To think what the hell is going on with all the child murders at the moment

[Belle82]

I’ve had to turn my Facebook news tab off recently, as it became a bit of a running theme that I would go on there and look at news after LO went down. I know it works on an algorithm so because I opened one of these stories it’s going to pull up more in my feed.

But I am not exaggerating when I say there was at least one case of a child being murdered or left to die accidentally or by neglect once a week for the last 6/7 weeks.
Most of these cases were at the hands of their parents / step parents.

I know people suffer from mental health, I suffered from it very badly when my little girl was born.

But what is going on, there have been around 10 cases very recently and it is so disturbing.
Sorry, it’s kind of shaken me and angers me so much for these little children when they only deserved to be loved.

@iloveeverykindofcat

If the motivations are different then the preventative strategies may need to be too.

They usually are but not always. Criminologists typify family anniliators as anomic (fails to see family as separate from self) self-righteous (does it to punish a third party, usually other parent) disappointed (family has not lived up to rigid idea of what family should be, this includes honour killings) or paranoid (belief they are saving the family from a worse fate). Women are almost always the last kind, but not always. Men are sometimes the last kind, but not usually. Of course that's just a schema and in real life its a lot messier with a lot more overlap but it gives you an idea of how women are usually differently motivated to kill.

I think I can understand that, especially point 3. I can empathise with the notion that me not being here would really damage my dc and follow the logic that if I couldn’t bear it anymore that I could somehow ‘save’ them from that pain. I think what stops a lot of people (women especially) from taking their own life could be their children so it makes sense that logic can become horrendously skewed in a mental health crisis.

Bagelsandbrie
There was another horrible one in the papers recently where a Mum murdered her 3 children after they’d all been stuck in quarantine for 14 days after a move from New Zealand to South Africa. I know it’s always happened but there really does seem to be an awful lot of these things being reported at the moment

I read about this incident and my reaction was that I wasn’t surprised it didn’t happen more often.

I think a combination of NZ’s Covid isolation policies and their refusal to allow a parent to leave with their children after setting foot on New Zealand soil I think is draconian.

Male violence is killing so so many women and children. And men are killing themselves in horrific numbers. It is truly horrific.

@eddiemairswife

Infanticide used to be defined as the killing of a child under 1 year old by its mother.

It still is, under the Infanticide Act 1938 which addresses the deliberate killing of a baby under 12 months by its mother on the grounds that she has not fully recovered from childbirth . Pregnancy and birth can be horrendously destabilising for some women and so having a separate crime/defence is right. Most women who are convicted of infanticide don’t get a custodial sentence as the court recognises that the offence wasn’t their fault.

Killamarsh is local to me.
The Mum Terri was rumoured to be pregnant too. So 5 innocents.
The thing that's charged with four murders had self inflicted injuries.

I've been around a few years. There is an undercurrent now that I was either oblivious to or didn't exist before. It didn't even feel this bad when Sutcliffe was at large.
I dunno the reason but it's escalating and I don't believe it's all down to more reporting.

I think papers are reporting more, most cases dont get beyond local news.

There was a really horrific case a few years ago where a baby died in an awful way and her dad got away with it....... It was horrific. And so many failures it was unreal, but most people won't have heard of Poppi Worthington it was barely reported on beyond a few newspaper articles.

@MobyDicksTinyCanoe

I think papers are reporting more, most cases dont get beyond local news.

There was a really horrific case a few years ago where a baby died in an awful way and her dad got away with it....... It was horrific. And so many failures it was unreal, but most people won't have heard of Poppi Worthington it was barely reported on beyond a few newspaper articles.

I've heard of her.

I thought that was reported on a fair amount, I certainly remember reading about it more than once and finding it highly distressing.

That poor, poor baby.

This gives a bit of an insight possibly

Men that are losing control due to a relationship ending seem to take it out of the person trying to leave the relationship. Men with a history of abuse or violence are most likely to be the ones who do this. Obviously it goes without saying, NAMALT

Violence against women and/or children needs to be dealt with much more stringently

I think that it's just the more you look at news on a subject the more they serve you news about it.

If you look at the statistics, the number of under 15s murdered is about the same over the last 10 years. However, the rate of 16-24's has increased by 1/3rd/

I agree with a pp though, that although child murders have happened for as long as we can all remember (sadly), the incidence of whole family murders, eg ex wife or wife and kids, seems to have increased.

This article gives a good summary: theconversation.com/men-and-women-kill-their-children-in-roughly-equal-numbers-and-we-need-to-understand-why-153527

In the case of accidental killings of children, it is more likely to be cases of neglect among mothers and abuse among fathers.

In deliberate killings, women are more likely to kill babies and newborns.

Women are more likely to kill during a psychotic episode.

Women are more likely to kill out of a belief that they are sparing their child pain.

Men who kill children are more likely to have a history of domestic violence.

Men are more likely to kill children as an act of revenge towards their partner/former partner.

Familicide (killing partner and children) is almost exclusively committed by men.

