Understanding Filicide: Definition, Categories, And Risk Factors

The research paper analyzes the filicide in regards to biological behavior. In this regard the paper analyzes the way the ideology of unrestrained consumerism, quite logically grown out of an atheistic humanistic view, leading a person to self-destruction. In the beginning, he puts himself at the center of the world, declaring his "I" the main value, and then begins to destroy all those who prevent him from "enjoying life.

" Including their future children, breaking at the same time their biological code and violating the laws established for him by nature. Finally this paper emphasizes that it is necessary to start developing a new ideology that would clearly and indicate the state's policy in the field of demography for many years to come.

So, first of all, the paper necessarily pays attention to the education of girls, to revise the methods of training gynecologists, sexologists, psychologists - all those who influence the decision of the woman to terminate the pregnancy. And also close medical clinics that specialize in developing therapies using stem cells derived from "abortive" material, abandon this trend in the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry. 

What is Filicide?

Filicide is the killing of a child by one or both parents. However, the exact definition of the filicide, based on the relationship of the parties (inclusion or exclusion of adoptive parents), as well as indicating the upper age limit of the victims, is lacking in the literature, making it difficult to interpret and compare the results of various papers. 

In most modern studies, the filicide is divided into three categories: the killing of a newborn by a mother (neonaticide), the killing of a child older than one day of life by the age of up to one year (filicide), the killing of children older than one year of life is actually a filicide, the definition of which is appropriate for parents of both sexes. In the United States, statistics were published, which reported that the murder was the fourth cause of death in children aged 0-4 years, the third for children aged 5 to 14 years and the second for people 15-24 years. Most often at the hands of parents, children under the age of 4 years died. Murders, in general, are classified as "male" crimes. However, traditionally, filicide is considered to be a predominantly "female" crime, and most of the studies are devoted specifically to the killing mothers. Comparative studies of children who have killed fathers and mothers are few, and they often contain contradictory information. Thus, 67% of the killings were committed by mothers. Pitt SE et al. noted that mothers are the killers in the prevalent number of cases. However, the filicide is more often committed by the fathers. In 52-65% of cases, children are killed by fathers.

Those who noted similar discrepancies in the percentage of killer fathers and mothers S. Flynn S. et al. in their study attributed them to the difference in the groups taken for study (a study of newspaper reports of deaths, patient records of patients in psychiatric hospitals, etc.). According to official data in the United States for the period from 1976 to 1999, 31% of children under five years old were killed by fathers and 30% by mothers.

All researchers noted a high percentage of mental disorders in parents, and mentally ill parents are most likely to commit filicide and also indicated that fathers are more often sentenced to imprisonment and mothers are sent to psychiatric hospitals for treatment. The most of the individuals surveyed suffered from obvious mental illnesses and, moreover, were in difficult life circumstances without any social support (Putkonen et al., 2016). The social isolation of parents and the difficulty of establishing stable interpersonal relationships were also found to be risk factors for committing a child's murder (Putkonen et al., 2009).

There is little evidence that mothers prudently plan to kill their children, most often they do so in a state of panic and fear, as a result of depression, psychotic or expressed dissociative disorders. The research found that there was a high incidence of psychotic disorders in mothers who had killed a child over one day of life. In 53% of cases, parents had signs of abuse or dependence on psychoactive substances, and 42% had intellectual insufficiency of one degree or another (21% had borderline intelligence, 21% had borderline intelligence, - slight mental retardation ), between the presence of which and the lack of proper care for the child preceding the filicide, there was a positive correlation. The psychotic condition was revealed only in 26% of parent.

Categories of Filicide

Because filicide occupies a prominent place in the structure of "female" crimes, this study aimed to identify the clinical and social factors that contribute to the murder of women by their children over one day of life.

As in the case of biologists, Haraway's conclusion about the influence of public discussions on gender, sexuality, and violence on scientific work is legitimate here. For obvious reasons, we also leave all the ethnographic literature beyond our attention.

The historical interpretations of the filicide are certainly close to ethnographic but still, have their originality. Like social anthropologists, historians consider filicide a social phenomenon, a form of birth control. Meanwhile, historians are used to dealing with "written societies." Therefore, their attention to the phenomenon of filicide is expressed in the interest in documents devoted to the problem of filicide, and such documents do not appear immediately. Their critical number accumulates when a kind of clash of two cultures takes place - "scientist" and "people's," or, in another terminology, when a new birth control policy conflicts with traditional cultural practices of birth control. Thus, historians focus on why and how from a certain historical moment within specific societies, the filicide passes into the category of unacceptable social phenomena, and around this, discussions are unfolding (Razali et al., 2015). Even though it is still customary to apply for some comments, but the problem of filicide to the texts of ancient authors, historical interpretations of the filicide began to appear relatively recently.

