So sad to hear another father has killed his wife and child

[spongefingeranyone]

Have heard on the news today that a recently sacked police officer has killed his wife and youngest child, with the eldest two escaping with dreadful injuries. It just makes me so sad for his family and very very angry that another father has seen fit to do this terrible thing.

My condolences to the family.

Sardine,

"But most men do live their lives without being violent."

The key is in the word "most". I would definitely argue with you about the "natural" bit. We have two sons and I know lots of people with similar family structure. It takes years of patient work to stop siblings trying to hurt one another from time to time. Most adults and older children have learned not to hurt. However, I would say it is an acquired rather than a natural behaviour.

Once men are adults, it is certainly not normal for 95%+ of us to want to hurt others. However, there is an intractable minority for whom it is entirely natural. This is not due to society (although I am not denying it may contribute) but to their genes, neurophysiology and upbringing.

The police and social services cannot arrest someone before they have committed a crime, so they cannot stop most crimes, merely tidy up the mess afterwards.

You can't have it both ways - you claim at the same time (rightly) that the vast majority of men finds horrendous crimes as horrendous as women do, and at the same time you claim that men have no interest in stopping these crimes.

Somewhere there is a big logic fail in your reasoning

Widow,

Ahh, that is where a good feminist will try and draw a fine distinction between individual men and the patriarchal structure of society. So, individual men may find these crimes horrific but MEN as a structure will condone them. If you try to say that MEN (the hive mind version) are merely the sum of individual men, you will receive a long, waffly explanation full of sociological and psycho babble.

Of course, if anyone could really explain clearly and in plain English how we (as men) are doing nothing to stop these acts, yet simultaneously abhor them as individuals, I am all ears.

Stewie,

I suspect we each have an equally low opinion of one another, although neither of us actually has a clue about what the other one is really like in RL. Such are the vagaries of internet boards.

As ever, though, weak debaters attack the person rather than the issue.

Widow if you read the reports from government and police you will see that there are institutional problems with tackling violence against women which stem from sexism, apathy and attitudinal problems.

That is simply true.

It is also true that most people do not commit violent crime.

There is no contradiction there. Both of these things are factually, demonstrably true.

Those eager to point the finger of blame at one gender or another do nothing other than alienate huge chunks of potential support.

What is all this bizarre denial about the gendered nature of murder suicides all about? Most odd

It is not about being eager to blame (weird fucked up concept) or wanting to reprogramme men (paranoid fucked up concept).

It is about not being in denial about plain facts.

I can't find a comprehensive study for the UK - perhaps there are posters who know of one which says the complete opposite to this one? Please share it if so.

www.vpc.org/studies/amroul2008.pdf

Murder-suicide is ?a dramatic, violent event? in which a person, almost always a man, commits one murder or multiple murders, and then shortly after commits suicide. What makes these acts particularly disturbing is that they involve more than one person and often involve a family.

Nine states had 10 or more murder-suicides in the six-month period of the study. In order, these states were: Florida (24), Texas (24), California (17), Pennsylvania (14), Arizona (12), Georgia (12), New York (11), North Carolina (10), and Ohio (10). Additional study findings from the six-month survey period include:

* Of the 554 murder-suicide deaths, 234 were suicides and 320 were homicides. Ninety-five percent of murder-suicides were committed by men.

* Nine murder-suicide events occurred in the United States each week during the study period.

* Seventy-three percent of all murder-suicides involved an intimate partner (spouse, common-law spouse, ex-spouse, or girlfriend/boyfriend). Of these, 94 percent were females killed by their intimate partners.

* Forty-five of the homicide victims were children and teens less than 18 years of age. Forty-four children and teens less than 18 years of age were survivors who witnessed some aspect of the murder-suicide.

* Most murder-suicides occurred in the home (75 percent).

In this study, 95 percent of the offenders were male. Other studies analyzing murder-suicide have found that most perpetrators of murder-suicide are male?more than 90 percent in recent studies of the United States.5 Another study which only looked at murder-suicides involving couples noted that more than 90 percent were perpetrated by men. This is consistent with homicides in general, in which 89 percent of homicides are committed by male offenders. However, most homicides involve male victims killed by male offenders (65 percent), whereas a male victim being specifically targeted by a male offender in a murder-suicide is relatively rare.

The most prevalent type of murder-suicide was between two intimate partners, with the man killing his wife or girlfriend. Such events are commonly the result of a breakdown in the relationship.

In this study, 73 percent of all murder-suicides involved an intimate partner. Of these, 94 percent were females killed by their intimate partners.

Most murder-suicides with three or more victims involve a male ?family annihilator??a subcategory of intimate partner murder-suicide

Domestic violence is associated with a very significant number of murder suicides. Therefore stronger domestic violence legislation may be one avenue of intervention, including programs that assist men with coping with issues of and separation. Moreover, experts have suggested that more research should be focused on the impact that domestic violence murder-suicides have on the families in which they occur.

And it's just been confirmed that the family who died in Leeds were all stabbed by the dad before he set the house on fire. So that's two families wiped out by the dads in under a week.

This is absolutely a gender issue. I cannot believe that the stats in the UK are much different from those in the US

Beach,

I don't think anyone is denying that this specific (and VERY RARE) form of crime is committed by mainly males. But so what? Your very exact figure of 554 in the whole U.S represents one in 500,000 people.

