Cavan family annihilation by a "brilliant Dad"

[DoinItFine]

Is anyone else reading all about what an amazing guy Alan Hawe was with mounting disbelief and fury?

He stabbed his wife and three sons to death in a frenzied attack and then hung himself.

But poor him, he must have bern awful tortured. And he went to mass all the time.

Great Dad

You know when you read awful threads about abuse on MN and then out it comes "he's a great Dad", and you think "what does a man have to do to losr that label?"

Well apparently you can murder your 3 kids and still keep the Great Dad title.

One can refrain from judging people who've just had half their family massacred whilst also not baselessly speculating about the murderer's mental state. Let's do both.

You can do both or neither.

Unless you can excuse the brutal murders as "not his fault", you can't justify treating the murderer the same as his victims.

Why are you conflating justification of the mother's decisions with not judging her about them when she's just been through horrific trauma? Not judging includes not making positive judgement either: people who are not judging her are by definition not offering approval of her decisions either.

Because I think "not judging" is indistinguishable from approval in most circumstances.

Like "not getting involved" when one person harms another.

I think the decision to publicly exonerate your daughter's and grandsons' murderer days after their brutal deaths is morally extremely problematic.

I am trying not to extend my judgement of that rush to defend to the people doing the defending. They are traumatised.

But it bothers me that in their trauma their immediate instinct is to defend the murderer.

It raises questions about where Clodagh could have turned.

We don't know the full facts - therefore we don't sit at home casting judgment on people. We know minimal facts.

We don't know Clodagh's mother's reasoning or how we might react ourselves to such an event. I went through a traumatic event - but nothing close to as traumatic as this. I forgave someone and was judged negatively for that. I was very annoyed at people deciding they knew better about how I should react when they had never had such an experience themselves.

We don't know if the father had a mental illness or if he was mentally heathy. We can't judge so.

*Because I think "not judging" is indistinguishable from approval in most circumstances.
*

Feel free to judge once you know the full facts - wait until then, otherwise you are judging in ignorance

Sorry, we can absolutely judge a brutal murderer.

Refusing to judge a brutal murderer on the off chance he was mentally unwell is a judgement to excuse his actions

Because I think "not judging" is indistinguishable from approval in most circumstances.

Then you think wrong, I'm afraid. You are conflating two quite different things, and it's particularly problematic that you do this as you (correctly) take issue with others who have no more knowledge of anyone's mental state than you do speculating about the father's sanity or otherwise.

Clodagh's mother is the victim of a hideous crime. Outrage is better directed at the people who were not and yet still think it's ok to centre the murderer and erase the woman who was slaughtered.

The "full facts" are never knowable about pretty much anything.

I will judge the brutal murderer based on the 4 brutal murders he did.

The mother is not up for judgement in my opinion. She's lost too much.

I also understand that she was in that house a great deal, she did regular childminding for them. She clearly mustn't have seen anything too disturbing given how blindsided she appears to be and her loyalty towards Alan even in death.

So it's possible that he was a master at hiding his other face, even from his MIL who was around all the time.

In that scenario, I can see how the poor woman would be thinking in terms of "brain storm" or one of those archaic terms.

As it is, the poor woman must be lying awake wondering what she missed, how she missed it, and what is she going to do now with them all dead. I believe she lost a son to suicide a few years ago too.

I have nothing but sympathy for her, as her sentence is lifelong. That sympathy isn't dependant on where Alan is buried.

Mm, well potential family annihilators can surely take great comfort from this case.

Put on a good front, Get involved in your community and everyone will forgive the most violent and deliberate crimes.
You'll even be regarded as a victim too. Bonus.

Clodagh was the victim of a hideous crime.

Her 3 sons were the victims of hideous crimes.

They were the primary victims of what happened.

They are the ones who were stabbed to death.

She clearly mustn't have seen anything too disturbing

She clearly mustn't have been dusturbed by what she saw.

That is very different.

Particularly in the light of her defence of him even after it is known that he murdered them all.

This type of reporting happens again and again. Yes to what pp said about it not happening in a vacuum. It is appalling.

