'Tragic Family Situation' - murder of children, apparently by their father.

[Northernlurker]

There is a horrible case in the news today. A father and three children disappeared from the home. Today the children were found stabbed and the father appears to thrown himself off a nearby quarry edge.
The police have confirmed they aren't looking for anyone else and one officer commented ''It appears to be a tragic family situation.' Now I have a problem with that description.

What's tragic about this is that three children have been robbed of their lives. It appears that the person who should love and cherish them has planned their removal from the home and then killed them. This isn't an accident. There is nothing inevitable about this crime. It occurred as a result of one person's actions and choices and it's not a 'family situation' at all. It seems to me that describing it as such detracts from the true violence of the situation. The police describe it as a muder investigation. Why not leave it at that? Why the need to soften it?

I see what you mean now about the difference - having both the murderer and the murdered within one's family.

I suppose if one believes the media are driven by genuine sensitivity for the feelings of people they write about, then it's possible to believe they chose the terms they used because surviving family members experienced something which made the case more worthy of the description "family tragedy" than in other cases. I don't happen to believe the media are driven by sensitivity or care for the feelings of anyone unless doing so will increase their revenues.

When a person does something horrible - a serious assault, a sexual assault on a child, killing someone, an act of terrorism, yes it is natural that the family and friends of the person will struggle to come to terms with what happened. They, too, may find it hard to square up their experience of their loved-one as gentle, sensitive or other positive qualities with the terrible act they committed.

But, in my experience, we don't see the press reporting accounts from families of all perpetrators in the same way. Particularly where the press have chosen to demonise the perpetrator, they frequently will vilify the family as well, at least indirectly. Often they will dig in to the person's history to find "reasons" for why they became evil, often centred on what they report as family "dysfunction." Remember some of the descriptions of the families of the two boys who killed James Bulger?

Basically, if they've decided a person is a "baddie," they'll scratch and scrape for evidence, rumours, statements from "friends," etc., whatever they can find to support their assertion.

However, if they have decided a person isn't really a "baddie," they'll similarly scratch and scrape for anything they can report that can counterbalance the horror of the crime they committed.

The media just aren't that keen for fathers, especially those who don't "fit" the template for "villian" (e.g. immigrant, substance misuser, long-term unemployed, criminal record, etc.) to be lumped into the "baddie" group, particularly the papers that witter on about upholding family values and traditions, etc.

I have very little support for media reporting of this, but I watched the policeman who was giving the press conference who used the phrase and I don't believe he had this same agenda. I have nothing but abhorrence for, say, the DM treatment of this with facebook statuses ripped from the mother's facebook account etc. I felt the policeman was just communicating that they didn't expect that there would be anyone else arrested in connection with their enquiries.

I didn't see the press conference video. But I did feel uncomfortable at the wording when I saw it in my yahoo news feed. I think many things could be presented as a "tragic family situation", suicide, or accidental death for instance, but this is an extremely violent, callous and cruel act and I don't think the wording fits the crime. I'm glad others noticed it too.

The person describing the murderer as gentle and sensitive was the murderer's father, which doesn't rule out him having had a history of abusing his wife and children.

and remember that 'sensitive' is a good catch-all word, often encompassing 'volatile'. i.e. someone who reacts easily and has little self control. What word would I use to describe someone I loved who didn't have much control over his temper?

My feelings of discomfort at passing judgement are still there - but I keep coming back to the fact that he stabbed them - and that act horrifies me, they watched each other die, this is not the act of a gentle man - this was brutal.

The only way it could fit the description is if he was in the grip of a psychotic mental illness.

It was not his father but his father-in-law. Slight difference.

Thing is, we don't know what happened and why it happened. So insisting that it must have happened a certain way, for a certain reason, and that the he was evil and an abuser without knowing any of the background just because it fits one's preferred narrative is stupid trial-by-internet.

We don't know either way. I don't think it helps anyone, and especially not those left behind, to speculate about the deed or his character.

There's something about today's item on the Daily Mail website that I feel very uneasy about. The maternal grandfather has written an open letter praising his son-in-law, there's a photograph of the grandfather in the park where he used to play with his grandchildren, and a comment from the family that the mother is "recovering well". All that doesn't really make sense to me, though I do understand that people react to bereavement in many different, and often not easily understood, ways, including denial and guilt.

But I've just got this awful feeling that this painting of the killer as a good guy is about him being seen as being "driven" to do what he did, and so far there appears to be only one candidate for that.

