minor analysis paper

Casey Penaluna
Minor Analysis Paper

Part One
Introduction to my topic

According to F.B.I. statistics for 2006, the most recent data available, 462 of the 14,990 homicides for which an offender was identified were parental murder. Of these 462 murdered 283 victims were boys and 179 victims were girls.
United States statistics also go on to show that more than 200 women every year kill their children which has helped to lead to an average mortality rate of 3 to 5 children per day.
Statistics can be staggering and in a country where women commit only two crimes as frequently as men; shoplifting and parental murder, in a land where they commit less than 13 percent of all violent crimes, they have found equal footing with men by committing 50 percent of all parental murders.
Many researchers don’t like to talk about the statistics. They are more concerned with the causes than with the aftermath.

What is it that drives a parent to kill their own?

This is probably the most prevalent question in regards to a phenomenon which has been occurring since Biblical times. In the U.S. we are not victims of famine or genocide. We do not live in war torn nations or reproduce knowing there is a cap on how many offspring we are allowed. We do not struggle with life threatening diseases or watch with hopelessness as our family members are stolen away from us and either imprisoned or enslaved. We do not need to save face and we do not consider financial hardships as a disgrace upon which our entire extended family will be shunned for.
So what is it here in America that prompts women to kill their children and in the case of men their entire family along with themselves?
Researchers have split the reasons parents kill their children into five main categories according to Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, a forensic psychiatrist and a senior instructor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Sometimes, parents are acutely psychotic. They may be schizophrenic or manic depressive or hearing voices. There is no rational, comprehensible motive for this type of killing. Psychosis and severe depression can lead women to believe they are killing their children to end their suffering or because they believe they are demonically possessed.
In other circumstances, classified as "altruistic," parents say they killed their children out of love. They may kill a child who is sick as a form of euthanasia. Or a depressed parent, who could be suicidal and hates the world, might think killing a child gently protects the child from terrible events in the future.
"When you're psychotically depressed the whole world appears as if you're looking through dull gray glass. When you look at your children, you see them through your own suffering and emotional pain and believe they, too, are suffering. You begin to think they and you would be better off in heaven. This is an altruistic delusion. The results are horrific, but it's done in the hopes of stopping suffering," said Dr. John Bradford, head of the forensic psychiatry department at the University of Ottawa.


Another category, experts say, is fatal maltreatment. A parent may be neglectful from the time of the child's birth. This neglect, such as leaving a child unsupervised in a bath, may lead to an unplanned death.
Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, said some men who kill their offspring do so in a continuing pattern of child abuse.
Another motive is termed "unwanted child," where a young mother may hide her pregnancy then kill the baby when it's born because she's ashamed. Children also can be killed because parents decide they're "getting in the way" of a parent's life.
Dr. Appelbaum tends to share the unwanted child theory in his assessment into why women kill their children. He asserts that mothers who kill their children tend to fall into one of two categories. “Immediately after birth, a mother may kill a newborn in order to hide its existence,” Appelbaum said. "Often, that's a young unmarried mother who is in a state of panic and fearful of discovery and takes what seems to her to be the only available option."
On the other hand, mothers who kill older children "typically do so when they are psychotic and out of delusional motivations. They may hear voices, the voice of God commanding them to kill children."
The least common type of parental murder is spouse revenge.
The murder of children is split proportionately between mothers and fathers but the punishment is not.
Doug Saunders observed recently in the Toronto newspaper the Globe and Mail that the media is complicit in treating maternal killers as newsworthy and paternal killers as ordinary criminals.
The reason for this is simple enough. We created this type of thinking our society perpetuates it and any anomaly which threatens that belief is to be dealt with swiftly and punitively. Jill Korbin, a child abuse expert who co-authored a report on parental murder for the American Anthropological Association stated that “we have a cultural view of good motherhood and it acts to the detriment of women and fathers who are having substantial problems parenting.”
Mother love is not universal. The idealization of women as natural loving mothers is a cultural belief that gets us into trouble. "We should detach from the idea of universal motherhood as natural and see it as a social response," Nancy Scheper-Hughes, medical anthropologist says. Women in jail reported that no-one believed them when they said they wanted to kill their children. "There's a collective denial even when mothers come right out and say "I really shouldn't be trusted with my kids."
So are these women ill or are they cold blooded killers having committed a crime against nature? The prevailing thought among feminists and legal researchers tend to claim that such women must be extremely ill. Judges and juries mostly agree, with the result being that women who kill their children in this country are disproportionately hospitalized or treated, while men who do so are disproportionately jailed, even executed. Women were hospitalized 68 percent of the time and imprisoned 27 percent of the time; fathers convicted of killing their children were sentenced to prison or executed 72 percent of the time and hospitalized only 14 percent of the time.
One may ask why men aren’t afforded the same mental health care as their female counterparts. Simple, when it comes down to the central legal truth children are still considered to be the mother’s property. While it is considered crazy to destroy your own property it is labeled criminal to destroy someone else’s. So while a mother can murder her child and basically get away with it by having a nice comfortable stay in the mental hospital the father is more often than not whisked away to a cold hard jail cell.