Who would kill their own child?
Less than a week after we saw the heart-wrenching image of three-year old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body on that Turkish beach, we learned that a 52-year-old Brisbane father had been charged with murdering his six-year-old daughter.
Today, we woke to the horrific news that a seven-year old boy had been stabbed to death in his neighbour’s front yard in Sydney, allegedly at the hands of his uncle.
In a single doomed trip across the Mediterranean, Abdullah Kurdi lost his wife and both his sons. The world is reeling from his unimaginable grief and the conflict that created it. Kurdi’s plea to ‘let this be the last’ has spurred an overdue global response to the atrocities enveloping Syria and its surrounds.
Closer to home, two families are reeling from completely different, but also horrific, tragedies. Children being murdered allegedly at the hands of the very people meant to care for them – their family.
In Brisbane’s north, six-year old Sidney was found dead in her bed by her mother on Monday morning. Her father was arrested and charged with her murder later that evening.
The Courier Mail now reports that he may have intended to kill not just Sidney, but her older sister as well. His wife was alerted to noises in the night and took the older girl into her bed unwittingly saving her from her own father.
Thirty-six hours later, a seven-year-old boy was found stabbed to death in the front yard of a neighbour’s home in Sydney. His grandmother’s body was buckled to her knees on a lawn not far away.
His uncle has been taken into custody, but not yet charged.
These actions are impossible to fathom, let alone come to terms with. Who would want to kill a little boy? Who could murder their own six-year old daughter?
They’re impossible questions to answer.
Parents give children life, they don’t take it away. Parents and family are meant to protect, nurture, care and teach their children. Not harm them and certainly not kill them.
Didn’t they feel overwhelmed by a primeval, fierce dedication to keep their child, or children, safe? Did parents who go on to murder their children ever make a silent vow into the downy, soft scalp of their tiny newborn like so many of us do?
Surely as their tiny baby grew into a toddler and then a child, at some point, they felt that surge of love, that determination to protect? How could they not?
As hard as it is to believe, a roll call of names shows us that something, somewhere goes wrong in a parent’s love.
Names like Luke Batty, Jai, Bailey and Tyler Farquharson, Savannah and Indianna Mihayo, River and Nyobi Hinder.
And now names like six-year old Sidney – a budding jiu-jitsu star who last year earned a trophy for being the “spirit of her club” and “for her happy approach to life.”
These are just a few of the victims we have come to know over the past decade who have been killed at the hands of a parent.
Related: What really drives a man to murder his own children?
It can be either parent – mother or father – who kills their child but far more fathers kill their own children than mothers do. Six out of every ten children in filicide (the deliberate act of a parent killing their child) are killed by their fathers.
In the US 450 children are killed every year by their parents. In Australia, the number is smaller – around 27 a year, but between 2002 and 2012 this adds up to 238 children killed by their parent or parents.
Yet we do not understand why. Studies have shown that murders by mothers are “altruistic” — they murder out of love, not out of hate, with a genuine belief that they are doing the children “a favour”.
Related: Melbourne mother charged over the death of three children.
Fathers get painted with a darker brush. They murder out of revenge a lot of the time.
Jack Levin, an American criminologist, told USA Today that mothers who murder tend to kill their newborns on impulse. “The day a child is born is the day a child is most likely to be killed by a parent,” he says.
But for fathers it is different – planned, often meticulous. They are more likely to kill the entire family, then themselves.
“A man sees himself as the main support of a family,” forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick told USA Today, “He may feel like it is his responsibility to not let his family suffer. You may have a severely depressed father who may think his children are better off dead with him.”
And yet despite expert after expert attempting to explain it to us over and over, we are appalled and confused by these cases.
When sentencing Arthur Freeman, the father who threw his four-year-old daughter Darcey off Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge in 2009, Justice Paul Coghlan put words to our disbelief:
“You brought the broader community into this case in a way that has been rarely, if ever, seen before. It offends our collective conscience,” he said.
It doesn’t just offend, it also sickens and breaks us.
The awful awful truth is, it will happen again. It is another dark reality of the inexplicable toll family violence takes.
If this post brings up any issues for you in relation to family violence, or if you just feel like you need to speak to someone, please call 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – the national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service. It doesn’t matter where you live, they will take your call and, if need be, refer you to a service closer to home.
If this post brings up issues for you in relation to suicide, or you just need someone to talk to, please call Lifeline on 131 114. You can also visit the Lifeline website here and the Beyond Blue website here.
Top Comments
I don't normally get into these arguments, but I have to say this article did not need to focus so negatively on gender differences. if 6/10 filicides are committed by fathers, then 4/10 are by mothers - hardly "far more" if you are comparing 40% and 60%. And the use of mothers reasons as altruistic, as though that changes the outcome for the kids?? I am disappointed that the deaths of these kids are being painted as worse if it at the hands of their dad :(
There is a difference though and I think it's worth pointing out. Most women who commit filicide do it on the day their child is born or they are very unwell. An alarming number of men commit filicide out of revenge and their kids are almost always older. What is it about those facts that some people don't want to admit to themselves? It's like the people (many women) who only a few years ago used to berate feminists and tell them women were more likely to commit DV. Do you remember those people? They don't do it anymore but it was absurd.
I think some people really put men up on a pedestal, it makes me think they really have very limited life experiences. Or have been very lucky.
Is it less bad if a child dies the day it's born? Is it less dead if the mum was unwell? Actually I would say anyone who kills a child is unwell, revenging dads included.
How about the day before s/he was expected to be born? A week? A month? Three months? Six? Nine?
Just curious.
How about the day before s/he was expected to be born? A week? A month? Three months? Six? Nine?
Just curious.
I say this as someone who came from an emotionally and verbally abusive, unstable upbringing -- I was raised by a mother who is emotionally irrational and undiagnosed, and had violent outbursts day and night, and never held down a job for long or relationship. My alcoholic father was absent. We were poor. There were generational issues in my maternal family going back some way... and I thrive now despite my upbringing because I was determined to not let myself be a victim and live like that perpetuating the dysfunction and desperation, and have a fulfilling life of meaning, love and peace.
You are reasonable and rationale and of mental and emotional stability. The majority of people are.
When you say this: "Surely as their tiny baby grew into a toddler and then a child, at some point, they felt that surge of love, that determination to protect? How could they not?" It is clear you are of sound mind. Often (not always) relatives who do this to their own family are mentally unwell / unstable, or have a personality disorder, they may be drug or alcohol-affected, be in debt or have addictions, they may well have come from entrenched generations of abuse and dysfunction. They made have chemical or neurological inability to reason or cope. They do not think, they act irrationally. They can almost never control their rages because in the moment they are unaware. If they lose their grip or the routine is disrupted, it;s a trigger to an extreme reaction. My mother used to calm down eventually but never said sorry or acknowledged she had a problem. It was always someone else who'd provoked her.
For those people, the sentence you wrote is un-relatable, even if it is logical and common sense to most people. The perpetrators act because they sit outside the 'norm'. That's something which has to be accepted if it is to be addressed. Don't appeal to common sense and regulated emotions, because the people who are like that in the first place do not do this to their kids. They already 'get it' an can't imagine ever hurting their children. The "others" can not get it, they are incapable. That's the awful, tragic context at play.
Thank you for expressing this so well. It's awful but so terribly true.
Well said. Murder does not happen in a vacuum, we may see a normal suburban family living a nice middle class life, but I'm sure there is always a lot more going on beneath the surface, a normal parent just doesn't 'snap' and kill their child, a lot of unstable behaviour leads up to that.