I think in general someone who develops some kind of sudden-onset psychosis that leads him/her to kill behaves in a more random fashion; there was a lot of calculation in these murders.
For instance, the severely mentally ill woman who murdered a teenage girl (recently convicted, can't remember the name) - she begged to be sectioned, she knew she was going mad, and when she wasn't locked up, she bought a knife and committed a murder but the girl she murdered was picked pretty much at random.

As to it being the FIL rather than the murderer's own father defending him, well, look no further as to why that poor woman stayed married to an abuser. She'll have been brought up to think that men matter and women don't, and no matter how vile your husband is, you have to 'work at the relationship' ie obey and placate him.

Quite possibly sgb but we don't know what the FIL is like do we ? He might just be unusually forgiving and generous like the famous father of the young woman murdered some years ago by the IRA bomb ? Or still massively in shock

sgb - what are your psychiatric qualifications?

WW: No professional qualifications but I read a lot and have friends in the MH-care professions. And one friend with a psychotic illness.

It's a very common pattern for abusive men to kill their children and then themselves to punish a partner who is trying to get rid of them. Men who do this have a history of abuse. I can't think of a single case in reality (though it's popular in fictional narratives) where a scenario like this turned out to be a Cunning Serial Killer who had actually killed them all and escaped.

I've just got this awful feeling that this painting of a killer as a good guy is about him being seen as being "driven" to do what he did, and so far there seems to be only one candidate for that.

Really, hugglemuggly?
Really?

And who apart from (some) posters on this thread are making these bizarre readings into what has been said?

You may not like the way this case has been reported, but please, bear in mind that it's you who are making these insinuations. You seem to want to 'blame' this sort of finger pointing on others, but you are making these bizarre statements.

I am very uncomfortable with the statement made by Ceri Fuller's father in law. I simply don't believe his daughter is 'recovering well' and I agree this was a brutal and calculated act and yet everything that is said - by the police and by the family seems to be designed to conceal that.

"Recovering well?" That makes it sound like they're talking about a broken leg, not the brutal murder of her children by someone she had loved and should have been able to trust.

I'm not a grief specialist but I can't imagine how a surviving parent in that position would ever recover, let alone after a few days.

This thread is really a bit out of control. No one knows them or the family and the speculation is vile and voyeuristic.

Nobody is speculating. We are commenting on events and comments in the public domain and in a context where male violence against women and children IS tolerated then I think it's important to do that.
What's vile is that those children aren't at home with their mother. What's vile is that the calculated removal of them from the home to an isolated location where they were stabbed to death is being dismissed as an inevitable and unavoidable event.

Agree northernlurker in that what is "vile" is that three children were stabbed to death by their father.

There are vile and evil things in this world and people should always try to be clear what they are.

I doubt too if I'd be saying my daughter was recovering well if God forbid this were ever to happen to her (as a mother). But I guess everyone's different and it's easy to say not quite what you mean when pressed for a comment by reporters I'm sure - especially in the aftermath of this tragedy.

No one is speculating? Sorry, but saying that the grandfather's statement is
"why that poor woman stayed married to an abuser. She'll have been brought up to think that men matter and women don't, and no matter how vile your husband is, you have to 'work at the relationship' ie obey and placate him" is speculating, and in a really offensive type of way given how little is known about the family.

I think it's weird, personally but really, not sure why saying that it's vile that three children are dead counteracts the fact that speculating on the dynamics of a family and what led to THIS particular tragedy is really quite distasteful. I have no issue with anyone talking broadly about family annihilation and what could be done to prevent it etc, especially as there does seem to be a pattern etc. However, talking about the specifics of a case that is current and has brought a whole world of tragedy to one family and one mother in particular just feels very, very wrong.

Thing is, I cannot think of a single case of a man killing his children and then either killing himself or making a gesture towards doing so, where the background was anything other than an abusive arsehole of a man, who the woman had been trying to get clear of for some time.
Men who do this are not 'decent' or 'sensitive' or 'driven to it', they are scum, and they will always, always have been abusing family members to some extent for some time before it happens. It's a pattern. They consider women and children to be inferior to adult males and to be the property of adult males.

What SGB and northern have said, with bells on.

There is something very odd about the reporting of this. Loathsome the way the FB statuses have been pulled to pieces.

I sadly agree with SGB.

Quick question, how/why are the papers allowed to lift statuses (sp?) from FB?

One of the worst threads I've seen here in a long time. Desperate stuff...

Look, what a lot of the people on this thread are discussing is how to prevent this sort of thing happening, not 'ooo, bwaaa, look at the people crying! Let's put up lots of faces! Anyone got any more juicy details?'