So, a ludicrously small number of men commit murder suicide (and a few women too). I think that in itself tells you absolutely nothing about society. Of course, you can link it to other broader trends but this has to be done with hard data and hard analysis, not a load of assumptions all heaped on top of one another.

It is almost a truism to say that DV is connected to murder suicide. So, someone known to be violent is likely to be...um.....violent. I am a bit confused about your last sentence. Surely if the family is annihilated, that IS the impact on the family. Hard to research it further.

Do you really feel a differently organised society would prevent many of these from happening? And, is it really worth it? Who is going to pay for all of this research and these programmes you talk about? In a country where breast cancer is still a massive killer and where kidney dialysis is rationed for the elderly (yes, our lovely UK), I can think of better places to spend tax $.

larry-more women suffer violence at the hands of men than get breast cancer.
But you like inventing evidence for arguments so I'm not surprised you came out with that.

Last sentence is from study, not written by me (I included a link to the study as I always find it is best to read things in context).

It is not me talking about research and programmes - it is the people who study the issues at hand.

Maybe you should ask them why there are bothering to give a shit about what is only a few hundred murdered women and children after all (figures in the study were for a 6 month period).

I have an inkling it might be because the figures suggest that this type of crime is on the rise. I also have a suspicion that it might be because they are examining the issues from the position that these crimes are part of the wider picture, of the common phenomenon, of less extreme domestic violence. I say this because this is the framework of all the expert analysis I have read on the issue.

Didn't we cover that already though, upthread?

And if we want to take things to a logical conclusion, we could say that less money and research time spent on domestic violence may lead to savings in breast cancer spending.

A double whammy win win if ever I saw one.

Beach,

"Maybe you should ask them why there are bothering to give a shit about what is only a few hundred murdered women and children after all (figures in the study were for a 6 month period)."

The problem with any issue involving individual tragedy, and especially those that ex post facto seem preventable, is drawing rapid and strong conclusions from rare events. "Dog savages toddler" ends with a bunch of new and poorly drafted legislation about dangerous dogs. The Soham murders led to all the new CRB check legislation which has had the effect of putting off many well intentioned adults of helping out with children's events (and would not have prevented Soham anyway).

But who can respond to the question "so, you don't give a shit about 2 little girls cruelly murdered" in the affirmative without looking a completely callous bastard? The reality is that people suffer awful fates every day, some by accident and some deliberately, and the sad faces are driven by whatever the media decides is the cause du jour. Then we suffer a rather horrible competitive form of collective outrage and hysterical "grieving". Lady Diana was the best example of this. Realistically, most of us only have enough headspace to give genuine concern, sympathy and compassion to those we personally know. Of course, that does not mean that we cannot engage with other moral causes, but to pretend to be personally devastated by some stranger killing their family rings an entirely false note with me.

So, by all means, let's discuss what can be done about DV and whether these suicide/killings are linked to it or not. And, in that vein, I enjoy your posts and will check out the links in more detail.

But the argument that if one feels that there are more important things to worry about than this rare event (the killings themselves, not the whole spectrum) means that you do not care about women is an entirely false one and will lead to bad conclusions, and if ever legislated on, bad law.

Thanks for the response but you lost my attention at this point 'The problem with any issue involving individual tragedy'.

I see this as a women's rights issue - you don't. I think that is about the long and the short of it.

The problem with the Soham murders was that Ian Huntley had a host of rape and attempted rape accusations behind him, some of them involving girls under 16 ie children, and not a single one had ever resulted in anything happening to him. Now with hindsight I think it is fair to say that the women and girls who accused him in the past were probably telling the truth. As are the vast majority of women and girls who report this type of incident. However despite this long chain of events pointing to him being a dangerous bastard, he was able to freely go about his business and go and work in a school.

I would say that if a person has many separate accusations against them of the same crime, they are probably worth looking at from a police perspective. Unfortunately there was no "joined up" action and people who should have known that he was dangerous did not.

And there you have it. Not one random terrible incident but a serial offender with a host of allegations behind him who escalated and escalated until he killed.

Nothing to do with princess diana.

here you go

Shocking

Sardine,

Totally agree with your post but it has nothing to do with mine.

It is the extreme public reaction that I compared to Princess Diana...the efflorescence of public emotion about complete strangers.

"There is an extreme feminist fantasy whereby all human beings are born good until they are corrupted by this vague hive mind called the Patriarchy. It is utopian in the extreme and pretty close to Scientology in that if all us men underwent reprogramming, we might just come closer to the "ideal man" who could never hurt a fly"

Which seminal feminist text does that idea come from Larry? I don't seem to have come across it. Could that be because like most anti-feminists, you're jsut making things up about what feminists believe and then bruiting it about the internet as fact? Yes I think it could.

"I don't think anyone is denying that this specific (and VERY RARE) form of crime is committed by mainly males. But so what?" So what is that it's a gender issue. And that very rare form of crime, is preceded by a very common form of crime, which if dealt with properly at that stage, might mean that the rare crime might never happen. It's all on a continuum.

You are the one who brought up Soham.

Context is all. It was the overemotional public reaction, egged on by the media and then the rush to legislation. That was my point.

Soham = textbook example of what ElfenorRathbone was saying earlier.

Patterns of male violence against women not taken seriously enough, violence escalates, some women and or children are murdered.

Everybody is shocked at this random isolated incident of extreme violence that apparently came out of nowhere.

Except it didn't.