Showing posts with label altruistic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label altruistic. Show all posts

Monday, 30 May 2011

FILICIDE (multiple): Quebec: Shedding light on the darkest of crimes: family killings

JANET BAGNALL,  May 27, 2011
 
 The trial of Guy Turcotte, a cardiologist charged with killing his two small children, started just days after a 28-year-old mother walked into the freezing waters of the Rivière des Prairies, a twomonth-old baby in her arms and her five-year-old son attached to one of her wrists.
Then, as Quebecers reeled from learning of Turcotte's frenzied knife attack against his children in 2009, another father put his three little children in his truck, set it ablaze, and went off to kill himself.
Seven people died in the three incidents. Only Turcotte, the baby from the river and a badly burned 6-year-old who escaped his father's attempt on his life survived.
What was going on in Quebec society? How could parents do such things to their own children?
Little is known about the young mother, but the two fathers, Turcotte and Martin Houle, appear to fit a pattern where personality characteristics in combination with a lengthy and acute family crisis formed an "explosive cocktail," says Quebec psychology professor Suzanne Léveillée. Turcotte's superior education did not make him atypical, Léveillée says. Men who kill their children and/ or whole families are often middle-class.
Léveillée, together with Julie Lefebvre, her Université du Québec à Trois Rivières colleague, will launch a book on the subject of murder within the family at the International Conference on Violence against Women to be held in Montreal May 29 to June 1.
Because the three cases were all over the media at the same time, it might seem to Quebecers that there has been an increase in the number of children murdered by their parents, but statistically this is not true. There is a distressing sameness to the numbers year in and out. Between 1997 and 2007, 68 children in the province were killed by a parent. Forty of the 68 were killed by their father, 28 by their mother.
Men and women kill for different reasons, research suggests. Men kill out of vengeance against the woman who has spurned them. Women tend to kill their children out of a misplaced "altruism," in which they think they are sparing the child the same misery they themselves have endured.
Men also tend to be responsible for "familicides," in which the whole family is killed. Quebec's chief coroner investigated 16 such cases dating from 1986 to 2000. In all cases, it was a man who carried out the killings. Excessive violence - such as the savage knife attacks by Turcotte on his children - was a characteristic in nearly half of these killings.
Léveillée and Lefebvre studied 10 of these "familicides." They found that there seemed little to suggest ahead of time that the men would go to the extreme of killing their entire family rather than "lose" them. Eight of the 10 men were working. Five were in the process of separating from their spouse. Only one man had a criminal past, and it had nothing to do with violence against another person. Only one man had been hospitalized in a psychiatric centre in the year before he killed his family. Nine of the men killed themselves afterward, one in prison.
"It is very difficult to foresee these crises," Léveillée told me. "Men don't consult when they are in distress."
But there are signs, she said. Among the strongest is the breakup of the couple, particularly if one or both of the partners are incapable of accepting a separation, feel the separation is something they cannot live through. Other signs include the presence of psychological or physical violence, threats of suicide, alcohol or drug consumption, and unhinged behaviour like frequent, hysterical phone calls.
For their book, Léveillée and Lefebvre interviewed, in prison, Quebec men who had killed their spouse. Out of 100 possibilities, only 23 agreed to talk to the researchers. They did so, Léveillée said, "not out of guilt - it's not obvious that they regret what they did. If it was a child, they think it was unfortunate. In many cases, they are not people who feel regret. They have personality disorders.
"Talking to us, I think, was a form of making reparations. It wasn't possible to stop them, but maybe by talking about it they can help stop someone else."
Although Léveillée does not think this spring's killings were connected, she worries that child-custody battles are becoming more of a minefield. Today's Quebec has fewer children and more separations. "We'll see in a few years whether there is a trend here," she said. "It may stabilize, but it is something to watch."
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shedding+light+darkest+crimes+family+killings/4846675/story.html#ixzz1NqCyTh80

Sunday, 8 May 2011

FILICIDE with Suicide: the issue discussed

OAK HARBOR -- Alan Atwater abused his wife Dawn, forced her to quit her job and encouraged her to have sex with one of his friends, family friends told authorities.
But despite problems in their marriage, Atwater told his aunt he was determined to change and make his wife understand she and their children were most important to him.
Dawn Atwater, however, told him and her friends she wanted to separate, according to Ottawa County Sheriff's Office reports.
These details, released last week, provide some possible explanation as to why Alan Atwater might have killed his wife and then himself with a gun April 16. Dawn Atwater told a friend her husband had threatened to commit suicide if she ever left him, according to reports.
"I'm just sick," Colette Yontz, a friend of Dawn Atwater, told investigators. "Just sick because we all knew this was going to happen."
What is more of a mystery is why he turned the gun on the couple's children, Ashley, 4, Isaac, 2, and Brady, 1.
Killing the children doesn't fit with the normal profile for murder-suicides related to marital problems, said Katherine van Wormer, professor of social work at the University of Northern Iowa and author of "Death by Domestic Violence: Preventing the Murders and the Murder-Suicides."
In cases where men kill their entire families -- an action known as familicide -- usually the man has lost his job or has other financial problems where he feels he can no longer provide for his family, she said.
"He may have killed her and felt he couldn't leave them," van Wormer said of the Atwater children.

