Why The Root Causes Of Filicide Are More Complex Than You May Have Thought

Dr Timothy Mariano, who led a large study of filicide cases, believes that three primary causes lead parents to murder their own offspring:

• Serotonin-related mental illness, including depression and schizophrenia.
• Unusually high testosterone levels.
• "The unwanted child"; a child that was unplanned, which the parents cannot provide for, or who was ill.

Dr Phillip Resnick, director of forensic psychiatry at Case Western, meanwhile, offers a broader analysis with five main causes of filicide. The "unwanted child" also appears in his list, with him offering a child born out of wedlock as a classic example. Mental illness, or as Resnick puts it, "acute psychosis", is another cause, he says.

Some filicide cases are motivated by spousal revenge, in which an (ex-)partner murders the children to hurt their co-parent. Finally, Resnick describes "fatal battering", in which a parent has set off to discipline their child but loses control to the extent that the child dies. These cases, unsurprisingly, mostly affect children of preschool age — those who are unable to defend themselves.

These parents can genuinely believe that they are doing the right thing. Is this as hard to understand when we conjure images of terminally ill children, or children born into severely economically disadvantaged situations? At the very least, I think that thoughts such as "I wish my child didn't have to suffer", or "I am sorry to have brought my child into this cruel world" are far from uncommon.

Can We Prevent Filicide Cases?

Child safety expert and best-selling author Gavin de Becker makes it clear that there's an almost fail-safe way to prevent being murdered by your own child: be a loving parent. What about preventing filicide cases, then?

Consistent suicide-prevention assessments are in place across much of the world, and Resnick and Friedman believe that similar strategies should be employed with the aim of preventing filicide — something that would first and foremost be made possible by mental health professionals entertaining the possibility that a parent could end up killing their own child in the first place.

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Therapists need to take parents' thoughts about harming their children seriously, their review suggests, and suicidal parents should be questioned about what they think would happen to their kids if they did take their own lives. At-risk parents could be committed involuntarily, while all postpartum parents could routinely be screened for filicide risk, as they are screened for postpartum depression signs in some countries.

In conclusion, though murdering one's own child certainly appears to be one of the more "monstrous" acts human beings commit, empathy and understanding could ultimately be the primary way to prevent these heartbreaking homicides.