Fathers Who Kill Their Kids

Last week in the UK Andy Copland, shot his four year old daughter Maisie and ex-partner Julie Harrison before shooting himself at his home in Aldershot, police say he had a violent history towards the women in his life.

It’s a fact that more men kill their kids just before killing themselves as a final act of hatred and jealousy towards their ex-lover/wife.

Copland was different in that he wiped out the mother as well; in the UK we have a rise in crimes of men who kill their kids to leave the mother alive in the hellish grief.

There is a dramatic difference in the sexes when it comes to infanticide and murder/suicides.

Evidence shows that women tend to kill their own kids during a mental illness episode and the majority of them weren’t in a relationship with the father of the kids, so it mostly isn’t based on revenge on the father, though it does still happen albeit in much smaller numbers.

The men who do this must be deranged, mentally ill and completely self destructive to kill their own babies to hurt the woman who lives on.

There was a horrific case in the UK nearly ten years ago where the father took his three kids to an isolated spot, started to poison the children with a hosepipe attached to the car. The father made the children speak to their mother on the mobile phone as they slowly gasped for air; he then told her the kids were dead as she frantically begged him for the lives of her children. That is a pain unimaginable to any human being, yet that father carried on until all his kids died and then he killed himself.

What makes a man commit the ultimate pain to a woman? Does he know that her children dying would be the one thing that would break her, so he calmly selects that particular torture to inflict on her?

Women who survive after their kids have died at the hands of their father must live on in horrendous grief, knowing that she chose a man who turned out to be a killer and even handed her precious children over to him before the murders, must destroy her faith in humanity.

Back in 2006, Briton John Hogan responded to his wife’s request for a separation whilst on holiday in Crete by grabbing his two kids and throwing himself off the balcony. His son died and his daughter was seriously injured.

To maximise the pain for his estranged wife, he made sure he took the kids with him over the edge, imagine how she must have felt watching her children being thrown to their potential deaths?

Recent studies have noted that a particularly macabre feature of murder-suicides in the UK is that contrary to claims that the killings must have been the result of a momentary act of insanity, virtually all were premeditated.

Chris Milroy, a forensic pathologist at the Forensic Science Service who studies murder-suicides, says that "When men kill their children there tends to be revenge in the equation. It's like they're saying, 'If I can't have them, no one can.'"

Davina James-Hanman, director of the Greater London Domestic Violence Project, believes "powerlessness" is a key word here.

"Domestic violence, whether sustained or carried out in a single killing, is essentially about power and control. If you think of the violence as a continuum, with murder at one end and minor abuse - for want of a better description - at the other, abusive men will go as far down the continuum as they need to establish the power and control to which they feel they're entitled. If the woman leaves the relationship - the ultimate challenge to his control - he will sometimes come back with the ultimate sanction and sometimes the only way to get back at her is through the children."

Mental illness has to be a recurring theme in these incidents, but why don’t as many women jump with their kids off a balcony during an argument? Why don’t as many mothers gas, shoot, stab or burn their own kids when a custody case or vicious divorce takes hold?

Why do men see killing their own flesh and blood as the final word in a fight?

David Wilson professor of criminology at Birmingham City University adds that a cultural shift is necessary to stop us viewing children as possessions or pawns. "The social construction of childhood is such that children are seen as weak and voiceless - the property of their parents. But if we applied the principle of seeing them as autonomous and having a voice to issues such as custody proceedings - asking, 'Which parent do you want to live with?', for example - that might potentially do something about the numbers of kids that are battered or murdered. Then there are laws around smacking. Again, the fact that we legally sanction it fits into this sense of children being merely a form of property of their parents."

Do men see the nurturing of children a threat to their own needs?

Does that mean when men have to take second place when a baby is born, do they secretly resent it and harbour such dark feelings?

Or are these men just more mental and determined to make a woman’s life a living hell without her kids if she doesn’t agree to have him back in her life?

Either way, the constant victims in all these incidents are children, who are raised by violent unstable men who wait for the opportunity to prove their control over a woman and disguise it as love, care and adoration.