Reasons for killings

There are five things that motivate people to kill their children, said Phillip Resnick, professor of psychology at Case Western University.
They are: Altruism, the idea the children are better off dead; revenge against the spouse, often over a custody battle or infidelity; the perpetrator is acutely psychotic; unwanted children, usually newborns killed by unwed mothers; and child battering, where a parent goes too far with disciplining a child and accidentally kills the child.
"If a man kills himself along with the children, it's more likely to be altruistic," Resnick said. "A man believes his family is better off in Heaven than in the world."
Resnick, who said he likely has interviewed more parents who killed their children than anyone else in the United States, is considered an expert on the subject. He testified for the defense in the trial of Andrea Yates, a Texas woman who drowned her children in a bathtub in 2001, and consulted on the case of Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman who murdered her two young children in 1994.
In 95 percent of familicide cases, men are the perpetrators, he said. Two-thirds of the time, a man who kills his children and himself also kills his wife, he said.
"Women may kill their children and themselves but rarely will kill their husbands," he said.
Men tend to feel responsible for the entire family and do not want to leave them behind, Resnick said. In situations with domestic problems, the men sometimes feel they cannot live without their partners or consider their partners the source of their pain, van Wormer said.
"Often these are men who are very dependent emotionally on their wives," she said. "They justify it as saying she's killing him, so he's going to kill her because she's the source of his pain.
"Once they take this first step, they feel they have to take the second step (suicide)."
Although Alan Atwater may not have planned to kill himself, he apparently had settled on doing so when he called the sheriff's office to report the deaths of his wife and children.
In that call, he calmly admitted to killing them and then said he was going to kill himself. Then he hung up.
Resnick, speaking in general, said people who commit suicide may be agitated at first while trying to decide whether or not to go through with it.
"Once they make a decision to do it, they feel at peace," he said.

Statistics elusive

Every year, more than 32,000 people commit suicide, and another 18,000 are victims of homicide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Determining how many of those deaths result from homicide-suicide cases, however, is more difficult.
The CDC's National Violent Death Reporting System collects data from 16 states -- not including Ohio -- so numbers from those states cannot be considered representative of the entire country. In 2008, 175 people in those states died of homicide followed by suicide, according to the system.
What is known about these cases is that a past history of domestic abuse is the biggest risk factor, according to the National Institute of Justice, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice. A study about murder-suicides conducted by Jacquelyn Campbell, professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Nursing, showed domestic violence had been a past problem in 70 percent of the cases.
However, 25 percent of these incidents of violence showed up in police arrest records, according to the institute. The researchers in Campbell's study learned about the past incidents after interviewing family and friends of the homicide victims, according to the institute.
http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20110505/NEWS01/105050330/Experts-weigh-murder-suicide-northwest-Ohio?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFrontpage

Saturday, 5 February 2011

Psychiatrist Phillip Resnick on Why Parents Kill Their Own Kids


On Jan. 27, Julie Powers, 50, a mother of two in Tampa, drove her 13-year-old son, Beau, home from soccer practice and allegedly shot him in the head "for talking back" to her. Then she went upstairs and shot Calyx, her 16-year-old daughter dead as she sat at her computer doing her homework, according to an arrest affidavit. At the time, her husband was serving in Qatar as an army colonel. Powers said her kids were "mouthy."
But what kind of parent would possibly murder her own children for mouthing off? TIME spoke with Dr. Phillip Resnick, director of forensic psychiatry at Case Western and a leading expert on parents who kill their children. He testified for the defense in the case of Andrea Yates, who was convicted in 2002 of drowning her five children in the bathtub. The murder conviction was later overturned and she was found to be not guilty by reason of insanity — as Resnick had argued. Over the course of his 40-year career, Resnick has worked on 40 to 60 cases involving parents who killed their children. Although he cannot offer a mental diagnosis or legal opinion in the Powers' case, he can discuss the motivations of parents who kill and what we know about them. About 250 to 300 children are murdered by their parents each year.

Does this seem to be a typical case of a mother who kills her children?
It's aytpical. Younger children are much more likely to be killed than teenagers. If a child is killed for being "mouthy," the remark that came out here, that's more likely to lead to fatal battering. [Usually, in such cases,] a 3-to-5-year-old is thrown against a wall in an overzealous attempt at discipline and dies — as opposed to [a parent] planning to kill and shooting them with a gun.

You have identified five main circumstances in which parents kill their children.
The first is "altruistic." The classic case is the mother who plans to take her own life and believes that the children are better off in heaven with her. Number Two is the case in which the parent is acutely psychotic. The third type is fatal battering [as described above]. the fourth is [to get rid of] an unwanted baby, for example an infant born out of wedlock. The final category is spousal revenge, [in which a parent kills the children to hurt the partner], typically after infidelity.
What we know so far about the Florida woman doesn't fit easily into any of these categories. If the children were much younger, it could be maltreatment, but at this age, that does not fit how it usually works. My guess is that eventually we will have a much better picture. It might be very severe depression. It might be [that she thought they were] possessed by a demon. A lot more will come out than just this idea that you kill a kid because he's mouthy.