Maternal health (physical and mental) is completely overlooked. It's all about the children. Even this thread gives the impression that child murder is worse when in fact all murders are equally horrific.

it’s kind of shaken me and angers me so much for these little children when they only deserved to be loved

What about mothers who kill though? Why is there no anger towards a system that does not help a struggling mother? How bad must things be for someone to kill?

@Booknooks

Male violence. Yes some women do, and yes societal pressures and mental health invariably plays a part in some cases; but there's always a lot of mental gymnastics and excuses for male behaviour.

I would say it's the opposite on this website. People are very quick to condemn men but look for excuses when it's a woman committing murder.

One case that has stuck with me was Liam Gonzales Bennet.

The poor child was badly beaten and neither the mother or her fiancé were charged. Lack of evidence apparently ☹️

The details of his injuries were heartbreaking and yet both are free.

I doubt anyone will agree but at the moment authorities are so stretched that people who need help are slipping through the net. it is so hard to get mental health help I speak from experience social workers are stretched and cannot help everyone and of course, some people just don't want to appear to need help or don't believe they do.

It really surprised me when I started on a paediatric orthopaedic ward, just how common Non accidental injury is.

www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/hawe-family-murder-inquest-psychotic-11723554
This hapened in Ireland a few years ago.We seemed to have a few of these happen with in close timeframe.

www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-40292267.html
That happened last year and in this case the mother murdered her children.

@Blossomtoes

Infanticide by mothers is a class of crime that needs to be seen and understood separately from male murder of families / family annihilation

Why? That’s completely illogical. The kids are dead, regardless of the sex of their killer.

When the child is a year or younger it is classed as infanticide and the case will be seen differently - in the UK and Wales - than if the child is older. This is due to an understanding of PND which can lead to a mother murdering a child. As far as I'm aware infanticide only applies to women and would only be considered if there are no other factors linked, so if you were, for example, the mother of Baby P - who I know was older than 12 months - then the long-term abuse would have made it unlikely that the special status of infanticide would be used.

@GrolliffetheDragon it was reported on but not massively. Her story was only heard because the media campaigned to make it public.

Considering the mess they made, the police not protecting the crime scene, the fact he went back to live with his other children for months afterwards and the absolute fuck up by social services and their attempt to keep the whole thing quiet im amazed it wasn't blown up a lot more.

I read that no woman who killed her baby within one year of giving birth, was sent to prison, as it would be deemed a postnatal mental health issue.

Andrea Yates is a really interesting case about lack of mental health support / care and how stopping medication can lead to tragic circumstances- she drowned her 5 children in the bath, in the one hour her husband left her home alone (he had been told not to leave her unsupervised but he’d decided to go to work and her mother in law was due to come round to be with her one hour after he left).

Darlie Routier is another case where the Mum stabbed the two children to death - although she has always maintained her innocence and said an intruder did it.

Then you have all the other women murderer / child abuse type cases - Daniel Pelka where the mum was just as involved as the step dad, Liam Fee the little boy murdered by his foster Mum and her female partner, then of course you have more high profile cases like Rose West (who killed one of her step children when Fred west wasn’t even around, he was in prison) and so on. There was also a story recently where a young mum went clubbing and left her toddler at home for 6 days alone and the toddler died.

I think it’s really important to keep mental health issues in mind because they do factor in so frequently with women murdering young children but it’s also important to remember that women do all sort of crimes like this with all sorts of motives - or lack of them.

Not sure if anyone has linked to this but it’s an interesting article -

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/men-and-women-kill-their-children-in-roughly-equal-numbers-and-we-need-to-understand-why-153527

I think a combination of NZ’s Covid isolation policies and their refusal to allow a parent to leave with their children after setting foot on New Zealand soil I think is draconian.

Regarding the woman who killed her three children last week. They had been planning the move for two years, they would have known and understood the managed isolation - and as for a parent not being able to leave, they had only been here a week, she was hardly planning on leaving again! This was a professional couple, who had been dreaming of moving to NZ - how dare you try to blame NZ's covid policy for something which was already seriously amiss!

My mother tried to kill me while I was still in the womb. (Quinine to induce miscarriage.)
My father tried too kill me after I was born, and "wouldn't stop crying".
After he had left the "family home", she left my sister and I alone overnight, ages under three and 18 months. My sister had rickets, I got burnt and we were both underfed. Lucky to survive I guess, with no SS involvement until we were both in foster care.

They were both 18/19 at the time.

He also tried to harm his second wife when he found out she was pregnant. He forced her to have the baby adopted.

He writes "thrillers" - they reveal the type of character he is, and always has been.

@Theworldishard

I read that no woman who killed her baby within one year of giving birth, was sent to prison, as it would be deemed a postnatal mental health issue.

No that's not true.

@Cornettoninja Sadly that's normally the case when a woman does it. When man falls into the paranoid category, it tends to be part of some wider delusion about the end of the world or some such - I vaguely recall one where the killer was convinced he had to send his children to heaven whilst their souls were still pure or something along those lines (in a tragic and twisted way it was self-sacrifical, as he would rather have been damned by sin himself than they be, if you see what I mean). But yeah paranoid killers are the ones you can have a kind of sympathy for, they are very very mentally ill.