Murder-Suicide, Filicide, Familicide - Call it what you want they are still dead

The other day I posted about the study that was conducted that showed that all the shooters in family murder-suicides are men. This is something that I keep running across as I read the news, watch the news, even when I am just stumbling around the internet.

Have we as a society become numb to the violence that is on our TV’s and in our papers everyday, simply because it IS there everyday? Is this why many are just not paying attention to these almost weekly killings of families?

Many things are blamed for this or rather, given as excuses; from the poor economy to prescription drugs and just about everything in between. One article that I found about this that pretty ran the gamut of reasons can be read HERE. It was that article that made me start thinking back to the one that I posted the other day. Of course every time someone writes about a parent killing their children (with or without killing the spouse) the names Andrea Yates and Susan Smith come up.

I can not lump them in with these men that are annihilating their ENTIRE families. This is a separate issue all together and one that we are seeing happen on the average of about once a week lately. I have a theory, of course I do...

On this site: http://anonymums.blogspot.com/2009/04/murder-suicide-epidemic-larger.html I found an interesting side to this backed up by some research. This closely resembles my own theory as to why this is going on and it really has nothing to do with the economy or any external factors.

An excerpt from the Journal of American Academy of Psychiatry and Law Online:

Filicide-Suicide: Common Factors in Parents Who Kill Their Children and Themselves

Susan Hatters Friedman, MD, Debra R. Hrouda, MSSA, Carol E. Holden, PhD, Stephen G. Noffsinger, MD and Phillip J. Resnick, MD

In the report of Somander and Rammer¹² from Sweden, the average age of children in filicide-suicide was 6.5 years, and 70 percent of the perpetrators were fathers. This was virtually identical to the average age of children in our U.S. study (6.8 years and 67% fathers, respectively).

Twice as many fathers as mothers committed filicide-suicide in our study. This is in keeping with findings in previous studies and the higher male suicide rate. Two-thirds of fathers attempted to kill their wives, while no mother attempted to kill her husband. This may be related to a more proprietary attitude of men toward the family.²¹ The sample spans many years before the women’s liberation movement when men were likely to be the only breadwinners.

The most frequent method of filicide-suicide was by shooting, a method that is likely to succeed in both filicide and suicide. Similarly, in U.S. newspaper reports of homicide-suicides, 90 percent of perpetrators used firearms.²²

Familicide

Dietz described familicide perpetrators as:

Family annihilators, usually the senior man of the house, who is depressed, paranoid, intoxicated or a combination of these. He kills each member of the family who is present, sometimes including pets. He may commit suicide after killing the others, or may force the police to kill him [Ref 23, p 482].

Our sample is consistent with this description. Of the 11 men who attempted to kill the entire family, 5 were depressed, 3 were paranoid, and 2 had alcohol in their systems.

A North Carolina study of homicide-suicide included seven cases of familicide-suicide.²⁴ None of the men had histories of domestic violence, while three had histories of mental illness, and two had criminal histories. Of our sample of 11 men who committed familicide-suicides, 2 had a known history of domestic violence, 5 had utilized mental health services, and 2 had criminal histories. Morton and colleagues noted familicide-suicides were often "preceded by a range of factors including severe depression and suicidal ideation in the perpetrator, ongoing marital conflict, perpetrator anger over separation, and illness in the victim and perpetrator’s child" (Ref. 24, p 97). Our sample showed many of the same themes, with the addition of financial stressors.

Perpetrators of familicide have been classified as accusatory killers or despondent killers.²¹ Accusatory killers had a grievance against their wives and often a history of violence. The despondent killer is described as "a depressed and brooding man, who may apprehend impending disaster for himself and his family, and who sees familicide followed by suicide as ‘the only way out’" (Ref 21, pp 287–8). Our data showed more altruistic killings—that is, committed by despondent killers rather than accusatory ones—though occasionally characteristics of both types were seen.

All of that being said, I believe that as a society we are all too often turning our heads to the violence that goes on right in our own communities. We ‘know’ of child abuse or spousal abuse and domestic violence that is taking place right next to us and all around us. Rather than taking steps to protect the victims most turn a blind eye and act shocked when the father kills every single member of his family. At which point everyone scrambles to explain away this happening. “He was being treated for depression” “Things were tight financially because his hours were cut” Bullshit!

Another factor that has played into this is that in far too many courts around the world judges are not taking into account any abuse or domestic violence that may have lead to the situation of divorce and subsequently the ensuing custody battle. These judges are punishing protective mothers for well...being protective, and thus ‘awarding’ (yep that is what they call it) these abusive fathers with custody of the children. This is giving a signal to the entire world that abuse in all of its myriad of forms is just fine.

So, with family court judges ruling in this manner and reporters spinning these deaths in the light of the current fashion...it is no wonder that we are still having them and they are increasing with time. Fairly soon we will be a world so numb to this that it will not even be reported as it is now. The sensationalism will wear off and no one will care.

I leave you with this last thought and question: If you are not part of the solution then by default you are part of the problem. Which are you?

