Filicide:: A review
Introduction
The killing of a child by a parent is a rare but profoundly disturbing event. Police, clinicians, social workers, and the public struggle to understand how such a thing could happen. There is, however, a considerable literature on the subject from a range of disciplines and perspectives. This paper is a descriptive review of the empirical literature in order to consider how it can contribute to making sense of filicide and identify future research directions. Depth of coverage of studies was allocated on population studies or those with a unique contribution to the literature. Studies were accessed through Medline, Psychlit, and Current Contents searches using the terms “filicide” and “infanticide.” Cited published work not otherwise generated in the search was also sought.
The paper first considers general features of child murder, followed by examination of maternal filicide, paternal filicide, and related issues such as death by neglect and murder misidentified as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Issues towards formulation are considered followed by a brief section on future directions. “Filicide” is used as a generic term describing the killing of children by their parents, including step-parents. It encompasses neonaticide, infanticide, and filicide.
Section snippets
Sociocultural considerations
Attitudes to filicide vary greatly through time and cultural context. In ancient Rome, the right of a father to kill his own children was protected Black, 1979, Finkel et al., 2001. Disproportionate value placed on male rather than female offspring in countries such as China, Fiji, and India have led to female infanticide and feticide on a scale which may be far greater than official figures suggest Adinkrah, 2000, Judson, 1994, Kumar, 1995. Physical and cultural constraints lead to
Other forms of fatal maltreatment
It is argued that between one-fifth and one-tenth of early childhood deaths currently described as SIDS are not due to natural causes (Emery, 1993). Meadow (1999) described the clinical features of 81 cases of murder misidentified as SIDS and described a history of unusual or unexplained medical events rather than reports of suspected abuse or neglect. Covert video recordings have been made of parents deliberately engaging in life-threatening child abuse while their children were in hospital
Means of filicide and disposition of offenders
Means used to kill the children are less violent than in murder in general, with babies killed in the first 24 hours usually by neglect or accident Marks & Kumar, 1993, Resnick, 1970. Mendlowicz et al. (1999) described an exception to this in a series of neonaticides in Brazil where 77.4% were killed through wounding violence. Female offenders rarely used weapons with frequent use of less violent means such as drowning or suffocation, with banging, hitting, or throwing also being common Cheung,
Towards a formulation of maternal filicide
The most uniform and clearly delineated group is the neonaticides. Marks (1996) described a process occurring in young uneducated women who had exercised such powerful denial of an unwanted pregnancy that it seemed to influence the perceptions of the people around them and attenuate the biological manifestations of pregnancy. The arrival of the baby was then experienced as a traumatic shock confronting the woman with the fear, which motivated the denial. The resulting anxiety was of such
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2015, Journal of Forensic and Legal MedicineVictim, perpetrator, and offense characteristics in filicide and filicide-suicide
2015, Aggression and Violent BehaviorCitation Excerpt :Even though infanticide refers to the killing of an infant (under the age of one year), it has frequently been used to denote the killing of a child of any age by a parent. Neonaticide corresponds to the killing of a child in the first 24 h after birth, while filicide refers to the killing of a child over the age of 12 months (Bourget, Grace, & Whitehurst, 2007; Stanton & Simpson, 2002). Although rates of child murder have decreased in developed countries, it remains an important cause of children's mortality (Koenen & Thompson, 2008).