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Killing their own

What brings a parent to murder their child?

Three weeks ago, CCTV footage captured mother Sofina Nikat pushing an empty pram out of the Darebin Creek trail.

Later that afternoon, she reported to police that an African man, smelling of alcohol and missing his shoes, had snatched her 14-month-old daughter from her as she walked through the parklands.

Her story swiftly unravelled. The image of lonely domesticity soon became a haunting symbol of Nikat’s alleged murder of her own daughter.

There is a morbid kind of infamy surrounding the murders of children. Cases like that of Arthur Freeman, who threw his four-year-old daughter off the Westgate Bridge in 2009, and Charles Mihayo, who smothered his two daughters in 2014, burn themselves onto the public consciousness.

As each new case horrifies the public, experts have become concerned with the popular misconceptions surrounding filicide – the act of parents murdering their own.

In Australia, around twenty-seven children are murdered each year by their parents. Between 1997 and 2008, 291 children lost their lives at the hands of their own parents.

Professor Thea Brown, part of the Monash Filicide Research Team which produced the first national report of filicide, is alarmed by these figures.

“They’re high in comparison to other OECD countries,” Brown tells upstart.

“For example, we are higher than the United Kingdom. In Victoria there’s between five to six children killed by a parent each year.”

Though there isn’t a clear gender divide when it comes to filicide, when a mother kills her child the popular perception is that her actions are a result of postnatal depression.

Lisa Negri, clinical psychologist and co-author of ‘Treating Postnatal Depression: A Psychological Approach for Health Care Practitioners’, stresses that this is not the case.

“Postnatal depression is actually relatively common, it affects around 10 to 20 per cent of mothers,” Negri tells upstart.

“It’s no different to a depressive episode at any other point in someone’s life, the only difference being that there is a child involved.”

Every time something like this happens, people always jump to the conclusion that it must be postnatal depression and that’s the most unlikely scenario,” she says.

“There are a whole lot of other more serious mental illnesses and factors including drug and alcohol abuse and poor social supports that are more likely explanations rather than post-natal depression.”

So what drives a mother to kill her child?

Negri suggests that a rare mental illness, postpartum psychosis, which usually affects women in the first month after birth, may contribute to some deaths.

“It is quite a severe mental illness where the person is suffering from some depressive symptoms but they’re also suffering from psychosis involving delusions and/or hallucinations,” she says.

“It affects around about .001 per cent. So one in every 1000 births a mother might suffer from a psychotic episode.”

These episodes are not dissimilar to those seen in other psychosis illnesses.

‘They might believe for example that they’ve given birth to a baby that’s much older than we would expect them to be,” Negri says.

“So for an example, a mother might think a newborn baby can be put into a Jolly Jumper or she experiences command hallucinations to kill her baby.”

However, according to Brown not all maternal filicide cases are the result of postpartum psychosis.

Brown’s 2013 research suggests that there are five key factors involved in filicide cases, with mental illness and partner separation being key.

“With all of them it’s mental illness, primarily depression but also other illnesses. Secondly, parent separation. Thirdly, being a victim of domestic violence. Fourthly, a past history of child abuse, particularly attached to the father and the stepfather. Finally, substance abuse,” Brown says.

Brown stresses the fact that it is usually a combination of factors, not one alone, which triggers incidents of filicide.

“It’s not just one, it’s when you put them all together that the burden seems to become crushing for some people,” she says.

During the Victorian study, one third of the interviewed surviving perpetrators gave simple explanations. The sentence “I lost control” was used frequently.

Brown says that finding the causes behind filicide is not simple, highlighting the difficulties in recognising risk factors.

Parental separation or substance abuse by themselves may not warrant extra concern from health practitioners, yet linked with other ‘stress factors’ they could be a deadly mix.

“The workers who worked in the family law area didn’t see parental separation as a risk because so many of their clients were experiencing parental separation,” she says.

“The risk factor that was apparent from our research, did not mean anything to them because they considered it to be a normal part of life.”

Despite these difficulties, Brown believes filicide in Australia can be stopped. She thinks that it is a matter of the right information reaching the right people, and overcoming misconceptions.

“So first of all, getting information together [and] getting it out to professionals and trying to discuss with them what this means to them in terms of how do they understand it and how can they implement it,” she says.

“The second thing is trying to identify the particular gaps in the service system that these families fall through. One of the gaps that’s becoming clear is that they’re falling through the mental health services gap.”

Brown is currently working on plugging these gaps. Later this year, she will present a more detailed research project on the factors that caused incidents of filicide nation wide, over the last twelve years.

Though it may be some time until we can answer the complex questions behind why parents kill their own, as Brown would say, it’s better than putting it away.

“It’s easier for us, because it is so confronting, to get very upset at the time and then put it away. Then the next time, get very upset and then put it away.”

 

Cait KellyThumbCait Kelly is a third year journalism student at La Trobe University and a staff writer for upstart. You can tweet at her here: @caitkelly1

 

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