What is the matter with these men? (Not funny)

[Janh]

Another one who killed most of the family and then jumped off a bridge - left the baby in the car this time

BBC

Oh, Tom, before i pick up my paintbrush, I notice some of your post was addressed to the 'dull among you" - who exactly are you insulting by comment?
I just can't get over men linking women getting residence orders with the mass killing of a whole family.
It's like saying the reason guards shot escaping concentration camp prisoners was because they would miss their company otherwise.

FWTW, I agree with Aloha. Well explained in the face of some pretty obstinate and damn near illiterate attempts to misconstrue the argument.

I read this this am but didn't have time to reply - thanks aloha for saving me the trouble and putting it so well.

yep
xxxxxx

can I ask a simple question to those like Tom and Aloha who have studied the statistics in much more depth than me?

The men who murdered their families: what majority of them were proven violent and abusive to their partners or children before the murder? In other words how easy it is to assume the same motives for all these murders? It seems to me that Tom is saying that the pasts of these men varied from case to case, so the final motives may vary too, while Aloha is saying a big majority of men had a record of violence and unreasonable, controlling behaviour beforehand and this carried through to murder.

FWIW, tigermoth, this is the current one's previous wife - he broke her nose (amongst other things).

Of course there was the man who gassed 3 or 4 (?) little boys in his car (and made one of them speak to his mother while it was happening) - that death wasn't violent as such, not sure what the family history was.

Must say I would be very surprised if any of the men who kill their children had no history of violent/mentally disturbed behaviour; but where you draw the line, and what you do about it, and where the money would come from to do something about it, isn't a decision I would like to have to make.

I remember that one too Janh, makes my blood run cold.

Oh yes, I remember the one about the little boys gassed in the car while the father talked to the mother on his mobile. Absolutely terrible.

I looked at the link you gave, janh, and that father obviously had a very violent past. From reading this thread I see that this type of history is not uncommon.

I was reading yesterday's Telegraph magazine and saw an article about Reunite, a charity that seeks to reunite children wrongfully separated from their main carer. Deirdre Cowley, age 6, was brutally shot and killed by her school teacher father after he had hidden her away in a cottage for 21 months. He had been granted access to his daugher, and had carefully planned an abduction.

He shot his daughter just as the police were surrounding the home. In the article Dierdre's mother is quoted as saying her husband 'had no history of mental illness.There was nothing in his past or that of his family to suggest he had a cruel or violent streak in his nature'

I don't know what to make of that, as with all the other cases, it fills me with sadness and horror.

Janh, in the gassing case, the man had regular contact with the boys, but he hated his ex for leaving him and having a child with her new partner. He explicitly told her he would get 'revenge' on her for it, and he killed the kids as an act of violence against his wife. Nothing to do with missing his kids, yet again.

OK, here are the horrible details. As you can see, it meets the criteria perfectly - violent man, had contact with the kids (so was not 'driven insane by lack of contact" who was so enraged that his abused wife had finally escaped him that he committed the worst imaginable act of violence against her. Do tell Tom, do you think that giving residence orders to more men would have helped in this case?

The dad who killed four sons
FARM WORKER: Keith Young
THIS is the father who gave an horrific running phone commentary to his estranged wife as he killed their four sons.

Farm worker Keith Young, from Winsford in Cheshire, called Samantha Young on her mobile, put their seven-year-old son on the line and said: "Say goodbye to your mum and tell her you love her."

Little Joshua obeyed his dad.

Samantha, who now uses her maiden name of Tolley, could hear her other children crying and the sound of a lawn mower engine pumping out the carbon monoxide that killed them and their father in his car, an inquest in Wrexham was told.

As she desperately tried to keep him on the phone, police attempted to trace the call.

Samantha asked Joshua, her eldest son, where they were, but he replied: "It's too dark, it's too smoky."

The inquest was told how the couple had a stormy relationship. Samantha, of Cleveland Way, Winsford, was assaulted a number of times, but kept returning for the sake of the children.

They had met when she was 14 and he was 24 but kept their relationship secret as he had just moved in with another woman.

She finally left him for good late last year but Mr Young, 38, of Littler Lane, Winsford, became depressed and talked of killing himself and his children. When he found out Samantha was pregnant by another man he carried out his threat.

Mr Young took Joshua and his three other sons, Thomas, six, Callum, five, and Daniel, three, out of their beds in their pyjamas, clutching pillows and quilts, and drove them to a lay-by on the Horseshoe Pass in North Wales.
Grudge

He started a lawn mover in the car and at 12.20am on March 27, called his wife to tell her what he was doing. Referring to her pregnancy he said: "I hope you're happy, I hope you have a grudge against that baby for the rest of your life.

