Unpacking reasons for revenge filicide
A NEW study published in the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling has shed light on the motivations behind revenge child murders in South Africa.
It is always tragic when parents murder their own children with the intent to hurt their spouse or partner.
Although there may be many reasons for such incomprehensible acts, retribution seems to be a motive when one parent kills a child to hurt the partner or spouse. These child murders are known as revenge filicides.
“Spousal revenge killers murder their own child to afflict hurt or retribution on the partner, spouse or ex-partner. In this type of murder, the spouse specifically wants the partner to suffer and feel misery,” said Dr Melanie Moen from Stellenbosch University and Professor Christiaan Bezuidenhout from the University of Pretoria.
For their study, the first of its kind in the country, they analysed media reports and court documents about revenge filicide cases from 2003 to last year.
Cases of this nature were difficult to identify, but they managed to classify 20 of these types of child murders since 2003. In 12 cases (60%), the offenders (men and women) were married at the time of the murder(s).
They killed their children by strangling, hanging, poisoning, suffocating, stabbing or beating them to death.
According to the researchers, the motivations for revenge filicides are often linked to complex personal and interpersonal relationship problems.
The two point out that in several cases, the offenders mentioned that they experienced marital and relationship discord such as an argument, rejection, jealousy and anger shortly before they killed their children.
“Our analysis showed that a parent can kill a child because of a loss of social identity due to rejection, extreme rage and anger, blaming others for their misery, sadism, a desire to cause pain and a need to inflict harm.
“The sense of loss of social identity and the anger and disappointment experienced by the murdering partner becomes an overwhelming, blinding rage that sweeps away everything in its path,” the authors said.
“The accumulation of the overwhelming negative emotional experiences leads to a desire to cause pain at all costs, sometimes sadistically, to ensure a reciprocal justice balance; the murdering parent believes that killing the child will cause the spouse or partner to experience the same hurt and that this type of ‘justice’ will bring about some form of equilibrium.”
The researchers added that the offending partner wants the receiving partner, who they believe inflicted this emotional and psychological pain on them, to experience the same pain by murdering a child or children.
“The principle of ‘lex talionis’ (an eye for an eye) comes to the fore with devastating consequences for the receiving partner and the children due to the reactive-impulsive expressive violent behaviour of the murdering partner who ultimately wants to restore their sense of control and sense of self.”
A form of narcissism – an extreme self-involvement that makes a person ignore the needs of others – was at play in the analysed cases.