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.

WidowWadman have you got anything to say about the links I posted, or are you more interested in getting personal with Sakura?

I'm not getting personal with anyone Beachcomber. As for your links - I'm still looking through them. However, none of the sources can be called exactly neutral can they?

Also, if the suggestion , that the way to address genderedness in DV really is the recommendation that women are better off living away and seperate from men, than that's the point where I don't believe reasonable discussion is still possible.

I think that's her business.

Now can we get back to talking about the systemic nature of male violence against women and children and why so many people have such a vested interest in pretending there's no such thing as misogyny?

Nobody is pretending that there is no such a thing as misogyny. I think misogyny is sadly still a very real problem in our society. I don't think that misandry is the right response to it though

I read somewhere that a preganat woman is more likely, over the course of the pregnancy and birth to die at the hands of her partner than from any cause associated with the gestation or delivery.
Yet, look at how we more heaven and earth to protect the health of Mums and babies but do so little to prevent what is a greater risk.

widowwadman- you are confusing the concepts of men as perpetrators and men as victims. There is a great deal of overlap in these categories but even when men are the victims, they are the victims of other men.

And there you go again trying to make the thread about misandry now. How dull. Does misandry result in 1 in 4 men being raped or sexually assaulted, with 90% of those rapes going unreported and a 6% conviction rate for those which are reported? Does misandry result in men being paid 17% less than women for doing the same work? Does misandry result in 25% of men being beaten up in their own homes on aregular basis? Does misandry result in men being blamed for the violence that is inflicted against them? No, I don't think it does, I think I'd rather be a victim of misandry than misogyny.

This is interesting though

They always try and bring in that the woman involved may have had a 'lover' in the media.
Right from the start, with or without evidence, whether the killer has been seperated from the woman or has several other girlfriends, even if the 'lover' is infact a long term partner.

If this society is not into blaming women victims why do they do that?

I briefly corresponded with a mother who had lost her child to her partner. He had tried to kill himself and he asked his child 'do you want to come with daddy?' the child said yes because most children would if asked that question.
The only reason the other child wasnt killed was because they were upstairs at the time.

The press hounded this woman because she had a boyfriend. The marriage had broken down.

This mad had killed his own child yet SHE was being villified.

THAT is the sort of world we live in. It stinks.

and widowwadman your link did at no point give evidence that these '4%' of make victims of dv were being abused by WOMEN. A lot of these cases are in homosexual relationships, where yet again it is tha man who is the abuser.

People keep saying that women do this too (the family annihilitation thing) but I can't remember a case where a woman has killed her husband, children and then herself. When women do this sort of thing they usually seem to kill their children and then call the police. Obviously I haven't investigated this much but that's what I remember from the papers over the years. The characteristics are not actually the same at all, are they.

I mean, when women have babies, they are assessed for post-natal depression quite carefully and people are aware of post-partum psychosis. These conditions can in their extreme form result in people dying (murder/suicide). I don't see people crying out that it is terribly sexist and wrong that women are screened for these things when they have babies. In case they are a risk to their babies or themselves. No-one seems to get in a right old state about that being unfair.

So

Women have children and sometimes things can be such that they end up killing their babies. This is bad and we need to keep an eye out for it and screen for it.

Men have wives and children and can end up assaulting them, killing them. It is sexist to point out that this happens and the idea of trying to do anything about it is wrong wrong wrong.

In your example the women killing her children is down to psychosis. The claim made in this thread is that men killing their families is down to them being men.

That's the difference.

Of course, it's important to screen for mental health issues (and it's generally acknowledged that men can suffer from PND, too) and offer support where needed.

I think it's very important to look at the reasons why people ending up killing their children and/or partners, but not just dismiss it as "it's something men do". In this thread it has been suggested, that men do it because they are men which is not terribly helpful, as that implies that nothing can be ever done to stop these things from happening and to reduce DV bar locking all men up preventatively. And noone would seriously suggest that, surely?

I just don't believe in reducing people to their chromosomes and putting all men under general suspicion of being perpetrators.

I don't believe we have really got very far with the 'why do some men behave this way?' question.

It quite clearly isn't just 'because they are men' or more men would do it.

We touched on hyper-masculinity earlier but haven't examined it in detail.

The fact remains that this is a gendered crime so it would seem logical that there are gender issues at play, no?

By gender issues I mean such things as hyper-masculinity, societal expectations of men, the institution of marriage, society's condoning of dominating and possessive male behaviour, etc.

"In your example the women killing her children is down to psychosis. The claim made in this thread is that men killing their families is down to them being men."

not all all

clearly a man who kills his children has something very wrong with him too

"The claim made in this thread is that men killing their families is down to them being men."