The medical and medico-psychological literature on the filicide is represented by a vast number of descriptive and analytical texts (Razali et al., 2015). In both Russia and other countries, the volume of such literature continues to grow.  Even within the framework of separate periodical medical publications, a rich bibliography of publications on the filicide has already accumulated. A case in point is the British Medical Journal ™, in which the articles on this subject are published for almost a century and a half.

If lawyers and doctors treat filicide as a form of deviation from social behavior, then for biologists who turned to the discussion of this problem later, the extermination of offspring is a phenomenon inherent not only to human society but to the animal world. This raises questions about whether it is legitimate to consider the filicide as something unnatural. One of the first in the 20 century,. Biologist Darwinist put the problem of the filicide in animals (Dube & Hodgins, 2001). Wagner, whose work "The Psychology of Reproduction and Evolution" was published in 1922. Wagner viewed the filicide as a case of an irreconcilable contradiction between the vital interests of the mother and the offspring, when the female animals, saving their lives, are forced to abandon the young, dooming them to death (Dube & Hodgins, 2001). In the next 50 years, his ideas in this field almost did not attract attention until the early 1970s. American S. Hardy, who studied the behavior of Lango monkeys in India, did not focus on this problem. In her studies, she argued that the Langur filicide is a regular practice that males resort to to provide an opportunity to preserve their offspring and destroy the offspring of male contestants (Lysell et al., 2014). The hypothesis proposed by Hardy gave a new life to the Darwinian concept of sexual selection and successfully solved some difficult questions of the evolutionary theory, in particular the question of the causes of the unique reproductive properties of the human race, thanks to which women are the only among all female primates capable of year-round conception of offspring. According to Hardy, this feature of the female body was the result of the evolutionary response of women to the filicide practiced by male primates.

Hardy's conclusions met with objection from J. Boggs, who suggested treating the filicide in Langurs not as a biological norm, but as an example of behavioral pathology caused by the deterioration of the ecological situation in which the populations of Indian langurs live (Jackson, 2012). The discussion of these two American primatologists gave rise to an interest in the problem from other Western scientists, and numerous examples of filicide in other species, from fish and birds to mammals, were subsequently described (Debowska, Boduszek & Dhingra, 2015).

The debate between Hardy and her opponents was an important milestone in the history of biology. Thanks to them, one more important page was written into science, telling about what was still considered peculiar only to people - the ability to destroy their offspring (Putkonen et al., 2016). However, as D. Haraway showed, these disputes were not only a form of struggle for scientific truth but also turned out to be a response of scientists of the 1970s-1980s. On political discussions about family violence and reproductive freedoms, initiated by feminists.

Conclusion

The conducted research allows to draw a conclusion that when women kill their children older than one day of life, the influence of psychopathological mechanisms within the framework of ontologically different psychiatric disorders, mainly with psychotic manifestations and existing predictors in the form of auto aggressive behavior, noted the instability of their psycho-somatic state during the examination by psychiatrists and general practitioners shortly before the commission of the tort, their requests s about care in the care and irritation of the dead children, the value of which was not given due assessment by others.

References

Debowska, A., Boduszek, D., & Dhingra, K. (2015). Victim, perpetrator, and offense characteristics in filicide and filicide-suicide. Aggression and Violent Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2015.01.011

Jackson, D. (2012). A meta-study of filicide: Reconceptualizing child deaths by parents. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering. Retrieved from https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=psyh&AN=2012-99200-386&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Lysell, H., Runeson, B., Lichtenstein, P., & Långström, N. (2014). Risk factors for filicide and homicide: 36-Year national matched cohort study. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 75(2), 127–132. https://doi.org/10.4088/JCP.13m08372

Putkonen, H., Amon, S., Weizmann-Henelius, G., Pankakoski, M., Eronen, M., Almiron, M. P., & Klier, C. M. (2016). Classifying filicide. International Journal of Forensic Mental Health, 15(2), 198–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/14999013.2016.1152616

Razali, S., Salleh, R. M., Yahya, B., & Ahmad, S. H. (2015). Maternal Filicide among Women Admitted to Forensic Psychiatric Institutions in Malaysia: Case Series. East Asian Archives of Psychiatry?: Official Journal of the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists = Dong Ya Jing Shen Ke Xue Zhi?: Xianggang Jing Shen Ke Yi Xue Yuan Qi Kan, 25(2), 79–87. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26118747