WHY A PARENT WOULD KILL THEIR CHILD:

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REASONS BEHIND NEONATICIDE AND

FILICIDE

Katy Hawkins

Introduction and Thesis

The day you are born is the day you are most likely to be a victim of homicide. The murderer? Most likely your mother.

Catching our attention with their grabbing baby killer stories in the news.

While many would agree that Neonaticide is wrong, metal health professionals, like Phillip Resnick, point to affective denial, mental illness, and extreme depression which add complexity to an otherwise clear issue of right and wrong.

Definition

Neonaticide - the killing of a newborn baby within the first 24 hours of life

Filicide – the killing of a baby/child once the child is older.

Phillip Resnick, forensic scientist, coined and defined these terms

Phillip Resnick

He seperated the term “infanticide” into neonaticide and filicide because he determined the motives for each murder are different.

He created a classification system within these terms to describe the different reasons that one would commit these crimes.

The Five Classifications

Altruistic filicide – the mother plans on taking her own life and believes it will be better if the children are with her in heaven. Mother kills out of love

Acutely Psychotic – parent is suffering from a mental illness which causes them to believe that killing their children is the correct thing to do.

Fatal Maltreatment – the parent abuses the child which leads to its death. This can include the mother’s who accidently leave their children in a hot car.

Unwanted Child filicide – this is when the parent decides that they do not want the child anymore and they decide to “get rid” of the child.

Spousal Revenge filicide – a parent kills a child because they want to make the spouse suffer

Affective Denial

Affective denial occurs when the mother does not want to tell a soul she is pregnant.

She completely denies the pregnancy to the point that she herself may not believe she is pregnant.

The site of a live, screaming baby awakens the mother to what has happened, and the mother believes that they only way out is to kill the child.

Affective Denial Cont.

These are the babies who are found thrown away like yesterday’s trash.

The mother may be unemployed, single, and may not have the means to take care of the baby

Doctor Joe Tucci said, “If an adult is killed, there are friends and family who miss that person.” Tucci went on to say, “But if a mother has carried and delivered her baby in secrecy, it’s not hard to make it disappear.”

Melissa Drexler

She arrived at prom, had her baby in the bathroom, and then left it for dead in the garbage.

She then made her way back to prom.

She had affective denial of this babies existence because she had the heart to kill it and continue at prom like nothing happened at all.

Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson

High School sweethearts. Amy accidently got pregnant their freshman year of college and they kept the pregnancy a secret.

She delivered the baby in a hotel room and Amy killed it and had Brian throw the baby away in the hotel dumpster.

Showed huge signs of affective denial.

Mental Illness

These mothers believe that their children are better off dead.

They commit altruistic filicide, acutely psychotic filicide, or fatal maltreatment filicide.

Phillip Resnick said that these mothers experience a time of psychological distress and this causes them to commit this crime. Depression goes hand in hand with mental illness.

Resnick used mental illness when defending these women in court.

Andrea Yates

Texas mother drowned her five children in a bathtub because she believed they needed to be “saved by Satan”

Resnick testified in her defense saying that she was truly mentally ill and insane.

In jail, Yates made a statement that helped Resnick to prove she was insane. She stated that she was evil and that her children were doomed while on Earth.

She believed their only hope was to take their lives.

Susan Smith

Created a crazy story has to the reason her children were founded strapped in their car seats at the bottom of a river.

She lied to police about the whereabouts of her children and police searched for nine days before finding them in the river.

Smith admitted that she planned on killing herself as well but chickened out at the last moment.

Casey Anthony

Casey Anthony was accused of murdering her daughter, Caylee.

She came up with a insane story about the whereabouts of Caylee and she lied to police.

Resnick testified for Anthony and made it seem like she was mentally ill during this time.

In all of these cases, this is the first major win for Resnick and the defense team that worked for Anthony.

Extreme Depression

Postpartum depression is a factor that causes mothers to snap and kill their children.

Mothers who suffer from this usually kill within the first 12 months of life.

Women become stressed with the challenges they face when raising a child, and this can cause some of them to snap.

Julie Powers She shot her teenage children,

ages 13 and 16, for “talking back to much”. This is an example of fatal maltreatment filicide.

She is an example of someone who snapped at the pressure it was taking to raise these two children.

Resnick looked at this case and said that is was one of the rarest filicide cases because parents do not usually kill children that are older. They normally kill newborn babies or young children who can not put up a fight.

Neonaticide and Filicide

Affective denial, mental illness, and extreme depression all have an impact on the reasoning behind these crimes.

Phillip Resnick has had control over the defense world when it comes to the cases and trials of these women. He is the man who has come up with the filicide class system, and he is the man who has come up with the reasonings behind these murders.

Neonaticide and filicide are complex issues, but there is strong psychological reasoning behind the reason of why a parent would kill their own child.