Re: women who kill their children

[dick sobsey <dick.sobsey@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Regarding the motivation of women who kill their children and sepcificallly
regarding the original request's reference to the South Carolina case, here
is a theory extracted from our research on parents who kill children with
disabilities and might apply although these children did not have
disabilities.

We have sometimes seen a pattern that we call ambivalence-disinhibition (as
the label implies, puttingd together two already established theories.
Ambivalence theory has been studied mostly in the way that people react to
people with disabilities or minority status, but it can also apply to the
way people feel about their children. They harbor both positive and
negative ideas or constructions. They love them and value them more than
anything else in the world AND they resent them and maybe even sometimes
hate them and find them burdensome.  Under certain conditions one view
predominates and other different conditions, the other view predominates.
However, the most dangerous condition is when the two ideas can be melded
together. This allows the parent to commit violence against the child
rationalized by doing it out of love.

For example, a parent of a disabled child may find caregiving burdensome
and resent the demands. However, under most circumstances inhibition would
stop such a parent from killing his or her child. Now, the parent is told
that the disabled child has no potential for quality of life and that
keeping the child alive just prolongs the child's suffering. The parent who
was inhibited can now construct a belief system that says that they are not
harmingtheir child but rather helping the child by alleviating suffering.
Some people would argue that the real motivation is mercy and others would
argue taht the real motivation is getting rid ofa perceived burden.
However, we now think that neither one is entirely correct and it is the
interaction between these motivating factors that allows violence to take
place. The elimination motivation creates the dirve but it requires the
mercy motivation to overcome inhibition and allow violence to occur.

The way that this could have played out in South Carolina is something like
this.
Some people including the prosecution suggested that the mother wanted to
get rid of her children because they were in the way. In particular they
stood between her and a man she was interested in who said that he didn't
want children.  Her statement said that she couldn't satnd to see her
children suffer through the divorce taht she was going through. Its not
unlikely that she really did worry about this since her father had killed
himself breaking up her family and she was then allegedly sexually abused
by her stepfather. Thse thoughts may have allowed her to construct a
rationale that she was spring her boys suffereing form killing them. Her
confession says that she loved them so much that she couldn't stand to see
them suffer.  Again, I think it is likely the interaction between the two
motivations is the key issue.

>From analysing cases of so-called mercy killings of children with
disabilities, I'm pretty sure that something like this operates in a lot of
cases. Whether it might be applied to other acses of children without
disabilities is another question, but my guess would be that it probably
does. The notion of a single motivativation for such an act is usually teh
way things are presented in the courts and the media, but it could be that
multiple motivating factors and interactions among them play an important
role.

dick sobsey



Dick Sobsey, Director
JP Das Developmental Disabilities Centre
University of Alberta
6-123 Education North
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2G5  Canada
phone: (780) 492-3755
fax: (780) 492-1318
dick.sobsey@ualberta.ca