while researching the numbers of maternal filicide i stumbled upon these results. notice the change in tone for both title and content in 3 months. and ofc both articles are not available anyore. ps i cant find any statistics on metrnal filicide. help will be appreciated.

HiveMindKing · 2020-02-09T21:56:06+00:00

Of course women cannot be held accountable for any wrong doing, it’s always the result of some outside influence. One of the commandments of 🤡 🌍

GuitZz · 2020-02-09T19:57:58+00:00

i can say one more in france today #Vanille

iseehot · 2020-02-10T01:39:33+00:00

Here you go, my Italian friend:

1st article

Why do moms kill their children?

By Matthias GafniJune 26, 2014

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — In Raijon Daniels’s short eight years of life, his mother, Teresa Moses, of Richmond, Calif., beat, starved and washed him with chemicals and high-pressure hoses.

In 2009, Judith Williams drove her 16-year-old son to the top of Mount Diablo State Park, shot him in the back and head, and then turned the .357 revolver on herself.

And in April, Ashley Newton, a young San Jose mother, was arrested on suspicion of fatally stabbing her 7-month-old son in a Livermore, Calif., park.

Maternal filicide — mothers killing their own children — is rare, experts say, but each time it occurs, the crime raises the question: How could it happen?

“Mothers don’t kill their children unless they are seriously disturbed,” said Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology in Washington, D.C. “I think it gets attention because, one, it’s unfathomable and two, it’s sensational and obviously the media reports on that. But it should be noted that this is not common. It is very rare.”

Rare as it is, there’s something about the mother-child relationship that can go terribly wrong. According to the Department of Justice, women commit only 14 percent of violent crimes in the United States. But a study on filicide shows they commit nearly half of all parental murders.

A 2014 Brown University study analyzing 32 years of filicide arrests found there are about 3,000 instances annually in the United States where a parent kills a child.

Newton pleaded not guilty June 19. Evidence at the scene suggested Newton may have been depressed, police said, and one witness who rendered aid to the mortally wounded infant said he could tell the mother, caked in blood, was in “a really bad place.”

“If there is indeed no suicidal behavior on her part, then typically it’s homicidal behavior associated with a psychotic break or postpartum depression,” Berman said.

Studies and experts agree on one common factor when mothers commit such an unthinkable crime: extreme mental illness.

Phillip Resnick, an expert in maternal filicide and a co-author of a 2007 World Psychiatry study, reviewed psychiatric studies on mothers killing their children and found most had depression, psychosis and suicidal thoughts. He identified five motives:

●“Altruistic filicide,” the most common motive, where a mother rationalizes that killing her child is in the child’s best interest.

●“Acutely psychotic filicide,” where a mother kills without an understandable motive, possibly hearing voices.

●“Fatal maltreatment filicide,” where a mother does not necessarily mean to kill her child, but death occurs after cumulative abuse.

●“Unwanted child filicide,” where a mother believes her child is a hindrance in her life.

●“Spouse revenge filicide,” the rarest for mothers, where she kills her child to emotionally strike out against the father.

Recognizing the special nature of the crime, other countries have infanticide laws that reduce the penalty for mothers who kill their children. British law allows mothers to be charged with manslaughter rather than murder if they have a mental disorder. Women who are convicted of infanticide there often receive probation and mental health treatment referrals rather than incarceration, according to Resnick’s report.

On Oct. 19, 2005, Lashaun Harris, who the week before told family members she was going to feed her three small children to sharks, traveled with her kids on BART to San Francisco, walked to the end of Pier 7 and threw her children into San Francisco Bay.

The 23-year-old homeless Oakland mother with a history of schizophrenia and other mental illness told police she heard voices telling her to throw her children into the water so they could reunite with God in heaven.

“What I learned with Lashaun Harris was she was a good mother and she wouldn’t have killed her children without her mental illness,” said Teresa Caffese, the former San Francisco public defender who represented Harris. “Heaven to her was a concrete place with basketball courts, buses, you name it.

“The system sometimes does not sufficiently help the mentally ill,” she said.

A jury acquitted Harris of first-degree murder but found her guilty of three counts of second-degree murder. A judge declared her criminally insane and sentenced her to a psychiatric hospital, where she will remain unless she regains her sanity.

Last year, Teresa Moses was released from Napa State Hospital after doctors determined she was no longer a risk to society. Her son was killed in 2006, and she was declared insane in 2009.

According to a 2011 report by the Department of Justice that studied trends from 1980 to 2008, 63 percent of all murdered children under age 5 were killed by a parent; 33 percent by fathers and 30 percent by mothers.

The United States has the highest rates of child homicide, and when a young child is murdered, it is most likely a parent who did it, according to Resnick’s research.

In infanticides — children killed under the age of 1 — such as the Livermore case, Resnick’s study found women perpetrators were often unemployed mothers in their early 20s. Newton has no job and is 23, police said.

Resnick also found that those rates increased with economic stress and social isolation, and offenders also experienced psychiatric disorders. Newton is originally from North Carolina, but has lived in Fremont and San Jose with no family in the immediate area, police said.

