July 24, 2010
Blurb
Familicide — they also call it that — is common enough that a profile exists for those who commit it: usually white, a bread-winner, older. “It's typically a husband or father who has suffered some major stress,” said Jack Levin, a sociologist and criminologist at Northeastern University. “He has lost his job and is deeply in debt or lost money in the market, and he thinks he's protecting his family from suffering. Or he's in the throes of a nasty divorce and decides to get even with his wife by taking what she loves most, which is the children.” In the few cases where it is a child, he said, the child is usually at least 16.
For the young adolescent who destroys himself and the family that surrounds him, no such profile exists; the numbers are too small for there to be anything typical. (Paul Mones, a children’s rights lawyer who has worked on hundreds of cases involving intrafamilial homicide, said he had seen only a few involving siblings killing siblings.) We can take comfort in such numbers, although small numbers are also discomfiting: With no profile, there is no way to predict when another comparable tragedy might occur. Who is the troubled fire-setter who will go on to other petty crimes, and who is the troubled fire-setter who will go on to commit a massacre?
Even if the experts cannot predict, they usually can explain. “The statistics would suggest there was probably family discord, disorganization, chaos — strife between family members and within this boy,” said Bradley Peterson, chief of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia….
Read more at the New York Times.
For the young adolescent who destroys himself and the family that surrounds him, no such profile exists; the numbers are too small for there to be anything typical. (Paul Mones, a children’s rights lawyer who has worked on hundreds of cases involving intrafamilial homicide, said he had seen only a few involving siblings killing siblings.) We can take comfort in such numbers, although small numbers are also discomfiting: With no profile, there is no way to predict when another comparable tragedy might occur. Who is the troubled fire-setter who will go on to other petty crimes, and who is the troubled fire-setter who will go on to commit a massacre?
Even if the experts cannot predict, they usually can explain. “The statistics would suggest there was probably family discord, disorganization, chaos — strife between family members and within this boy,” said Bradley Peterson, chief of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia….
Read more at the New York Times.