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.

Isn't epidemiology based on patterns? How meaningful could any research into family annihilation be if it refused to examine the gendered nature of it?

I don't know which poster first mentioned prevention but I imagine case studies of these men would help towards building the body of statistical and other evidence from which preventive strategies are developed, in much the same way as any other public health problem.

SardineQueen Not a question of approval - if it works, great, I just struggle to see how it would work. Nobody's on this thread come up with a suggestion yet. If you can demonstrate that a gender focus in prevention strategy is beneficial I'm all for it. At the moment I think it's a red herring

I'd dispute the figure that men do it more than women and that fathers are the family annihilators.

http://crime.about.com/od/female_offenders/a/mother_killers.htm

blog.chron.com/momhouston/2011/04/moms-killing-their-children-more-common-than-you-think/

Splitting percentages though will never give us an entirely true picture.

Maybe we should just have to accept that very bad things happen and all we can do is expect them?

Those aren't desperately reliable sources dementer. Why is there this determination to try and 'prove' that women murder their families as much as men do? It simply isn't true

According to the US Bureau of Justice:
For the years 1976-2005 combined, among all homicide victims, females are particularly at risk for intimate killings and sex-related homicides.
Homicide Type by Gender, 1976-2005
Victims Offenders
Male Female Male Female
All homicides 76.5% 23.5% 88.8% 11.2%
Victim/offender relationship
Intimate 35.2% 64.8% 65.5% 34.5%
Family 51.5% 48.5% 70.8% 29.2%
Infanticide 54.6% 45.4% 61.8% 38.2%
Eldercide 58.1% 41.9% 85.2% 14.8%

Sorry that layout makes it very difficult to read - stats are here

Hear, hear SGM.

Yeah, you keep saying that, but there's no proposal how?

What programs are already in place to stop family annilhilation?

All the links are about DV, which I think is a separate issue to the one in the case which started the thread.

Is that one a lie then?

It stems from the same thing, surely? Why would there need to be separate programs?

Do you really believe DV and the attitudes behind it are different from family murderers? Surely it's the ultimate expression of "power" and ownership?

Oh god it makes me sick how stupid some women are, that they will deny the gendered aspect to murder.

2 women a week in this country are killed BY MEN. Most murders are committed BY MEN.

FFS you stay in that river in Egypt.

Of course it's related to DV, how could it not be

there is a need to point out that women kill their families too because they do.

But the difference is that if a woman kills her children there must be some mental illness behind it, we must sympathize with her because clearly she was ill, even though that may not necessarily have been the case, we must not judge her in any way shape or form. Whereas when a man kills his family he clearly was a bastard and is just another statistical man who has acted as all men do in violence.

I can think of at least four women in the past couple of years who have murdered their children (and not killed themselves) at least one of whom did so to get back at her ex.

And we don't know whether there is a link between these killings and domestic violence. We don't know whether this woman and her family had previously been victims of domestic violence at this man's hands, so we cannot possibly judge.

The prevalence of women who murder their children in comparison to men who do the same is not relevant - what is relevant is the attitudes towards women who do so in comparison to men who commit the same acts.

A woman who murders her children is no less worthy of contempt than a man who does the same.

"The prevalence of women who murder their children in comparison to men who do the same is not relevant"

No no, it's not relevant at all.

Let's all just ignore the fact that family annihilation is overwhelmingly committed by men against women and children.

I expect you think that rape isn't a gendered issue either, because men get raped too.

And DV isn't a gendered issue.

And sexism isn't a gendered issue.

In fact, nothing is.

Similarly, black boys being murdered at bus-stops, isn't a race issue, because a few white boys occasionally get attacked by black boys too.

Nothing is systemic, nothing is related to anything else, everything is just random, atomised events with no relationship to anything else that happens in society.

So we can't make sense of anything. Righto.

Murder rate in England and Wales =619. That is ALL MURDERS. That is a rate of roughly 1-2/100,000 or, in other words, vanishingly small. I believe women killed via DV account for approximately 1/6th of all these murders, so there are, maybe 5/1,000,000 women.

For comparison, SIDS deaths are aproximately 50/100,000, road deaths are 10/100,000 and deaths from breast cancer are roughly 40/100,000 women.

While any individual death is a tragedy for those concerned, to draw any generalisations from such rare events is meaningless.

Oh, OK, so the police were wrong to draw any conclusions about racism from Stephen Lawrence's death then?

Because very few black people are ever murdered by racists. So few, that you can't draw any conclusions from those who are.

I see.

Comparing the male/female population split to a racist/non-racist population split is ridiculous.

Why is gender only important to you when the victim is female anyway?