Why mothers kill their babies

As a matter of chance, two of them were in my class. They were treated horribly by the white students. Her Black classmates handled the mistreatment differently. The girl was so nervous she vomited on her desk and was tormented by the other students. The boy became a class clown to deflect the mean comments he received. I was 10 years old. It was quite confusing. By that time, I had chosen to ignore those —including teachers and school staff — who were constraining my interaction with African American friends.

I knew by that time that most of the people where I grew up were deeply racist, and I did not want to be like them. Somehow, and I don't know how, I knew there was more to the world than what I was experiencing. Smithey attended Louisiana Tech University, intending at first to study law so she could better understand social injustice and crime.

Then, she discovered sociology and, within it, the specialization of criminology. She was hooked. Smithey earned her bachelor's degree in and her master's degree in , both in sociology. Between the two, she worked for a nonprofit organization dedicated to the prevention of child and spousal abuse and as a counselor for incarcerated youth.

After finishing her master's degree, she took a position at a faith-based children's home, supervising and training house parents. I turned to the family violence literature and found the very unsatisfactory answer of child homicide as 'accidentally killing a child while abusing it. So when my son was 18 months old, I started my doctorate.

With a predoctoral award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Smithey spent three years researching infanticide in the only way that made sense: locating mothers who had killed their infants and intensively interviewing them.

This reduced the distance between good and bad for me. The realization that these women weren't inherently evil then led to another question: What could cause a normal person to kill an infant? Smithey's answer: The unfair social conditions we've all been taught to accept as normal.

This failure is the result of cultural and economic inequalities situated in the context of increasingly anomic, unrealistic expectations of mothering and decreasing social support and economic resources necessary for fulfilling the role identity of mother.

Here's how she explains it: In today's society, nearly all mothers must have a paying job to make ends meet. Their job dominates their day, leaving little time for the significant demands of parenting. Advocates such as Feingold say prosecutors often fail to acknowledge postpartum psychosis as a legitimate mental illness.

These women are really sick and need treatment, not punishment. In some instances, women do avoid punishment. Yates, for example, initially received a life sentence. False testimony from a witness for the prosecution prompted a judge to order a new trial.

During the second trial, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a state institution. The sentence prompted a strong response from critics, particularly those who felt there was no justice for the murdered children.

The outcry in Texas grew louder in when a state house committee passed a law intended to limit penalties for women who committed infanticide during a mental health crisis. The bill was never sent to the legislature for a vote. Unlike other countries, the U. Eve Hanan, a former public defender who is now an associate professor of law at the William S.

This, she says, is a major reason why women with postpartum psychosis are often punished rather than rehabilitated. They have different ways of looking at mens rea , which is the guilty state of mind required to convict somebody of a crime. Although definitions vary by jurisdiction, Hanan says homicide laws include specific language regarding intent.

For women with postpartum psychosis, the specifics of these definitions can lead to convictions. Windows of lucidity can be interpreted later in court as sanity and used to demonstrate premeditation. Bolanos, for example, appeared lucid when she carried her son into a Dollar Store the afternoon before the murder.

A security camera recorded her buying knives and razor blades, both of which she used to kill her son. Although Bolanos suffered from delusions, mental-illness defenses are rarely used in court—about 1 percent of the time for felony cases, according to one study. But they often struggle to prove a client with postpartum psychosis should have a reduced punishment, says Barry Lewis, a criminal defense attorney in Chicago and an advocate for helping mothers with postpartum psychosis.

Postpartum psychosis presents suddenly and often in women who have never had a psychotic episode in the past. For a defendant such as Yates who had years of suicide attempts and psychotic episodes behind her from preexisting mental health issues, a defense attorney generally can point to the history of behavior, depending on state laws regarding insanity defenses.

Even the most sympathetic judges have limited options when sentencing women with postpartum psychosis. There are few psychiatric facilities in which a woman can receive rehabilitation. In the s, there were more than , patients in psychiatric hospitals.

By , the number dropped by 90 percent. In the following five years, the number decreased further to about 43, patient beds—nationwide. At the same time [as deinstitutionalization], we began incarcerating people with mental illness. In the U. Catherine Zalis was one of those women. In , Zalis, 21, was pregnant for the third time in three years.

On average, one child is killed by a parent almost every fortnight in Australia. Last week, three children — Claire, 7, Anna, 5, and Matthew, 3 — were included in this terrible number. It was less than a year ago that Hannah Clarke and her children Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey were killed by their father , Rowan Baxter, who doused their car in petrol and set it alight.

In , Anthony Harvey was sentenced to life in prison in Perth for killing his small children Charlotte, Alice and Beatrix, his wife Mara and her mother Beverley. Also that year, Charmaine McLeod is suspected to have deliberately caused the head-on collision in Queensland that killed her and her four young children, Aaleyn, Matilda, Wyatt and Zaidok.

Filicide is the murder of a child by a parent. However, one of the most recent comprehensive national filicide studies in Australia documented cases between and This study mirrored trends elsewhere, with male and female perpetrators represented in roughly equal numbers.

Common precursors to filicide included a history of domestic and family violence, parental separation and mental illness. Read more: Why do parents kill their children? The facts about filicide in Australia. On social media, some commentators on this latest case involving Katie Perinovic have been quick to criticise what is perceived as more sympathetic media coverage of women who kill their children.

And for some, the fact women and men commit filicide in roughly equal numbers suggests that family violence has no gender.

But filicide is a relative outlier as a form of violence committed by women in relatively equal numbers to men. Men commit almost all forms of violence at higher rates.

And the most common form of domestic homicide — intimate partner homicide — is committed far more by men against women in the context of domestic violence.