Behavioural Forensics News - The five types of parents who kill their children

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The five types of parents who kill their children
Candace Sutton
news.com.au
OCTOBER 21, 2017 9:27pm

‘WARNING: Distressing content

EXCLUSIVE

THE most violent of all parents who kill their children is the stepfather or de facto partner, according to research.

He kills by throwing or stomping the child, but he usually only kills a single victim.

More deadly is the separated father who, a study by Swimburne University in Melbourne has revealed, kills multiple victims — often all his children — in a bid to punish their mother.

But the most deadly of all parents who kill their children is the coupled father, who is still living in the family unit.

He will kill multiple family members, not only his children but also his wife is in danger of being murdered with her kids.

Killing season for kids can come at any time of year but when it comes to mothers, fathers or stepfathers who murder children there are five distinct types.

This is the conclusion of a new study of filicide — the act of a parent killing their child by Lillian De Bortoli, a research fellow at the university’s Centre for Forensic Behavioural Sciences Australia.

During her research, Dr De Bortoli studied 155 murders perpetrated by 97 parents in Australia between 2000 and 2011.

Of the victims, 118 were children said Dr De Bortoli, who selected child murders carried out by single perpetrators from coronial cases of child deaths around the country.

Her analysis of those statistics reveals a chilling similarity between the method and number of victims and five “types” of parent who murder their child.

“I looked at all the kids who died and I identified patterns, whether they were mothers, fathers and coupled or single at the time of the killing,” Dr De Bortoli told news.com.au.

The different types are the de facto male or short-term stepfather, the separated father, the single mother, the “coupled” mother who is still in the family unit and the coupled father.

“The de facto male kills in a particularly violent way,” Dr De Bortoli said. “He inflicts multiple abdominal injuries, and head and spinal injuries, and he has usually been abusing the child for some time before he kills them.

“The separated father kills multiple victims.

“He has a background of interpersonal violence, and has been violent to the mum which is why they separated.”

Dr De Bortoli also uncovered patterns in how people murdered their children according to the age of the child.

“The little ones often suffer head or spinal injuries,” she said, adding that seven or eight-year-olds were sometimes suffocated after being drugged. “Also there are cases in which the parents has used carbon monoxide poisoning,” Dr De Bortoli said.

Presenting her findings at a recent international conference in Italy, she said that compared to other countries, a very high number of Australian parents — 27 per cent — who murdered their children went on to kill themselves.

Dr De Bortoli was motivated to do the research because of a dearth of statistics available on Australian child deaths, compared with abundant publicly available studies in countries such as the UK and Canada.

“We have to get a much better way of monitoring and understanding child death with a view to preventing it,” she said.

“The difference between death and serious injury can be like the flip of a coin.

“Sometimes the child doesn’t die because the mother has come home in time and taken her child to emergency and the child has lived.

“But put yourself in the shoes of a child protection practitioner.

“Identifying which child is at risk is a difficult call to make, and sometimes you can cause more harm by taking the child away from their parents.”

Dr De Bortoli said understanding how a parent could inflict pain on their own child was not part of the study, but the cruelty of the deaths often angered her and made her think about the children who survived.

“We need more support for kids who have been abused, who have these tough childhoods and may end up on the street or in the criminal justice system,” she said.

“And people who kill their children may have personality disorders, or their empathy is not well developed.

“This occurs in people who have been abused as children or may have had a traumatic childhood.”

Dr De Bortoli will publish her study in an international journal, making her findings available to child protection agencies in Australia and overseas.

Here are the five distinct types of parents who kill their children and characteristics of their crimes:

Read more at:

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/re...n/news-story/afd823940356d06353f3e039fc04e204
 
Has there been much research into women who kill children? I know one notorious case that had the very real unlikelihood of having been discovered, and was only due to unerring persistence, willingness to question the forbidden to question, and stroke of luck on the detective's part.

How many isolated family-related deaths are poison or suffocation that have been masked, not unlike Angels of Death (who have been known to strike in the 100s before getting caught), by the role of doting caretakers?
 

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