses on homicide inquiry reports in mental health and demonstrates how these texts have behaved as active documents in structuring social relations and responses to risk in this field. It is argued that inquiry reports in this context have taken on the status of modern allegories. Such reports have been significant, both because they are symptomatic of increased levels of anxiety associated with mental illness in post-community care society and also because they have served to exacerbate these anxieties.