Oh my God … I made a mistake …

Abstract

Children die in many different ways at the hands of their parents. For the general public, and for future researchers and administrators, they then become statistics. Statistics tell you nothing about what a child endured or experienced preceding the killing; and very little about the perpetrator or the circumstances leading up to the death. Yet it is these factors that may leave indelible memories and provoke powerful emotions in the lives of family members, neighbours and friends. Without such factors, the bare statistics, accumulated over time, are unlikely to move us, or enlighten us about a deepening tragedy in family life. More importantly, such factors may also contain lessons, enabling professionals to minimize the risks of similar killings in the future. In this book, the narrative will often pause on statistics, probing what they do not tell us as much as what they do. The second chapter will give details of the book’s contents, but this first chapter is different: it will focus almost entirely on three cases. They belong to that category of filicide in which the method of killing is drowning. This is a relatively short chapter, but it has numerous objectives: (i) to quickly transport the reader into the core painful realities of filicide; (ii) to describe the events leading up to one particular killing; (iii) to highlight the exploitation, abuse and suffering endured by all the children; (iv) to question generally held assumptions about the mental health of perpetrators, particularly revolving around the motivational delusions attributable to them; and, finally, (v) even though the book will make its own contribution to the ‘statistical field’, and encourage workers to familiarize themselves with all relevant research findings, this chapter will expose the limitations of statistics.