CHILDREN RARELY KILLED BY SEX CRAZED STRANGER..

Children under 5 are known to be particularly at risk of parental homicide with mothers being equally as guilty as fathers. The full text of the article below, emphasises the difference in treatment between the two sexes however, with mothers often being dealt with sympathetically, they were mentally ill, but fathers often being found to be acting out to punish the wife, they were evil. There is an all too familiar ring in the details given with the behaviour of the father in Greece, including his own attempted suicide. I hope this man is re-tried for what he did.

What is particularly horrifying is that in a staggering 95% of cases these little tots know the person who killed them.

The final paragraph of this article is particularly poignant ..maybe it is high time people stopped considering children as their property to do with as they will and a much greater emphasis was placed on the fact that children are legal entities in their own rights. They have just as much right to enjoy a family holiday for example..and to be safe on that holiday. They are not possessions to be dumped in a safe..they are real little people, helpless, vulnerable little people if they are not part of a loving and protective family.

Did Kate view Madeleine as an extension of herself?

Given that Dr O'Brien was missing from the meal table for 45 minutes and during the same time that Madeleine went missing, just how can the McCanns be so certain he had nothing to do with it? That just does not make sense, does it, if you know you did not do it yourself, then you would just have to suspect this man of harming your child, wouldn't you? How could you not? How could you know it was some "lurking predator" with such certainty that the McCanns display. Given they say they left the door open, rather than protect "their property" how could they say with certainty, Madeleine did not just wander off? I know for a fact when my children were four they would have been able to open a patio door, desperate to find me if they had woken up alone..Why did the PR man for Martin Warner write in The Times, Kate was convinced that Madeleine had just wandered off and had an accident or was being kept safe by someone, is Mr Woolfall telling lies? See: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2599613.ece

Full text of the article When Parents Kill: Why Fathers Do It, Why Mothers Do It.
http://www.slate.com/id/2063086/


The Numbers

Children under the age of 5 in the United States are more likely to be killed by their parents than anyone else. Contrary to popular mythology, they are rarely killed by a sex-crazed stranger. FBI crime statistics show that in 1999 parents were responsible for 57 percent of these murders, with family friends and acquaintances accounting for another 30 percent and other family members accounting for 8 percent. Crime statistics further reveal that of the children under 5 killed from 1976 to 1999, 30 percent were murdered by their mothers while 31 percent were killed by their fathers. And while the strangers, acquaintances, and other family members who kill children skew heavily toward males (as does the entire class of murderers), children are as likely to be murdered by their fathers as by their mothers.

The Newspapers

Doug Saunders observed recently in the Toronto newspaper the Globe and Mail that the media is complicit in treating maternal killers as newsworthy and paternal killers as ordinary criminals. Newspapers currently following every motion in the Andrea Yates trial completely ignored last month's Los Angeles filicide, in which Adair Garcia killed five of his six children by asphyxiating them with a barbeque he'd lit in the living room. He did it to punish his estranged wife, who had moved out a week earlier. Coverage of Ukranian immigrant Nikolay Soltys, who killed his pregnant wife and 3-year-old son last August, was less focused on his mental state than his dramatic flight and capture. Why is Yates a front-page story while Garcia is disregarded? To paraphrase Michelle Oberman: Murdering mothers are just different.

The Motives

The same studies that have been used to prove that murderous mothers are "sick" can as readily be used to support the theory that both mothers and fathers consider children to be a woman's property. Social science research and FBI crime statistics show that men and women differ in the reasons they kill their children, in the methods they employ, and in the ways they behave following such murders. None of this data proves that fathers are crazier than mothers. Much of it suggests that we all simply believe children "belong" to their moms.
Researchers, building on the work of Phillip Resnick, have shown that women tend to kill their own offspring for one of several reasons: because the child is unwanted; out of mercy; as a result of some mental illness in the mother; in retaliation against a spouse; as a result of abuse. Frequent themes are that they themselves deserved to be punished, that killing the children would be an altruistic or loving act, or that children need to be "erased" in order to save or preserve a relationship. Contrast this with the reasons men kill their children: Most frequently—like Garcia or Soltys—they kill because they feel they have lost control over their finances, or their families, or the relationship, or out of revenge for a perceived slight or infidelity. The consistent idea is that women usually kill their children either because they are angry at themselves or because they want to destroy that which they created, whereas more often than not, men kill their children to get back at a woman—to take away what she most cherishes.
According to a recent article by Elizabeth Fernandez in the San Francisco Chronicle, studies further reveal that fathers are far more likely to commit suicide after killing their children. Mothers attempt post-filicide suicide but rarely succeed. Some scholars suggest this is because mothers tend to view their children as mere extensions of themselves and that these homicides are in fact suicidal.

The Murders

Perhaps more revealing than the differences in why they kill their offspring are the differences between how fathers and mothers do so. For one thing, parental murderers tend to be highly physical. According to a 1988 survey done by the U.S. Justice Department, while 61 percent of all murder defendants used a gun in 1988, only 20 percent of the parents who killed their children used one. Children were drowned and shaken, beaten, poisoned, stabbed, and suffocated. These methods betray a certain "craziness" in both genders—they betray an intense passion and a lack of planning. But a study by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows that fathers are far more violent. And mothers frequently dispose of the corpses in what researchers call a "womblike" fashion. Bodies are swaddled, submerged in water, or wrapped in plastic. Moreover, the NCMEC study showed that while the victims of maternal killings are almost always found either in or close to the home, fathers will, on average, dispose of the bodies hundreds of miles away. All these behaviors suggest that women associate these murders with themselves, their homes, and their bodies
None of the arguments here assumes that there is no such thing as postpartum depression or, in rarer cases, postpartum psychosis—a deep break from reality that affects less than one in 500 new mothers. Andrea Yates is actually a good example of someone who was overdetermined to experience some kind of psychotic break that would end tragically. But Yates is only one of hundreds of mothers who kill every year, and while complete psychotic breaks explain why some of this homicidal rage and violence is turned upon one's own children, it doesn't account for either the staggering numbers of maternal homicides or for society's leniency toward women in these cases. The property theory does provide these answers. Women still believe that they have sole dominion over so little property that arson and armed robbery and rape make no intuitive sense to them. But the destruction and control of something deemed to be a woman's sole property sends a powerful message about who's really in charge, and this message hasn't changed since the time of Jason and Medea.
It would, of course, help if we could stop thinking of children as anyone's property. It does nothing to advance the feminist cause to simply assume that all mothers who kill their children must necessarily be crazy. It will do a good deal to advance the cause of children's rights if we begin to consider them as legal entities in and of themselves.
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