He then asked her: "Can you hear the mower?" to which she replied "Yes", and then "Can you hear your children?" to which she said "Yes" before the call ended.

Mr Young rang again at about 1.15am when a police officer and her brother Steven listened to the call. Samantha told him she would have an abortion and they could try and make their relationship work. But he replied: "It's too late - Dan's dead."

Samantha asked to speak to one of her other sons who could be heard asking for his mother.

Mr Young put Joshua on the line and told him to tell her he loved her and say goodbye, which he did.

He then said: "It's one down, I've got to go through with it, I've gone too far. I'll go to jail, I've got to do it."

The children could be heard coughing and crying.

Mr Young said another of the boys had died and then the third. He said he was feeling sleepy and had a nosebleed. "Isn't it funny - getting a nosebleed before you die," he said.

Samantha heard him breathing heavily and then silence.

The next sound she heard was the voices of police officers who had found the car and smashed a window to try and get to her sons inside. But it was too late and they were dead.

North Wales coroner John Hughes described the deaths as "one of the most harrowing cases I have seen."

"Nothing in this life prepares us for the death of a child," he said. "The effect is far-reaching. It affects the parents, the families and it affects friends and the coroner too.

"This case has been like a dark cloud which has been waiting ever since I heard of this terrible sequence of events. It is one of the most harrowing cases I have had to deal with. My heart goes out to all those who have been touched by it."

He said *no one had taken Young's threats seriously**, adding: "He repeatedly talked of taking his own life and taking the children with him. Those who heard the threats did not think for one second he was going to do it.

"The last thing you would expect a doting father to do would be to harm his children."

OR as we have shown, it was far from the last thing anyone should have expected. When the partners of violent men escape them, they do this kind of stuff. And how DARE this fool of a coroner describe this child-murderer as a doting father. Doting fathers do NOT beat up their children's mothers then slowly murder their kids. This kind of attitude makes me so angry.

Obviously the winkie was not intentional.

How harrowing. Agree with you all the way aloha.

And another, March last year"

Father 'killed sons after wife left'
sA father killed his two young sons "because his wife left him," a court has heard.
Brett Wilson, aged eight, and his seven-year-old brother Bradley, of Great Barr, Birmingham, were discovered in a car parked at the Hilltop and Manwood Farm Golf Course, Park Lane, Handsworth, in February last year.
A jury at Birmingham Crown Court heard on Monday that the boys' father, Steven Wilson, slit Brad's throat and stabbed Brett in the neck with a screwdriver.
The jury was told that Mr Wilson, 44, had assaulted his wife Denise during a meeting to discuss their break up before he killed his sons

The pressure group Women's Aid has compiled a list of more than 15 children killed by fathers during contact visits after the parents' relationship broke up. It includes cases such as that of Daniel and Jordan Philpott, whose father, Julian, killed them on a contact visit in August 1999 after being granted unsupervised access - even though he was facing charges of actual bodily harm against their mother.

God, that is just so vile.

eading these reports (and rather wishing that I haddent as they are so harrowing) it seems blindingly obviuos whu these me do these things. They hate their wives and want to hurt them in the most awful way possible. Even if they have decided to kill themslves they want to destroy their wives lives forever, and killing the children does that. This isn't an act of a moment, it requires preplanning and an evil that few of us can imagine. The reason that they do is it to have the ultimate revenge over someone, and in doing so they made sure that they will continue to 'control' their wives even when they are dead. What other possible explantion can there be?

hmb, I'm really glad it seems obvious to you too! I have to say, this is beginning to affect my blood pressure to a really unhealthy degree. I just can't bear to see these women's deaths being used as a reason for more men to get residency of their children. If these terribly crimes affect policy in any way it should be that violent men are denied contact with their kids full stop. Certainly not the other way round. I noticed that so-called Spiderman bloke used precisely this argument - 'men kill their kids and wives because they don't have contact' - recently. It's obviously a bit of a mantra in the men's movement. And I'd love to know a bit more about that man's background. I really would. I have grave suspicions about his devoted father routine anway after he announced that Spiderman was his ten-month old daughters favourite film. Er, I think not, actually.
Must log off now before my head explodes.

Aloha, there is a biblical precedent for understanding that if someone truly loves a child they would rather see it be brought up by someone else than to see it die. Remember the judgement of Solomon? Two women contested the motherhood of a child. Solomon tested them by saying that the child should be chopped into two and each woman given half. The true mother said to give the child to the other woman and to let it live.

To my mind anyone who is prepared to damage their child in any way, let alone kill it, shows that they are not a true parent. These men are not fathers, they are psychopathic monsters. My husband is a father, he loves his children, and that is the essential requirement of a parent.