“Unless there’s a really unusual circumstance, a mother doesn’t kill her children,” Caffese said of the Newton case. “I bet there were signs all along that were just missed.”

— Contra Costa Times

iseehot · 2020-02-10T02:38:54+00:00

Part 2a

What makes mothers kill their own children?

By Fredrick KunkleSeptember 27, 2014

Soon after Catherine Hoggle disappeared with her two young children, law enforcement officials feared the worst — that the severely mentally ill young woman might harm the children and herself.

More than a week after an intense search, and with no sign of 2-year-old Jacob or 3-year-old Sarah, investigators announced that they had begun preparing a homicide case against the Montgomery County woman, believing she may have committed one of the rarest and most repugnant of crimes.

And yet it’s the third time in a matter of weeks in the Washington region that a mother has been suspected of harming her offspring.

The act of killing one’s child is unthinkable for any parent, but owing to long-standing cultural, emotional and biological factors, a mother who kills her offspring has the power to inspire special shock and revulsion.

“Momma is the loving person, the giving person, the sacrifice person — for them to do something like that is like denying God or something,” said Bobby Hicks, former Union County deputy sheriff who was the first to interview Susan V. Smith, a South Carolina woman who killed her two children in 1994 by letting her car roll into a lake with the toddlers inside. “How could a mother do that to her children?”

Catherine Hoggle (Montgomery County Police) Such a mother is seen as someone who is not only guilty of a crime but has violated a law of nature and rebelled against instinct.

But the motives behind maternal filicide, as it is known, are much more complex, even counterintuitive — and troubling, even for those professionals who have devoted their careers to trying to understand them.

“It’s just such a delicate subject,” said Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California at Davis who has conducted pioneering research on the evolutionary, psychological and historical factors in infanticide.

The work of Hrdy [pronounced HURDY] has created controversy by demonstrating that under certain circumstances, infanticide could serve as an evolutionary adaptation, not necessarily a pathology, in the human struggle for existence.

In an interview and in her book “Mother Nature,” Hrdy said that infanticide is extraordinarily rare among primates, whose offspring are among nature’s most costly to raise because of their long path to maturity. It is more common among other mammals, such as lions, that cull their litters.

But nature, over eons, has instilled hard calculations in primates and humans, too: A mother faced with inadequate resources to ensure survival of herself, the child or other offspring might feel compelled to abandon or kill it.

Hrdy’s work also suggests, paradoxically, that those pressures may be greatest in patriarchal cultures where a woman’s role as mother is idealized and she is under intense pressure to give birth to children and nurture them with self-denying devotion.

Troy Turner, father of the missing children, is supported by friends, relatives and concerned community members during a vigil for Jacob and Sarah Hoggle on Sept. 13 in Germantown. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post) “[I]n societies where women have a lot of social support and also have access to birth control and education about birth control and the freedom to use it — in those societies, rates of child abandonment and infanticide are going to be very low,” Hrdy said in an interview. “It is in the societies where you don’t have those choices where the rate goes up.”

Phillip J. Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University’s Medical School who is considered to be an expert in the study of filicide, distinguishes between neonaticide, a term he coined to describe the killing of an infant by its parents within the first 24 hours of birth; infanticide, which involves a parent’s killing of a child less than 1 year old; and filicide, which is the killing of a child up to 18 years old by a parent, stepparent or guardian.

Resnick also categorized five basic motives. There is “altruistic filicide,” when a mother kills in the belief she is saving her child from a fate worse than death; “acutely psychotic filicide,” in which a mother obeys voices or hallucinations commanding her to do so; “fatal maltreatment filicide,” in which a child dies from abuse or neglect; and “unwanted child filicide,” in which a mother rids herself of a child perceived as a hindrance. The rarest motive involves a mother seeking revenge against her spouse — like Medea, a figure in Greek myth who killed her children to avenge herself against their father after he had abandoned her for another woman.

“In reality there are both rational and irrational reasons,” Resnick said in an interview.

A statistical analysis by Brown University researchers of more than 15,000 homicide arrests over 32 years found that about 500 parental filicides occur annually, or about 2.5 percent of homicide arrests.

Just this month, Prince George’s County authorities charged Sonya Spoon, 24, with killing her two toddlers — Ayden Spoon, 1, and Kayla Thompson, 3 — in their Cheverly home on Sept. 7. On Sept. 16, District police filed murder charges against Frances Lyles, 25, in the fatal beating of her son, Xavier, 3, in June. Earlier this year, Montgomery County police brought murder charges against a Germantown woman who allegedly killed her two toddlers because she believed they were possessed by demonic spirits. None of the defendants has entered a formal plea, online court records show.

Filicide goes back to the earliest days of human existence, its enduring grip on the psyche still preserved in myths and fairy tales. Even in the Bible, the stories of two key figures — Isaac and Jesus — evoke themes of sacrificial filicide.

