Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T08:19:25.005Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

18 - Maternal Filicide

from Part III - Postcopulatory Adaptations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

Todd K. Shackelford
Affiliation:
Oakland University, Michigan
Get access

Summary

Evolutionarily informed perspectives offer a comprehensive theoretical approach to parental investment, as they include not only explanations for why an individual makes such investment, but also for why an individual might withhold such investment. These explanations include associated predictions for when an individual is more or less likely to withhold investment. This chapter introduces the readers to evolutionary psychological perspectives on maternal filicide (i.e. child homicide perpetrated by a woman in the context of maternal care). These perspectives suggest that reproductive conflicts between women and the children in their care may activate mechanisms that evolved to regulate maternal investment. Under predictable circumstances, these mechanisms increase the risk of a lethal lowering of investment. Maternal filicide is then, despite being rare in current societies, no less a result of women’s evolved psychology. This chapter will present the theoretical foundation for disaggregating maternal filicide perpetrators who are genetic mothers from those who are stepmothers of their victims, and maternal filicide perpetrators suffering from non-adaptive psychopathology (such as psychosis or suicidal ideation) from those who do not. The chapter will further present the theoretical foundation for predicting a distinct pattern of characteristic traits for each of these four subcategories, and a selection of the empirical support for the predicted pattern that has been documented cross-culturally. Lastly, the chapter will explore the statistical changes in maternal filicides recorded since the mid 20th century in several Western countries, focusing on the Scandinavian countries. The explanation for the decrease in maternal filicide that will be offered is that the current life conditions of women in these countries prevents the activation of the evolved psychological mechanisms that motivate maternal filicide. Although filicide perpetration is currently reduced to historic lows in these countries, there are still certain groups of women that are more vulnerable to perpetrating maternal filicide than others. The chapter will identify these groups of women and suggest why their vulnerability persists.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adinkrah, M. (2000). Maternal infanticide in Fiji. Child Abuse & Neglect, 24, 15431555.Google Scholar
Alder, C., & Polk, K. (2001). Child victims of homicide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Alexander, R. D. (1979). Darwinism and human affairs. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Bourget, D., & Gagné, P. (2002). Maternal filicide in Quebec. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 30, 345351.Google Scholar
Buss, D. M. (2005). The murderer next door. New York, NY: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Camperio Ciani, A. S., & Fontanesi, L. (2012). Mothers who kill their offspring: Testing evolutionary hypothesis in a 110-case Italian sample. Child Abuse & Neglect, 36, 519527.Google Scholar
d’Orban, P. T. (1979). Women who kill their children. British Journal of Psychiatry, 134, 560571.Google Scholar
Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1994). Some differential attributes of lethal assaults on small children by stepfathers versus genetic fathers. Ethology and Sociobiology, 15, 207217.Google Scholar
Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (2001). An assessment of some proposed exceptions to the phenomenon of nepotistic discrimination against stepchildren. Annales Zoologici Fennici, 38, 287296.Google Scholar
Del Giudice, M. (2007). The evolutionary biology of cryptic pregnancy: A re-appraisal of the “denied pregnancy” phenomenon. Medical Hypotheses, 68, 250258.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Duntley, J. D., & Buss, D. M. (2008). The origins of homicide. In Duntley, J. D. & Shackelford, T. K. (Eds.), Evolutionary forensic psychology – Darwinian foundations of crime and law (pp. 4165). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Duntley, J. D., & Buss, D. M. (2011). Homicide adaptions. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16, 399410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durrant, J. E. (1999). Evaluating the success of Sweden’s corporal punishment ban. Child Abuse & Neglect, 23, 435448.Google Scholar
Durrant, J. E., & Janson, S. (2005). Law reform, corporal punishment and child abuse – the case of Sweden. International Review of Victimology, 12, 139158.Google Scholar
Flynn, S. M., Shaw, J. J., & Abel, K. M. (2007). Homicide of infants: A cross-sectional study. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 68, 15011509.Google Scholar
Friedman, S. H., Hrouda, D. R., Holden, C. E., Noffsinger, S. G., & Resnick, P. J. (2005). Filicide-suicide: Common factors in parents who kill their children and themselves. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 33, 496504.Google Scholar
