When mothers turn into killers – Some believe they’re killing children ‘out of love’

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I killed them,” depressed mother Tania Clarence repeatedly told police officers when they arrived at her house in Thetford Road, New Malden, south-west London, over the Easter weekend in 2014.

The horror of what they found in the well-to-do house unfolded in court over the next year: “She smothered the boys first while they were sleeping using a nappy so they would not smell her,” prosecutor Zoe Johnson told the court.

“Little cars and toys had been placed by their heads. The covers were neatly tucked in…”

Husband Gary, an investment banker, had taken their eight-year-old daughter on a holiday to South Africa, leaving Tania alone with Olivia, 4, and three-year-old twins Ben and Max, who all suffered from the muscle-weakening condition SMA type-2.

“She found it much harder to kill Olivia, and wrote a letter to her husband in the time between killing the boys and killing Olivia.”

The warning signs to the tragedy were there: in May 2011, a doctor noted that Clarence was “seriously overstretched/under intolerable strain” from all the medical appointments. But the most chilling was in 2012, when she told medics that she did not want to see her children’s suffering prolonged and “if they were in South Africa they would go to the top of a mountain and die”.

Maternal filicide is defined as child murder by the mother – a mother who has had frequent depression, psychosis, prior mental health treatment, and suicidal thoughts, University Hospitals of Cleveland psychiatrists Dr Phillip J Resnick and Susan Friedman found in their study Child murder by mothers: patterns and prevention.

They have identified five major motives:

• In an altruistic filicide, a mother kills her child “out of love”, rather than anger or hate; she believes death to be in the child’s best interest (for example, a suicidal mother may not wish to leave her motherless child to face an intolerable world; or a psychotic mother may believe that she is saving her child from a fate worse than death);
• In an acutely psychotic filicide, a psychotic or delirious mother kills her child without any comprehensible motive (for example, a mother may follow command hallucinations to kill);
• When fatal maltreatment filicide occurs, death is usually not the anticipated outcome; it results from cumulative child abuse, neglect, or Munchausen syndrome by proxy;
• In an unwanted child filicide, a mother thinks of her child as a hindrance;
• The rarest, spouse revenge filicide occurs when a mother kills her child specifically to emotionally harm that child’s father.

Are they legally accountable?

The law often reduces the penalty for mothers who kill their children. Britain, for example, allows mothers to be charged with manslaughter, rather than murder, if they are suffering from a mental disturbance – a precedent the
majority of nations follow.

Most common murder methods:

Studies showed the most common methods of infanticide are battering, smothering, strangling, and drowning. The murder of infants and young children is typically committed with personal weapons (eg, hands, feet) and rarely involves firearms, knives, and other dangerous weapons.

Fathers tend to use more violent methods such as striking, squeezing, or stabbing, whereas mothers more often drowned, suffocated, or gassed their victims.

Who are the most common perpetrators?

Studies found a predominance of unemployed mothers with a tendency to commit suicide. The mothers often experienced psychiatric disorders (36% to 72%) – and in Japan, the infant victims frequently had physical anomalies.

Prior mental health care is a red flag – and stress. Multiple stressors (economic, social, abuse history, partner relationship problems), primary caregiver status, and difficulty caring for the child were frequent.

“Our recent study of mothers found not guilty by reason of insanity in two US states found that the perpetrators were often depressed and frequently experienced auditory hallucinations, some of a command type,” the psychiatrists noted.

“A small New Zealand study that interviewed the mothers after their filicides found that psychotic mothers who had committed filicide often killed suddenly without much planning, whereas depressed mothers had contemplated killing their children for days to weeks prior to their crimes.”

A significant proportion (16%-29%) of filicides end in suicide by the mother.

When mothers of young children commit suicide, about 5% also kill at least one of their children. Most frequently, severely mentally ill mothers have altruistic motives and often take the lives of all their young children.

A study of depressed mothers with children under age three, found that 41% had thoughts of harming a child.

Warning signs

Can it be prevented? Early screening and identification of mental illness is key, Resnick and Friedman suggested.

Depressed mothers contemplating suicide should be asked directly about the fate of their children if they were to take their own life. Threats must be taken seriously.

Parenting classes, emotional support, and emergency numbers to call when mothers are overwhelmed can be helpful in preventing filicides. But spouse revenge filicide is difficult to prevent, because there is usually little warning.

This behaviour most often occurs after learning of spousal infidelity or in the course of child custody disputes.

Sometimes a mother is so convinced that her child will be sexually abused if custody is awarded to her ex-husband that she decides the child is better off dead. Evaluators of child custody disputes should be alert for this potential.

As Resnick noted in his study Filicide in the United States: “When children are killed by one of their own parents, it can be viewed as the ultimate betrayal because the parent’s role is to nurture and protect their children.

“When a child’s death is the result of a parent’s psychosis, the feelings of loss and guilt usually last a lifetime. Some parents who have killed their children find it hard to forgive themselves and are indifferent to whether they are placed in prison or a hospital.

“The ongoing sorrow of these parents is captured in Greek mythology in the words of Medea upon killing her two sons: ‘To die by other hands more merciless than mine – No; I who gave them life will give them death; now no cowardice, no thought how young they are, how dear they are, how when they first were born; Not that – I will forget they are my sons; One moment, one short moment – then forever sorrow.’”

– news@citizen.co.za