In practice, the most common reasons for infanticide include disability, illegitimacy, lack of resources and cultural preferences for males. When twins were born among the Inuit, for example, the indigenous Arctic people sent one off on an ice floe because providing for two was too daunting, Resnik said. Hrdy cites a letter from a Roman soldier to his pregnant wife in the first century BCE with some blunt instructions: “If it is a boy keep it, if a girl discard it.”

By the 16th century, some European countries enacted laws making filicide a capital offense. But in 1922, Britain reduced penalties for maternal filicide, based on the presumption that a woman who killed her child must be imbalanced from the effects of giving birth — a stance that caused feminists to criticize lawmakers for treating childbirth as a pathology and assuming women were less able to govern their behavior than men.

“On the one hand, the mother is a nurturer and a protector, and if they violate that role the public feels they deserve the harshest punishment,” Resnick said. “And yet on the other hand, mothers unconditionally love their children, and there must be something very wrong, and so they deserve leniency.”

The British law reflected the sense that mothers who kill their children must be in the grip of a force strong enough to overpower the deep psychological, biological and cultural traits that normally bind them to their children, beginning in pregnancy. When a woman breastfeeds, her body undergoes changes that deepen the attachment further. Stress-related chemicals subside, and her body releases oxytocin, a potent hormone that promotes emotional bonding. The chemical reaction is so powerful that women who nurse their newborns are less likely to harm them in those first few days when infanticide risk is at its height.

To prevent maternal filicide, Resnick urged psychiatrists to be alert to the potential in mothers suffering from mental illness. Mothers who appear to be in the throes of severe depression, substance abuse or personality disorders should be queried about their child-rearing practices and parenting problems. Mothers who voice suicidal thoughts should be identified early, and perhaps asked about the fate of their children if the mother were to die. Resnick also urged a lower threshold for psychiatric hospitalization.

“Psychotic mothers who fear that their children may suffer a fate worse than death due to persecutory delusions should either be hospitalized or separated from their children,” Resnick wrote, in a paper he co-authored for the World Psychiatric Association’s journal.

see part 2 b

iseehot · 2020-02-10T02:39:22+00:00

Part 2b

Society’s profound ambivalence toward maternal filicide often plays out in high-profile cases, such as those of Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, a Texas woman who drowned all five of her children.

Smith initially told investigators that she had been carjacked by a black gunman who drove off with her two sons — Michael, 3, and Alexander, 14 months. Hicks, the former sheriff’s deputy, said he believed her story until the moment she confessed nine days later.

“You have to understand: This is a small town. In small towns, you know everybody,” said Hicks, who lived less than a mile from Smith and attended church with her. “And you don’t hear of mothers hurting their children.”

Prosecutors sought to impose the death sentence. But the jury that found Smith guilty elected to spare her life. She is still in prison for the October 1994 murders.

Andrea and Rusty Yates were a deeply religious couple whose lives revolved around raising and home-schooling their large family in a Houston suburb.

But Andrea Yates also had been treated for severe postpartum depression after the birth of her fourth child and again after her last.

On a Wednesday morning in June 2001, she filled the bathtub and drowned each child one by one. She called her husband, a computer specialist at NASA’s headquarters, and told him to come home. She called police.

Debra M. Osterman, a psychiatrist with the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County, Tex., said she diagnosed Yates with psychotic major depression that had so darkened her mind that she believed that killing her children, though against the law, could save their souls.

“She just had absolutely no idea that what she’d done was wrong. She said, ‘Maybe I could have just killed Mary, and that would have satisfied, that would have saved them all,’ ” Osterman recalled. “It was weeks later before I felt like I was seeing any life behind her eyes.”

Yates pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Jurors found her guilty but spared her a death sentence. Her conviction was later overturned, and a second jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity. She has been in a psychiatric hospital since 2006.

Osterman said Yates has made progress since the trial, though like many other mothers who have killed their children she will always struggle under enormous guilt.

“She really believes she will be reunited with her children but only if she lives out her life and doesn’t commit suicide,” Osterman said.

The larger lesson, if any, is that medical officials should have acted on warning signs earlier and intervened more dramatically, Osterman said. Less than 48 hours before the killings, a mental health worker failed to heed Rusty Yates’s pleas that his wife should be hospitalized, Osterman said. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful.

“I think people really project a lot of archetypal things onto these cases,” Osterman said. “I think this is all very distressing to us because we all feel vulnerable as children. The danger is really right there in the house.”

Jennifer B. Jenkins contributed to this report.

colttaine · 2020-02-09T23:18:41+00:00

I discussed it in a recent video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx-3lK_6ZQc

According to the 2007 study that i referenced titled "Child murder by mothers: patterns and prevention" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2174580/

When a young child is murdered, the most frequent perpetrator is a victim's parent or stepparent (1). Rates of infanticide parallel suicide rates rather than murder rates (2). The risk of being a homicide victim is highest during the first year of life (3-5). Though the US has the highest rates of child homicide (8.0/100,000 for infants, 2.5/100,000 for preschool-age children, and 1.5/100,000 for school-age children), the problem of child homicide transcends national boundaries (6). These rates of child murder are probably underestimates, due to inaccurate coroner rulings and some bodies never being discovered (4,7,8).

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