How could a parent kill, and how can we stop them?
It’s rare for a child to die at the hands of another person. Just 16 children under the age of 11 were victims of homicide in Canada last year.
It’s horrifying when one is killed, though, even more so when a parent is a suspect.
When that happens, we always ask the same questions: How could a parent kill his or her own child? What could be done to prevent it from happening?
As a forensic psychiatrist who has testified as an expert witness more than 600 times, including in more than 10 cases in which parents killed their children, Victoria’s Dr. Shabehram Lohrasbe wishes there were neat, easy answers. There aren’t — though some broad truths apply.
In a recent report, Lohrasbe found filicides — the killing of one’s own children — often have common elements: mental disorders, high stress, suicide attempts immediately afterward. Filicide is one of the few forms of extreme violence not associated with substance abuse or antisocial personality disorder.
Lohrasbe — who stresses that none of his comments are specific to the Christmas Day killings in Oak Bay — cited forensic psychiatrist Philip Resnick, who identified five types of filicide: • “Altruistic filicide is committed out of love to relieve the real or imagined, immediate or impending, suffering of the child. Altruistic filicide is most often associated with suicide attempts by the parent following the filicide.” • Deaths that occur when a parent is in the throes of acute psychosis. • Unwanted-child filicides almost always occur soon after birth. • Fatal maltreatment filicides might occur as a result of child abuse or neglect. • Revenge filicides, when children are killed in an attempt to make the spouse suffer. “Such parents are likely to have a severe personality disorder.”
“In all the cases I have assessed over the past three decades, I cannot think of any that could not be so classified,” Lohrasbe said Wednesday.
“However, several had multiple motives. Broadly, among parents who commit filicide, psychotic mental disorder appears to be more prevalent among mothers, and personality disorders among fathers.”
Depression is common to both genders, he said. Suicide attempts reflect “catastrophic thinking,” a feature of severe depression. “The sufferer sees no way out of what is perceived as unbearable pain.”
How to prevent it? There are no one-size-fits-all fixes, Lohrasbe said. The need to assess and treat psychotic mental disorders and depression is obvious, as is the need for support services for pregnant women and parents struggling with family relationships.
It can’t just be left to mentalhealth practitioners, though. People dealing with financial pressure, loneliness, anger and other problems need the support of a community — typically friends and family.
The legal system is a factor, too. “In our current stress-soaked society, and as the influence of family bonds, religion and shared cultural values has receded, the dominance of the adversarial process that often follows estrangement can exaggerate and harden fears, entitlement and rage,” said Lohrasbe. “Hence in many cases the most important preventive influence can be through legal practitioners who actively promote mediation rather than adversarialism and nudge their clients toward the best interests of the children.”
Criminal law allows those charged with murdering their children to plead not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder, but the bar for proving that is set high. It is usually only reached when there is history of a major mental disorder. That’s reflected in the outcome of several cases:
In March 2002, in the tiny northern Vancouver Island community of Quatsino, Jay Handel killed his six young children, ages two to 11, in their beds before burning down the family home with their bodies inside. He left an angry note to his wife, who was leaving him, on the gatepost in front of the burning home. Handel was sentenced to life in prison.
In September 2003, Sidney’s Astrid Literski, having been embroiled in a bitter custody fight, killed her four-year-old daughter in her bed, then made an abortive attempt on her own life. Literski was sentenced to 12 years after pleading guilty to second-degree murder.
In September 2007, Peter Lee broke into his estranged wife’s Oak Bay home and killed her, their six-year-old son, his wife’s parents and himself. At the time, Lee was out on bail, charged with deliberately crashing his car five weeks earlier while his wife was a passenger. She had just told him she wanted a divorce.
In 2010, Merritt’s Allan Schoenborn was found not criminally responsible for killing his three children, ages five to 10, in their home in 2008, but still ended up in custody. He is being held in the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital in Coquitlam.
This September, Victoria’s Kaela Mehl was convicted of firstdegree murder and sentenced to life after feeding sleeping pills to her infant daughter, then giving herself what she thought was a fatal dose, in 2015.