ORIGINAL ARTICLE

ABSTRACT:

OBJECTIVE: Maternal filicide, or child murder by mothers, occursmore frequently in the United States than in other developednations. However, little is known about factors that conferrisk to children. The authors review the literature to identifypredictors of maternal filicide and identify gaps in knowledgeabout maternal filicide. METHOD: Databases were systematicallysearched for studies of maternal filicide and neonaticide (murderin the first day of life) that were conducted in industrializedcountries and were published in peer-reviewed, English-languagepublications after 1980. RESULTS: Women who committed filicidevaried greatly by the type of sample studied. Neonaticide wasoften committed by young, poor, unmarried women with littleor no prenatal care. CONCLUSIONS: The results of the reviewsuggest that little is known about the predictors of maternalfilicide and that a systematic, focused program of researchon reliable markers for maternal filicide is needed to betterprevent these events.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Predominantly women, not men, kill children According to Jeff White, writing for the Report Newsmagazine, men are brutes who 'always specialized in killing older children.' However, it is women, not men, who kill more children, by far. The following article was commissioned by the Report Newsmagazine but was not published.  Apparently it became overlooked and forgotten.  I can't blame the editor for that.  He was busy fighting a case for freedom of the press in a Human Rights Tribunal of the Alberta Human Rights Commission at the time.Response to Jeff White Andrea Yates notwithstanding,….all men are beastly brutes, if we are to believe what Jeff White told us. Re:Report, Apr. 29, 2002, p. 40

According to Jeff White, "Men have always specialized in wholesale killing of older children." Well, maybe he has always done so (how did he get away with it?), but nobody else I know did. He told more whoppers in his article. He mentioned a survey (unnamed) "of 35 cultures from around the world," that "found that 21 of them killed deformed or sickly children," and "positively demanded" their deaths. "Only Christians didn't approve of it." By my reckoning, 35 - 21 = 14. Were those 14 cultures exclusively Christian? Did Jews and Muslims habitually kill their disabled children? Are Christians to be despised for bringing an end to the practice of destroying those that don't conform to pagan ideals of beauty or convenience? Hitler promoted such "Whitish" cleansing. The more of our Christian ideals we discard, the more the people on the Left cleanse. It's now a women's right!

In addressing the topic of the male role in "serious domestic violent crime," Jeff White covered a selective and very broad range of subjects, localities and much anecdotal evidence. From there he then drifted back to Canada and cemented his hypothesis of men being habitual killers of their families firmly into place with StatCan's estimates on partner violence, even if covering only a fraction of family violence. Those data relate to all alleged violence between men and women only, including instances of men yelling at their wives, giving them the cold shoulder or "scaring" them. They are demonstrably tainted with StatCan's pro-feminist and family-hostile editorial bias. Moreover, they are not even based on biased convictions but largely on the results of telephone surveys.[1] Why not, advocacy numbers fit a pet theory so much better, right?

StatCan's very broad definitions of "mother" and "father" deliberately mislead.  A "spouse" could mean just about anyone in the presence of a woman or man, no matter the duration or quality of the presence. "Mother" is likely to be a natural mother, whereas "father" is most likely any man but a natural father. Thereby it is made to appear that we can safely ignore the far superior safety of families headed by married biological parents. However, in their care, as Patrick Fagan from the Heritage Foundation identified, children are 33 times less likely to be seriously abused and 73 times less likely to be killed than in single-mother "families."[2]

American government agencies report numbers that are more objective, not as subjective as those Jeff White selected. In the US in 1999, 70.3 percent of perpetrators of child abuse were female parents acting alone or with others. Out of an estimated 826,000 victims of child maltreatment, nation-wide, 1,100 were fatalities. Their perpetrators break down as follows:

PERPETRATOR RELATIONSHIP [3]

31.5% Female Parent Only
10.7% Male Parent Only *
21.3% Both Parents *
16.3% Female Parent and Other
1.1% Male Parent and Other *
4.5% Family Relative
6.1% Substitute Care Provider(s)
5.7% Other
2.7% Unknown

* "Male parent" in that context most likely is just about anything but a natural father.

That means that, acting alone or with others, female parents were responsible in 69.1 percent, and male parents in 33.1 percent of cases of fatal child maltreatment.

Contrary to Jeff White's yarn, if anyone cornered the market on the killing of children, women did, not men! Furthermore, considering stepfathers, common-law husbands, boyfriends and other strange males involved in the lives of women and in the abuse of "women's" children, it emerges that natural fathers are the least likely to let harm come to any child. That's what we should try to establish, not deny and twist around.

Not much can be gained by tarring all men or women with the same brush. It would be a long jump from the circumstance that at most three percent of people engage in child abuse to the assertion that therefore all women (or all men) are child abusers. Such jumps in logic are a prerogative usurped by feminists, not the mark of an objective journalist.

Space doesn't permit to go into the misperceptions promoted by Jeff White with respect to partner violence. He should look up the studies undertaken by Drs. John Archer, Martin Fiebert and others.[4] Newspapers, too, in spite of their liberal bent still provide much useful information, as long as we can keep it free of editorializing by uninformed people or those with an agenda. By the way, there were no "horrors of the Yates trial," but the trial exposed, examined and judged the horrors visited by Andrea Yates on the children she and her husband conceived.

Was it necessary to publish an article that contained such a large collection of misleading information? Aren't men being vilified enough already without anyone adding to the general slander directed against them? Let's hope that Jeff White's article is not a sign of worse things to come, and that we won't see the Report join the drive to keep women and "their" children safe from those beastly brutish men, although the media frequently report that women kill children in revenge against the children's fathers.

What's next, the promotion of deadly ideologies of people like Prof. Steven Pinker? ("…birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other" in setting a boundary for the killing of a child [5]) They significantly extend abortion to include the new-born whose continued life will depend solely on a "rational" decision by the mother, all in compliance with the "prehistoric tradition of infanticide as the oldest method of reproductive control." At least Steven Pinker, who used almost identical words, only speculated that there may have been such a tradition. On Jeff White's keyboard it became an assertion. The Report printed it and always told the truth before, therefore the "prehistoric tradition" (an oxymoron) must be true?

See also: Video on violent women

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1.) "Family Violence in Canada 2000 — An Alternative Approach," by Eeva Sodhi, a letter to Statistics Canada, posted 2000 08 31, at http://fathersforlife.org/Sodhi/fvcans1.htm, a critique pointing out flaws in the method of presentation and in the statistics contained in: Statistics Canada pub. "Family Violence in Canada: A Statistical Profile 2000" Cat. No. 85-224 (Note: Interestingly, in her commentary, Eeva Sodhi identifies and analyses precisely those statistics by which StatCan misleads the uninformed in exactly the manner in which Jeff White got mislead.)

2.) A compelling status report and useful suggestions for solutions are provided in the report by the Heritage Foundation "Marriage: The Safest Place for Women and Children", by Patrick F. Fagan and Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D., Backgrounder #1535.

3.) Child Maltreatment 1999, Fig. 4-3 http://www.calib.com/nccanch/chma99.pdf

4.) Studies by Archer, Fiebert and others can be accessed or are listed at http://fathersforlife.org/family_violence_main_page.htm

5.) "Why They Kill Their Newborns," by Steven Pinker, New York Times, November 2, 1997, Sunday, Section: Magazine Desk, http://www.gargaro.com/pinker.html

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