I don't think you really understand the arguments WW. The claim isn't that it's down to them being men, it's that it's down to them being a particular type of man, with particular attitudes and values not shared by most men, thankfully.

"The logical conclusion, is that women should not live with men."

Systematic purdah? Thought that was the last retreat of the misogynists.

Just because something is a logical conclusion, doesn't mean someone is saying that everyone should do it.

There's a thread about dying your hair running at the moment. The logical conclusion of everything I know about hair dye, is that I should stop dying my hair. I'm not going to just yet though.

Honestly, why must everyone take everything so bloody literally? You just can't bat ideas around, can you?

We can have a debate about whether the logical conclusion is for women to avoid living with men on the basis that they might kill them, or to take into account that most men don't kill their partners or inflict any physical violence on them, so therefore the logical conclusion is that it's statistically safe to live with men, without anyone assuming that either side is saying that this is what all women must do, can't we?

Wannabe puts it right on the money and has it 100% right in my opinion.
On the flip-side there are some pretty drastic assumptions and solutions which make me want to gag.

But we are not claiming that 'all men are bastards' as wannabe asserts.

It is a shame that discussions like these take on this faux polarisation because people are uncomfortable with the fact that 95% of family annihilators are male (the majority are white too BTW).

This doesn't mean that 95% of men are bastards or any other strawman.

What it means is that this type of behaviour is predominately male behaviour. There are experts who study this type of behaviour and for them there is no question that it is related to gender. The question being asked here is why do some men behave with such extreme violence?

Personally I think the question is a useful one because I think it is part of the wider subject of domestic violence in general. It is not very common for a man to kill his family and himself (although the US figures are pretty disturbing). Male domestic violence that doesn't involve killing the entire family, is quite common however. And I think it comes from the same place as family annihilation - so we are back to themes of entitlement, ownership, hyper-masculinity, the power dynamic in the nuclear family, dominant male behaviour, etc.

Perhaps this is the wrong place for this discussion, I might start a thread in feminism about it.

Would you agree with the separation of women from men as a way of life to prevent this rare anomaly beachcomber?
Nobody can really dispute that DV is abhorrent and that female on male violence is on the rise.
This should be tackled as a social problem and shouldn't be looked at from the view that women are always the victim.
Shocking cases like the one the OP posted are too rare to legislate effectively.

Following the general theme of Beachcomber's post.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8877021/Mother-depressed-over-job-fears-kills-herself-and-her-two-children.html

www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/111206/texas-laredo-food-stamps-mother-kills-children

Although one should not infer that 95% of women are childkillers, violence and neglect of children by mothers with PND is predominantly female behaviour. There is no question that PND is a gendered issue.

I personally believe that the question of why some women behave with such extreme violence is a useful one as general child neglect by mothers is far greater than these extreme examples. So, we are back to the themes of entitlement as these women clearly believe that their children are possessions to do as they will with.

If anyone can see the flaws in the above analysis, I hope they can also see that it is identical in logical composition to Beachcomber's post. This trope of claiming that behaviour resulting from a psychotic break is some extreme form of normal "gendered" behaviour is both logically incorrect and offensive to whichever sex the argument is posited against.

I've got to agree with you there Larry.
From what I can gather the term family annihilation has been coined to fit around the man/fathers murderous acts.
When in reality it's the same acts that mothers/women commit for roughly the same motives.

Well I disagree. I don't know that cases like the one here are so terribly rare. Certainly men killing their partners is not a rare anomaly, I believe the figure is 2 a week in the UK. In one of the articles I linked to, it says that there are 10 murder suicides a week in the US, although it does not specify how many of those involve men murdering their partners and or family.

Certainly there appears to be a profile of the sort of person who commits this sort of crime.

I'm not looking at this from the view that the woman is always the victim - I'm looking at it from the view that in 95% of cases the perpetrator is male and the victims are women and children. I take this view because those are the figures I have read - are you disputing the figures?

Now what you describe as a rare anomaly, I see as an extreme on a common spectrum - that of male domestic violence. Are you disputing that killing one's spouse and children is an extreme form of domestic violence?

Do I think women and children living away from men is a solution? When I am at home with my kind DH and my safe life, I think 'no'. When I am faced with the reality of the figures of domestic violence, domestic abuse, rape, sexual assault and all other types of male violence and domination, I'm not so sure.

Certainly the current set up isn't working very well for far too many women.

Perhaps we can change things, but that would take a pretty radical overhaul of current society.

In the meantime women are being hurt and killed by men and we need to be honest about that before we will be able to do anything much about it.

I think the difference is whether the partner is killed or just the children - do women who kill their children kill the partner as well or just the children?

Am sure there is a theory that women kill their children as an extension of themselves and men kill the children as an extension of the woman. The profiles are completely different.