Distorting Filicide Numbers - A Glimpse Behind the Curtain

A brief look at framing devices around the latest ANROWS report into filicide.

If you believed our national media you might think that filicide perpetrators are overwhelmingly men. And this view is perpetuated by the spin, bordering on outright propaganda, put out by publicly funded bodies. 

ANROWS released a document last month called, “Tips for Reporting Findings from Australia’s First National Report on Filicides in the Context of Domestic and Family Violence”. Three pages of “tips” HERE were written by ‘experts’, such as OurWatch, to “assist” journalists in how they should report the findings.

The report says that while “other forms of domestic homicide (are declining), filicide persists with around 20 cases each year”. This is a mostly ignored tragedy. Yet every Australian can rattle off the claim that one woman a week is killed by an Intimate Partner - even though it is not accurate.

We are first told, “a striking 76% of filicides occurred within a domestic and family violence context.” That context being a history of DV. This excludes the remaining 24% who are mothers with no history of DV who kill, ostensibly, due to mental illness. The report itself says, “without considering the DFV context, males and females perpetrate filicide somewhat evenly” (pg 44). But when you factor in the disproportionate step-father presence in the numbers, a lot more mothers kill their children than fathers.

The tip sheet instructs journalists how to manage this sleight of hand.

DO “Explain the gendered nature of intimate partner violence by providing prevalence statistics.” Yes, change the subject to Intimate Partner Violence. A good example of this is the Rosie Batty case - the discussion around the death of the male child was distorted into the female experience of IPV. (And no, I don’t blame Rosie Batty for that - see my discussion HERE).

But making the conversation about IPV distracts from other critical factors. For instance, only 37% of people who commit filicide are employed (pg 55, suggesting poverty), while 42% were in country towns (pg 50, suggesting lack of services).

DO “Keep gender-focused statistics together. For example, “Of the filicide offenders, 97 per cent identified as primary perpetrators of intimate partner violence were men, while 96 per cent identified as primary victims of intimate partner violence were women.”” So again, DO present the statistics in a way to suggest men kill children as an extension of IPV, while women only kill because they are victims.

But these women aren’t just victims, they are perpetrators. The most significant set of statistics, the pattern of domestic violence with respect to the actual victim, the child, shows more than a third (36%) of the women are also sole perpetrators of violence against the child.

A further 56% of the time the mother was involved she was not the sole perpetrator but still participated in the abuse and death. Male perp / woman victim doesn’t come close to explaining what is going on. The child is the victim.

We see it again when we look at criminal history. On pg 59 we are told 44% of the women who killed their children had a criminal history, so it more relevant to see these women as criminals rather than victims. This becomes clear when we deconstruct that 96% ‘victims of IPV’ figure. Pg 66 tells us, “87 per cent of stepfathers who killed their children had been violent towards an intimate partner… 94 per cent of female filicide offenders were identified as a primary victim-survivor of IPV, either in a current or former relationship.” Note the language - the men have committed violence toward an intimate partner, while the women have experienced DV in a current or former relationship. They are NOT necessarily talking about the relationship the person was in when they killed the child!

What are the actual figures? THIS Cambridge article gives us extensive Australian figures:

Mothers were characterised as being mentally ill (52%), separated from or with no current partner (45%), having a history of crime (30%), being a victim of domestic violence (23%), and having drug (22%) and alcohol (11%) abuse issues.

So having the mitigating factor of being in an abusive relationship when the filicide happened? 23% of the time, not 96%. Twice as likely to be in no current relationship (45%), and/or to be a convicted criminal than a victim. This is also on pg 81 of the report: “Approximately 6 in 10 filicide offenders were a primary IPV perpetrator (59%) and around a quarter were a primary IPV victim-survivor (23%).”

DO “Emphasise the strong connection between a history of domestic and family violence, especially intimate partner violence and filicide. Most of the time, the killing of a child by their parent is not a “one-off incident” but part of a history of behaviour.” However, the history of abuse of the child is true for both female and male perpetrators. It is both intuitively and statistically correct to say that the vast majority of filicide offenders are themselves victims - whether that be of substance abuse, poverty, or past trauma.

However, it is much easier to simply characterise offenders as ‘evil’. But this is equally true for both men and women. Indeed, if we  look at the rates of male suicide, mental illness and substance abuse it is difficult to argue that female offenders are worse off in terms of prior disadvantage or trauma. 

But what happens when partners separate, and the mother, as is usually the case, gets sole or primary custody of the child/children? When you look at all the numbers on filicide, you find that the most common scenario of filicide is a custodial mother killing her child due to mental illness. Not a vengeful father during a custody dispute (we’ll come back to that), not a step-father (though they are massively over-represented), and not a wicked step-mother.

DO “Highlight that intimate partner violence impacts children. Child sexual, physical and emotional abuse often coexist alongside a parent’s use of intimate partner violence. Even where these direct forms of abuse do not occur, children are experiencing the acute and chronic impacts of living in a home where a parent, usually a father or stepfather, is using violence towards a partner, usually the child’s mother.” Except where the statistics say otherwise.

To try to frame the whole situation as “what happens to children is simply downstream of IPV so it’s all the man’s fault” is a ludicrous oversimplification of the complexity of DV, particularly child abuse. Violence is not a hierarchy, with men at the top and children at the bottom and helpless women in the middle - it is a cycle, it goes around and around. Today’s abusive man is yesterday’s traumatised child, while women being both victims and perpetrators is one of the most persistent findings in DV research. That cycle stops when we keep the children safe, which means holding adult child abusers responsible for their actions, irrespective of their gender, irrespective of their background. Trauma explains behaviour, it doesn’t excuse it.