OK, have done some googling on the Spiderman protester, David Chick, and his partner accused him of violence prior to their separation. Details here

Families Need Fathers have a deeply dodgy reputation too but I'm afraid I don't have any of the details to hand; just know the reputation.

I did not intend to post on here again but feel I must after reading what has been written

Aloha here here for your eloquent posts.

The sad thing for me is that these acts have been attributed to a situation that I found myself in very recently - not one person on here can ever understand the utter despair of being seperated from their child unless it has happened to them - the times I have sat and sobbed or the times I have sat and known that if I started sobbing I wouldn't stop - there have been times that I have been physically sick from wanting just to reach out and touch her and I couldn't - times when he has put her on the phone and as much as I wanted to speak I couldn't I just had to put the phone down because just hearing her voice and not being able to hug her would have destroyed me - times when I have left work in the evening and seriously thought about not stopping at the pelican crossing when the red man was flashing but just walking on across hoping that the 149 to London Bridge would run into me - times when I have seriously thought about driving off the side of the QE2 bridge or swallowing a hand full of pills but there has been at no point a time when I have even thought about harming a hair on my childs head and what really fucks me off to the point that if I ever met you Tom I think I could actually become violent (and that is seriously not me) is that you could actually attach an issue like this to us parents who are/have been seperated from our children.

Please don't - it is an affront to men and women who find themselves seperated from their children and I find it utterly distasteful that you could do this - if you are seperated from your child and feel like this please get help, if not shut up because you do whatever cause these men that truely want to see their children are fighting no justice whatsoever.

I'm with you, aloha and co, twinkie - I can't see a link between separation from children that you love and murdering them - and would go as far as to say I find the link distastful.

I have been thinking about the idea that all murdering fathers were violent or controlling to their wives or children previously. If this is so overwhelmingly the case, why is this fact not widely recognised by everyone and why are violent fathers still allowed unsupervised access to their children?

twinkie - i agree with what you say, up to a point, I think that the way you describe your feelings of separation and not being able to even envisage a situation where you might harm your child as a result, is what most of us would believe we would react like in that situation.

What I do think though is that there is no doubt whatsoever that separation is the catalyst for these men to commit these terrible acts. They are not processing the separation in the same way as you are - thats why you would never dream of doing something like that - if you like thats why they are evil/mad and you are not!

As many have said on these thread these men have invariably been highly violent people during the relationship with the mother, and possibly to the children involved as well. That is not normal behaviour either.

I do think it is important to link the separation and the final act - only then will the women going through separation from violent exes have a chance to get the protection that they need. This may well require a greater understanding by the courts etc that these men should not be granted access, or that the women need to be given injunctions against the perpetrator, although sadly in this case it didn't work. No one is excusing their behviour in making the link between separation and the act of murder (not even Tom I think), but it must be recognised as the catalyst otherwise I fear that we cannot protect those who need protection properly.

Tigermoth, the reason that violent men are still given access to their children, is because the courts and society still pretend that domestic violence is not a real problem. Women being used as punchbags is not that unusual, and unless it starts to upset the neighbours and lower the house-prices, it seems that the view taken overwhelmingly is that it shouldn't be considered important enough to reflect negatively on the character of the person perpetrating the violence - in other words, it doesn't really matter.

This is particularly so when there is no evidence of a man hitting his children. Again, courts, social services and society in general appear to take the view that hitting a woman is OK, as long as the kids aren't hit. The fact that a child has had to endure the horrific, frightening sight of one of the most important people in his or her life being savagely attacked by the other most important person in his or her life, and the effect that has on a child's emotional responses, self-confidence, ability to negotiate relationships, ability to grow up into a stable, functioning person,etc. is completely and totally ignored, largely due to a very male approach of compartmentalising (how the hell do you spell that word?) different experiences off from each other, and pretending that watching your mother being battered isn't going to have a seriously catastrophic effect on your psyche. And until it's more generally recognised that to beat a child's mother is an act of child abuse in itself (something many men will scream blue murder to deny), these bloody men will continue to be treated as if they are suitable people to be put in charge of vulnerable children.

JMG - what I'm saying (which is where I part company from Tom) is that it is the fact that their partners have taken control and left that provides the motives for these men. It's not separation from their children that bothers them, it's that their victim (their partner) has had the temerity to escape from them. Men kill their partners when they leave in cases where no children are involved, though that isn't as well publicised. And far from these cases being a reason to extend residence orders to men, which Tom certainly appeared to be implying, I agree with MeanBean's well argued post - violence to the mother IS violence to the child. And when a man threatens to kill his partner/kids, it should be taken very seriously indeed and she should not be forced into contact with him via the kids. It is a strong argument for reducing the number of men who have contact with their kids, not vice versa IMO.