The pattern…the shooters are all men…the Chaos

Original:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/18-8

Published on Saturday, April 18, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Denormalizing the Signs of Impending Disaster

by Michael Schwalbe

Warning signs can go unheeded because we normalize them. According to some analysts, this is what happened in the case of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. On January 28, 1986, less than two minutes after taking off, the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters exploded, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

In her book The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, sociologist Diane Vaughan asks why NASA managers decided to launch the shuttle, despite warnings from engineers that the mission should be delayed because of potential problems with the solid rocket boosters in the below-normal January cold.

Vaughan’s answer points to what was normal in the social world of NASA at that time: minor compromises in design and performance; equipment that deviated slightly from specifications; and pushing ahead with flight schedules, despite engineers’ worries over seemingly small technical anomalies.

According to Vaughan, the recommendation to delay the flight was ignored because having problems and anomalies on the shuttle were taken-for-granted aspects of NASA culture. So was the tendency for engineers to worry. Against this backdrop, Vaughan says, signals of danger appeared mixed, weak, and routine, and thus were not taken seriously enough.

So far this year, eight mass shootings have resulted in nearly 60 deaths. As at NASA in the case of the Challenger, there have been ample warning signs. But because these signs are so commonplace in our culture, we have either ignored or failed to see them.

After each shooting, the question has been asked, Why do people do this sort of thing? The experts typically consulted are psychologists, who cite depression, social isolation, anger, and shame as causes. The most often mentioned contextual factor is the easy availability of guns.

But to ask, Why do people do this sort of thing?, is already to ignore the obvious pattern. It is not people of all kinds who kill because they are depressed, isolated, despairing, angry, or feeling shame. The shooters are all men. So the question we should be asking is, Why do men do this sort of thing?

One reason this question is seldom asked is that violence and manhood in U.S. culture are thoroughly normalized. As anti-violence educator Jackson Katz documents in his film “Tough Guise,” over the past twenty years violence has come to be the defining feature of manhood in America. Violence and masculinity have become nearly synonymous.

This is not to say that all men are violent, or even that all men go around pretending to be Rambo just beneath the surface. Of course not. Yet all men are judged by a cultural standard that says a real man — one who deserves all the privileges of being a member of the dominant gender group — should have a capacity for violence and a willingness to use it when necessary.

The same cultural standard says that real men are able to exert control over the environment, over others, and over themselves. To be a victim of external forces is thus nearly the opposite of what it means to be a man in U.S. culture. It is hard to feel put upon, demeaned, or controlled by others, and still feel worthy of respect as a man.

The great contradiction, however, is that in a capitalist society most men don’t have much power. A relative handful of men control vast economic resources, make laws, control the police, and command armies. These men can indeed make decisions, backed by force, that deny most other men and nearly all women control over their own lives.

On the one hand, then, real men are expected to be able to exert control; on the other hand, they lack the resources — wealth, status, institutional authority — to do so. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that some men try to compensate for their lack of power by displaying a capacity for violence, or a lack of fear of other men’s violence.

Most of the time, most men are not overtly violent. But when a man tries to exert control and then rages against people and circumstances that frustrate these efforts, we are not necessarily alarmed. We are not alarmed because he is doing what we expect men to do.

Fortunately, such frustration does not usually lead to mass killing. Yet this is simply the logical extreme to which violent masculinity leads. When the burden of shame for failing to meet the cultural standards of manhood becomes unbearable, and a man feels there is nothing left to lose, mass killing may be a perverse attempt to restore, with irreversible finality, a sense of control.

As at NASA, the warning signs today are abundant. But they are mixed, weak, and routine.

Not all men are violent. Nor are men who occasionally commit acts of violence always violent; they can often be kind and gentle, too. And because it is possible to point to rare instances when women are violent, we can be misled into thinking there is nothing special about men that should compel our attention.

But the most serious problem is that we normalize the relationship between manhood and violence, and thus we take for granted what should be clear warnings about the potential for violence that our society instills in every man. When men learn to stake their self-worth on having power and being in control, and yet live under conditions that frustrate and humiliate them, we should not be surprised when explosions occur.

It may be strangely comforting to see the problem of mass shootings as a psychological one. If the problem stems from psychopathology, then we don’t have to look critically at our culture of manhood or at how our society concentrates power in a few hands. Certainly, men suffering from depression and excessive anger may benefit from support and therapy. But therapy will never solve our collective violence problem.

If we understand the problem in cultural terms, we can see that the dangers go beyond being the victim of a “random” shooting. The logic of violent masculinity puts the whole planet at risk. By this logic, the natural world has no value in itself, but exists mainly to provide resources for expanding one’s power. By the same logic, which is also the logic of U.S. imperialism, it is better to destroy the world than to fail to dominate it.

What we need is a cultural shift away from defining manhood and nationhood in terms of a capacity to dominate. We need to reject the worship of power and of “commanders-in-chief,” and instead make democracy the primary value by which we judge our social institutions. The warning signs are all around, writ small in every mass shooting and writ large in every war. Our survival depends on denormalizing these signs and heeding them soon.

Michael Schwalbe is a professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.  He can be reached at MLSchwalbe@nc.rr.com.  

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