Society’s unending cycle of child abuse
Traumatic upbringing evident in mothers who kill their own, writes DAVE CHAMBERS
My mom hit me with a plate over my head . . . she would hit me with a broomstick or a mop
CAYLEIGH* was 23 and pregnant when she murdered her seven-year-old stepdaughter by smothering her with a pillow.
Three years later, she wept in court as she was jailed for 15 years. Begging a High Court judge in Cape Town to show mercy, her lawyer said she had experienced a traumatic upbringing.
Now the horrors of Cayleigh’s childhood have been laid bare by a PhD candidate who interviewed 22 child killers in an attempt to understand the link between their crimes and the way they were treated by their parents.
Bianca Dekel said traumatic parentchild experiences had a profound impact on the way the killers she met in five Western Cape prisons treated the children they murdered.
“Their childhoods were marked by abusive, neglectful and absent parenting practices,” she said in a paper published last week in the journal PLOS One.
“Many children in South Africa endure childhoods characterised by adversity. The difference for these men and women is located in the emotional experiences of adverse fathering and mothering.”
Cayleigh, from Stellenbosch, cannot remember when her father started sexually abusing her, only that it went on “for as long as I can remember” until her father died when she was 13.
Two years earlier, she had needed an abortion.
“To my father I wasn’t his child; to him I was a wife,” she told Dekel, who works at the Medical Research Council’s gender and health unit at the University of the Western Cape.
“If I refuse to do what he asks me to do with him, he will beat me . . . I was never allowed to cry, no matter how painful it was. Otherwise, he will beat me up badly . . . because he said crying is for babies.”
Said Dekel: “It was evident that the sexual abuse was still extremely painful to speak about and she often cried during the interviews. Childhood sexual abuse may carve a path through many adult lives of those who survive it and may leave a legacy of this abuse.”
The 14 women and eight men Dekel interviewed were responsible for the deaths of 25 children. They were parents, step-parents and caregivers, and received prison sentences ranging between eight months and life.
A list of their victims’ manner of death makes for horrifying reading: Fatal child abuse, neglect, buried alive, strangulation, firearm, smothering, poisoning, set child on fire . . .
The ways in which they reported being abused as children are also grim. Half of them reported maternal abuse, nine reported sexual abuse, 15 said they were physically abandoned by a parent, 20 said they were emotionally rejected and 10 were raised by addicts.
“The abuse and absence of their own parents were remarkable,” said Dekel. “[They] cried the most when speaking of their parents and the abuse/abandonment they experienced.”
She said the intergenerational cycle of abuse was evident in the account of Jennifer*, who was 21 when she was found guilty of the fatal child abuse of her three-month-old daughter.
“My mom hit me one day with a plate overmy head . . . she would hit me with a broomstick or a mop, whatever she could get in her two hands,” Jennifer told Dekel.
“She said: ‘I want you to feel my hurt and my pain and my suffering that I went through in my life’.”
Said Dekel: “Patterns . . .formed during interactions with one’s own parents tend to influence the style of interactions that individuals will eventually have with children in their care”.
The psychologist said that with no loving model for childcare other than “frightening behaviour and passivity and abandonment”, the killers she interviewed were unable to parent in a healthier way.
“It seems as though [they] resorted to adverse strategies such as detaching from their emotions and using drugs/alcohol, which may have aided the use of violence as a response to stressful emotional situations.”
Dekel said there was no straightforward solution to the complex problem. However, efforts to prevent child killings should be concentrated on adults who had themselves experienced abuse.
“Fostering safe and nurturing relationships between parent and child appears to be a crucial factor in breaking the intergenerational cycle of abuse,” she said.
* Not their real names