DO “Seek out expert comment on the interconnected, yet separate, nature of children’s and women’s experiences of domestic and family violence.” This is another framing tactic that essentially says, “change the discourse from child abuse to IPV, and use ‘experts’ to give this credibility”. This ABC employs these ‘tips’ to the full, falsely claiming, “Filicide overwhelmingly linked to male perpetrators”, wrongly claiming all 68% of DV-related filicides by a man were by the father, and engaging two experts to try to claim, “Revenge and control are the drivers of male-perpetrated filicide”, which the report actually contradicts. 

Only 31% of filicides occurred in the context of relationship breakdown (pg 69) - significant, but nowhere near a majority, and only half of that (15%, pg 70) involved family law proceedings. 74% of the incidents (pg 40) did not appear to involve pre-planning (whereas someone plotting their revenge is planning by definition). Also, 83% of the offenders were living full-time with the victim (pg 51), which simultaneously torpedoes the idea that filicide is committed on any large scale either by vengeful non-custodial fathers, or mentally ill mothers after a ‘coercive controlling’ man stole her kids through the family court (another common narrative that has almost no basis in reality). 

When we go through the statistics, none of it supports the narrative.

Most perpetrators were not involved in DFV orders, either as respondents, or people being protected (pg 57).

Only 14% of the children were under protection orders (pg 68).

Less than half the perpetrators had experienced DV in childhood, lower than the national average (pg 58).

Half the cases involved some contact with mental health services, half did not (pg 75).

The most significant consistent stats are about child abuse - 78% had a history of child abuse (pg 60) and 60% of the time there had been contact with child protection services (pg 72), though few progressed to specialist services (19%) and as mentioned above, even fewer (14%) to protection orders.

So the most consistent understanding of filicide comes from looking at it as an act of child abuse. Looking at it from a child centred perspective.

And yet this was missed because they were too busy pushing the flimsy “it’s all explained by male IPV, you just need to look at it from the mother’s perspective!!!” narrative.

Finally, there is the issue of the crimes charged (pg 54), and methods used (pg 39).

Male crimes were predominantly manslaughter (only 37% were murder), while the methods used were most often unarmed assault, or ‘beatings’ as the literature calls it, at 47%.

The victims? “Nearly half (46%) of the filicide victims were aged under 2 years” (pg 82). And this is leaving out essentially all the ‘postnatal depression’ victims.

When we factor in the lack of pre-planning in 74% of cases, we come to a stark conclusion - in at least half of the cases, the male probably had no intention of killing the child: it was a beating delivered for punishment, ‘discipline’ or anger / frustration.

This doesn’t let men off the hook, but even a brutal man can strike a child intending, in his sick mind, to punish or discipline the child, or to make them stop crying, yet have no intention of killing or even injuring the child. Factor in the vulnerability of a small child, things like “shaken baby syndrome” etc, and we arrive at… a very dark place, to be sure, but somewhere utterly unrelated to “spousal revenge” or “coercive control” as the “heart of male perpetrated filicide”.

Looking now at the tip sheet’s ‘DON’TS’.

DON’T “Quote a single statistic without context.” So don’t casually say, “97% were male perpetrators of IPV / 96% were female victims”, because someone might supply the context and embarrass you. Sage advice.

DON’T “Imply women experiencing violence are at fault for not preventing violence against their children.”

Except… sometimes they ARE at fault.

Not always: a woman with an abusive man, experiencing IPV, is a victim. BUT, a woman who brings a violent man into the children’s lives, a step-father or ‘boyfriend’ or whatever she calls him, and keeps him in the children’s lives when he has shown himself a danger to the children… YES, she is to blame for that. Not for his actions - they are on him - but for his access to the children.

And the reason for this is she has failed her duty of care to her children.

Finally, DON’T “Suggest abusive men are “driven” by separation to kill their children or that they “just snapped”. Instead, focus on the significant percentage of filicides in which there was a history of abuse demonstrating that the killing of these children was part of a pattern of behaviour”.

Compare this to the framing of “96% of women who kill are IPV victims!”, meant to imply women are ‘driven’ to kill by what they have suffered. Factor in the outrageously one-sided nature of custody outcomes (which I covered it HERE), emotional abuse and threats to take away the children (I covered that HERE), the financial effects of divorce quite apart from custody issues, and the simple reality that separation is a very well recognized risk factor for domestic violence, and we can see that this narrative is both simplistic and inaccurate.

Yet we get these contradictory framing devices - DO say the woman is driven to filicide by being the primary victim of IPV, explore it and get experts to agree, DON’T ever say the man is driven to do it, even though the system is designed to remove a father from his child’s life in the event of relationship breakdown, if that is what the mother wants.

The filicide literature consistently tells us, there is no one cause. There is no one predictor. The Monash Deakin Filicide Research Hub, having previously agreed with the 5 potential offender characteristics (mental illness, domestic violence, partnership breakdown, substance abuse and history of child abuse), in their most recent research added a 6th (criminal history), so the problem is becoming more complex, not less so.

To ignore this and present simple answers in the manner of this ‘tip sheet’ - “it’s all about DV, and that means IPV, and that means blame the man!!!” - is simply wrong. It’s a disservice to the dead, and a lack of protection to the vulnerable, because it stops being child centred.

And if filicide isn’t something to be viewed as child centred, well, God help us all.

Filicide is about the killing of innocent children, and an accurate and constructive understanding of filicide comes from looking at it as an act of child abuse. An act of abuse with causes. Causes which can be effectively addressed, but only if we reject an ideologically driven approach.