Filicide – An Intro

Have you ever heard the term Filicide? It’s a pretty ambiguous term of which not much is known about and people rarely sit down to discuss it.

Filicide means the killing of one’s son or daughter. It has a devastating effect on both families and community yet despite this, comparatively little is known about it.

Research suggests that 25 children are killed every year by a parent or guardian. Children aged less than one year are at greatest risk. Because of differences in jurisdictions around reporting and legislation, child deaths are recorded and analyzed individually by states and territories. National publications that analyses police data are limited, and only report aggregate data. This general and broad approach disregards any in-depth analysis of risk factors and conditions around individuals who commit such cases, resulting in an unreliable and piecemeal understanding of child-abuse-related fatalities.

Understanding filicide is especially troublesome in light of the fact that it is quite uncommon. Nonetheless, given the effect it has on communities and societies, it is important to examine some converging risk factors to understand where individual and situational factors combine to increase the risk.

A common behavior in filicide perpetrators is: psychological instability, past manhandle, and abusive behavior at home. Understanding filicide has for the most part centered around thought motive, perpetrator gender, or the biological relationship with the victim. Joining these variables may build up a more nuanced point of view of filicide. This is especially vital given the decent variety of families in the present world. Separation, divorce and other complex living arrangements for children have broadened the concept of families, making a more detailed approach warranted.

Focusing on family relationships to identify risk

There exists some interesting patterns in relation to the more likely circumstances surrounding filicide perpetrated by particular family members. For instance, albeit psychological instability was normal among all culprits, female culprits were well on the way to have a diagnosed mental illness. Male culprits will probably have had earlier contact with the criminal justice system.

Be that as it may, substance abuse has not been a distinctive factor for any culprit, sex or relationship.

Separated fathers were more likely to have had custodial issues at the time of the fatal incident. Homicides committed by this group were more likely to involve multiple children and/or other adult victims and suicide.

It was noticed that where there were multiple child victims, they were more likely to have been administered sedatives before death.

Prior to the filicide incident, separated fathers were often described as loving, whereas coupled fathers were more likely to have had a history of intimate partner violence. In contrast, de facto fathers were more likely to have abused the child in the events leading up to the fatal incident. However, they were least likely to commit suicide at the time of the incident.

In terms of the cause of death, violent deaths (resulting in the head/spinal injuries or multiple abdominal injuries) were more common for victims of male perpetrators. This was particularly the case with de facto males. Female perpetrators most commonly killed by asphyxiation.

In light of all mentioned above, it is necessary to develop an enhanced comprehension of the conditions in which filicide happens as that may add to its aversion by enhancing the capacity of specialists to recognize the scenarios where it occurs and how one can prevent them. This is something that needs to be discussed and not put a cap on. Please. Begin speaking and don’t keep it all zipped up!