I've read that mothers who kill their older children are likely to be married and employed, which was the case here and seems kind of strange to me.
Mothers with preschool children are less likely to be employed [than those with teenagers, so it could just reflect the population]. A single mother is more likely to be overwhelmed because there's no one to help, but that's with younger children. The newspaper said [that classmates and teachers described the children as] polite and good students. It is not an example of delinquent kids who are out of control and the mother doesn't know what to do with them.

I've also read that murders of older children are more likely to be extremely violent.
Actually, the degree of violence depends very much on the child. A 3-year-old you can easily strangle or overdose. Teens are not going to cooperate in being killed so the use of a knife or gun is more necessary. In some cases of fathers who kill teenagers there has been a real standoff and hostility, but for mothers that's not the usual pattern. I would not say the method of death expresses rage — it's just what's needed to take the life of older children.

Any speculation about what might have happened here?
[Again,] my hunch is that a lot more is going to come out than this early statement, which sounds outrageous. Either we will find out that she was either depressed or psychotic, or something else is cooking.
As I understand it, there was a note left that said she planned to kill herself after killing the children, so the question becomes: was the primary issue that she was going to take her own life and then decided to take the children's lives, or did she decide to take the children's lives first and couldn't go on after that?
Fathers are more likely to wipe out the whole family. In 95% of those cases, the fathers are the killer. The father may feel, I can't support my family, I'm responsible for them, I'll take all of them out with me. Whereas [murders by a] mother with this age children are "altruistic — they murder out of love, not out of hate — and they genuine believe that they are doing the children a favor. [But if that was the case here,] you would not expect the remark that they were "mouthy." If she did do it for that reason, you'd expect her to put a better face on it. In one case I had, a woman killed a 3-year-old and herself. The note said, 'Bury us in one box, we belong together.' In that type, it's kind of an extended self [the mother sees the child as part of her]. It's not necessarily negative; the mother may well think of young children as extensions of herself and feel that her children would be lost without her. [She thinks that] even if the husband remarried, they'd have a mean stepmother and so the children would be better off with her in heaven.

Are these crimes ever religiously motivated?
I would not say there are religious motivations, but with religious people, the nature of the psychosis may encompass religious themes. Andrea Yates came to believe that her children were engaged in such bad behavior that they were going to end up in hell. She believed that she was doing them a favor by killing them before the age of accountability so that they could enter heaven.

But if you don't believe in heaven or hell, you wouldn't kill for those reasons...
Yes, a strong belief in the hereafter may have an influence.

Is there any way to prevent these types of crimes?
It's a complicated question. There are broad issues, such as easier access to mental health care, which is a problem right now with state cutbacks becoming severe. Another thing is awareness. If a woman is very depressed and she has young children and makes a suicide attempt, there is 1-in-20 chance that she will try to take the kid with her. Specific inquiries about thoughts of harm toward children should occur in any evaluation of a seriously depressed [mother].

Have you had any cases similar to this one?
There was the case of 10-year-old [and a younger child, whose mother attempted to kill them both.] The mother was found legally insane. She was psychotic. She was severely depressed and then had this sudden belief that this is what she had to do. She did it with a knife, very suddenly, and then called the police after she stayed overnight with her dead child. There was no effort to flee. It wasn't like, I'm going to kill the children and take off and have a good life. She was a physician and she was married to a physician. One of the children survived the knifing.

Are these parents mostly sent to mental institutions because they use the insanity defense — or do they go to prison?
The vast majority of parents who kill their children go to prison rather than mental institutions. I just saw an article written by the FBI: for women who kill their children and are not found insane, the mean length of their prison sentence is 17 years; in women who kill newborns, the mean length is 9 years. However, out of all homicide [perpetrators], none have a higher incidence of being found insane than mothers who kill their children.

Killing newborns is much more common than killing older children.
As far as death by homicide goes, you're more likely to be killed on the day you are born than on any other day of your life.

Are these mothers dangerous to people other than their own children?
They are not a general danger to the community. There are infanticide laws in 22 countries, including England, Canada and Australia — instead of women being charged with murder, [if the child is] under 1 year old, they are charged with infanticide. In the U.K., the vast majority get probation rather than prison. The recidivism rate is very low. The risk of suicide is substantial, however.

Is the bad economy likely to lead to more of these cases?
Suicide does increase some when there are more people losing their jobs, so there might be little an increase in familicide where the father is unemployed. As far as mothers go, if she's the sole support, I don't know if that will increase.

 http://healthland.time.com/2011/02/01/psychiatrist-phillip-resnick-on-why-parents-kill-their-own-kids/#ixzz1D6oMTqp1