Gheorghe, A., Banner, J., Hansen, S. H., Stolborg, U., & Lynnerup, N. (2011). Abandonment of newborn infants: A Danish forensic medical survey 1997–2008. Forensic Science, Medicine & Pathology, 7, 317321. doi: 10.1007/s12024-011-9253-6Google Scholar
Haig, D. (1993). Genetic conflicts in human pregnancy. Quarterly Review of Biology, 68(4), 495532.Google Scholar
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I and II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 152.Google Scholar
Harris, G. T., Hilton, N. Z., Rice, M. E., & Eke, A. W. (2007). Children killed by genetic parents versus stepparents. Evolution and Human Behavior, 28, 8595.Google Scholar
Hrdy, S. B. (1999). Mother Nature – maternal instincts and how they shape the human species. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.Google Scholar
Kauppi, A., Kumpulainen, K., Karkola, K., Vanamo, T., & Merikanto, J. (2010). Maternal and paternal filicides: A retrospective review of filicides in Finland. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 38, 229238.Google Scholar
Laurssen, T. M., Munk-Olsen, T., Mortensen, P. B., Abel, K. M., Appleby, M., & Webb, R. T. (2011). Filicide in offspring of parents with severe psychiatric disorders: A population-based cohort study of child homicide. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 72, 698703.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, C. F., & Bunce, S. C. (2003). Filicidal mothers and the impact of psychosis on maternal filicide. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 31, 459470Google Scholar
Liem, M., & Koenraadt, F. (2008). Filicide: A comparative study of maternal versus paternal child homicide. Criminal Behavior and Mental Health, 18, 166176.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marks, M.N., & Kumar, R. (1993). Infanticide in England & Wales. Medicine, Science and the Law, 4, 329339.Google Scholar
Ottesen, V. (2012). A current absence of neonaticide. Scandinavian Journal of Forensic Science, 18(2), 155163.Google Scholar
Ottesen, V. (2016). An evolutionary psychological analysis of filicide in Norway, 1990–2009. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Psychology. University of Oslo. Retrieved from www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/50525Google Scholar
Ottesen, V. (2020). Filicide. In Shackelford, T. & Weekes-Shackelford, V. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of evolutionary psychological science. Springer. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2288-1Google Scholar
Overpeck, M. D., Brenner, R. A., Trumble, A. C., Trifiletti, L. B., & Berendes, H. W. (1998). Risk factors for infant homicide in the United States. The New England Journal of Medicine, 339, 12111216.Google Scholar
Resnick, P. J. (1969). Child murder by parents: A psychiatric review of filicide. American Journal of Psychiatry, 126(3), 325334.Google Scholar
Shackelford, T. K., Weekes-Shackelford, V. A., & Beasley, S. L. (2005). An exploratory analysis of the context and circumstances of filicide-suicide in Chicago, 1965–1994. Aggressive Behavior, 31, 399406.Google Scholar
Scheper-Hughes, N. (2005). Culture, scarcity and maternal thinking. In Spinelli, Mararet G. (Ed.), Infanticide – psychosocial and legal perspectives on mothers who kill (pp. 119130). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.Google Scholar
Somander, L. K. H., & Rammer, L. M. (1991). Intra- and extra-familial child homicide in Sweden 1971–1980. Child Abuse & Neglect, 15, 4555.Google Scholar
Stone, M. H., Steinmeyer, E., Dreher, J., & Krischer, M. (2005). Infanticide in female forensic patients: The view from the evolutionary standpoint. Journal of Psychiatric Practice, 11, 3545.Google Scholar
Tang, D., & Siu, B. (2018). Maternal infanticide and filicide in a psychiatric custodial institution in Hong Kong. East Asian Archives of Psychiatry, 28(4), 139143.Google Scholar
Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In Campbell, B. (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man 1871–1971 (pp. 136179). Chicago, IL: Aldine.Google Scholar
Trivers, R. L. (1974). Parent-offspring conflict. American Zoologist, 14, 249264.Google Scholar
Weekes-Shackelford, V.A., & Shackelford, T. (2004). Methods of filicide: Stepparents and genetic parents kill differently. Violence & Victims, 19(1), 7581.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Maternal Filicide
  • Edited by Todd K. Shackelford, Oakland University, Michigan
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology
  • Online publication: 30 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108943567.022
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Maternal Filicide
  • Edited by Todd K. Shackelford, Oakland University, Michigan
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology
  • Online publication: 30 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108943567.022
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Maternal Filicide
  • Edited by Todd K. Shackelford, Oakland University, Michigan
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology
  • Online publication: 30 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108943567.022
Available formats
×