I can't help but feel that when we are repeatedly given the 'male' perspective, that patriarchal shaping of our culture will continue. Female journalists, editors and owners of media institutions seems to be the only way that there will be a change in this narrative.

potential family annihilators can surely take great comfort from this case.

And their potential victims can get even more afraid.

You can tell that WA are extremely worried about this case and what it means for vulnerable families.

But again, you're putting the mother on trial. Now it's that she turned a blind eye???

I'm not down with that.

I'm also not down with the priest who is comforting the family being "a dodgy fucker".

Let's keep the blame to Alan.

It certainly would be a crime of the dad was mentally healthy but we don't know if he had a mental illness that could have led to him being found not guilty by reason of insanity

We just don't know either way. I'm not saying he's evil or innocent - I'm saying we don't know.

I hate that people think that mental illness is an excuse for murdering your entire family. There are plenty of people with mental health problems who manage to not go on killing sprees, and I would like to point out that there is a very, very large difference between women who crack under pnd and smother their babies and someone who violently stabs their entire family to death, has the presence of mind to write 2 fucking notes and then chooses to kill themselves in a far more humane way.

My grandfather had what was then called paranoid schizophrenia. When he tried to kill his whole family it was his illness's way of letting out the fact that he hated women, saw them as inferior and believed that as head of the household he had the right to kill them all. Yes he may have been mad at the time, but he was also evil to the core - he was exceedingly good at being charming too so no-one really believed my mother until the police were involved.

No, the blame is on Alan and all his supporters.

These crimes do not happen in isolation.

They are part of patriarchal oppression and minimising the crime is part of that.

Every person who has gone on the record defending a mass murderer should be taking a long hard look at themselves.

It is not morally neutral to say that a man who murdered all his children was a "great father".

*Clodagh was the victim of a hideous crime.

Her 3 sons were the victims of hideous crimes.

They were the primary victims of what happened.*

Yes and the secondary victims are the close family and friends of the people who died. Why would you so harshly judge how they behave and the decisions they make.

I hate that people think that mental illness is an excuse for murdering your entire family.
Do you think they should get rid of the insanity defence?

We should certainly get rid of the bizarre idea that all murders were done by blameless mad people unless we can prove otherwise.

It's not 'harshly judging' to be unable to understand the mindset that is violent killers = great dads. RIP.

I'm also not understanding the mindset that it's not a crime if he's mentally unwell...I mean, what is that?

I watched that film about cardinal law the other week (abuse cases by catholic priests in Boston, can't remember the name of the film.)
One of the saddest things in it was the families who knew their kids had been abused but were keeping quiet under pressure from the church and community. Virtually none of the parents 'took things further' due to this. I struggled watching that because if anyone hurt my child my first instinct would be to find and punish the perp. How strong must that pressure be that that instinct is overridden? Where could those families have turned to in the community for help?

These murders don't happen in isolation. They occur in a deeply patriarchal society, where there is huge denial about DV and big pressure to keep the veneer of normality up.

The media coverage of this case is depressing and disturbing.

When people use the insanity defence and get found not guilty by reason of insanity they don't just then get to go free because "oh you were mad and couldn't help it but off you pop now you poor lamb". They get assigned to psychiatric hospitals, sometimes for an indeterminate sentence.

Imagine Alan hadn't killed himself after violently murdering his family - do you honestly think that if he was then diagnosed with a mental illness that he shouldn't be punished for his crimes? Seriously?

That's not the point here one. The point is that people don't want to discuss the pattern of male family annihilation and they avoid this by treating each case in isolation and seeking to explain it in isolation. So speculating about mental illness as an explanation as to why this happened and why we shouldn't discuss it further. It is a neat tactic for keeping everyone in denial about these crimes and what we could be doing to prevent them.
If you look at the bigger picture then actually, most family annihilations are reported in exactly this way, going on about what a great dad the man was, minimising the murdered women. These are crimes almost exclusively committed by men, men who fit a particular profile.
In some ways it reminds me of how we discuss rapes. There's always reasons to minimise and excuse men doing truly horrific things to others.