Abstract
This book is an important contribution to the study of homicide generally, and of the circumstances of the killing of children specifically. The writing encompasses three different studies conducted by the author, one an English study (drawn from her PhD thesis) of parents or parent substitutes prosecuted for homicide of a child under 18 in England and Wales in 1984, a second a child protection study which examined 22 deaths of children 14 years or under in NSW which occurred between 1989 and 1991, and the third a subset of a NSW Judicial Commission study of homicide offenders which examined 25 victims of homicide under the age of 18 committed between January 1991 and 1993. Although not the exclusive focus of the book, much of the weight of the analysis is directed at the problem of child killings which occur within the family circle.
There are many excellent parts to this work. The second chapter, for example, provides an important summary of the problem of the difficulty in knowing, in fact, how many child homicides there are. Sometimes there are suspicious ‘accidents’, where proof of homicide is lacking, despite the fact that the nature of the injuries would indicate that the child had been subjected to systematic abuse. In other cases, it has been found that deaths originally diagnosed as SIDS actually were homicides.
The book is especially strong in its analysis of filicides, that is, homicides where the offenders were the parents of the victim. It becomes necessary in such an analysis to provide some classification of the various kinds of cases, and the author provides a reasonably satisfactory solution to this problem, using such categories as ‘retaliating killings’, ‘unwanted child’ (neonaticide), ‘discipline’, ‘altruistic’ and ‘psychotic parent’, among others. What is made clear is that there are important differences in the dynamics of filicide depending upon the sex of the offender.
The discussion then shifts (in Chapter 5) the question of the criminal justice system response to filicide. The author here reviews both the literature and data regarding the proposition that men are treated as ‘bad’, while women are treated as ‘mad’. Consistent with her earlier findings, the author concludes that there is an important difference in the justice system response, and that in general men are treated more harshly. It is certainly the case empirically, as this book finds, that men are much more likely to receive lengthy prison sentences when they are convicted of filicide than is the case for women. Importantly, however, women offenders are more likely to be diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. The author concludes that while women may well be more likely to be, in fact, mentally ill, it is also pointed out that more women ‘…have been found to be labelled as mentally ill than men’ (p.136). Included here is a detailed discussion of the formal and informal control factors that may be working to produce different justice system outcomes for women in contrast to men.
There is also, in Chapter 6, an examination of the operation of the legislation regarding infanticide. Those of us doing research in the area of child homicide are struck by the extensive discussions around the legal issues relating to infanticide, discussions which in fact are totally out of proportion to the actual use in the real world of the technical charge of infanticide. This book serves the important function of pointing out that the underlying medical principles in legal thinking about infanticide are unsustainable and outdated.
There is a discussion, much too brief in the view of this reader, on the comparison of non-family child killings with filicides. As children age, especially as they move into the years above the age of six, increasingly the offenders will be drawn from outside of the family. In the teenage years, the offender is very rarely a family member. What the writing does not make clear are two important points. First, in these years, the offenders are almost always males. Second, the years from the age of six to about 11 are actually the years where the rate of homicide is the lowest that will be experienced in the total of the life span. Thus, child killings are striking in that there is a period of very high risk of homicide (from the family, including both males and female offenders) in the earliest years of life, a middle period of very low risk, and then a period in the teenage years where risks again rise to very high levels (but the offender is emphatically not a family member and only rarely will it be a women killer).
Professionals in the general field of child abuse should pay particular attention to the chapter on improving the professional response, where the discussion takes up the question of what we can learn from child deaths (Chapter 9). This constitutes, as the author would recognise, only a starting point, but an important one, for this problem. Without question, there is a need, as the author argues, to put more resources, money and thought into the issue of how we might provide better mechanisms of child protection.