This week, a Dublin mother is believed to have killed her two young sons and then killed herself. Though shocking, it's not an isolated incident. Why do such tragedies occur, asks Shane Hegarty
The killing of a child by a parent shocks society like no other death. It seems to society the most irrational of acts, a warping of the natural order in which a parent is supposed to give life, not take it away; is expected to nurture, not destroy.
When a parent takes both their own life and their child's life it especially challenges our notions of victimhood. Such an event often becomes a "tragedy" rather than a murder. There will be mourning not only for the victims but for the perpetrator. It is difficult to imagine any other circumstances in which the murdered person would share both a funeral service and burial plot with their murderer.
The killing of a child by a parent - filicide - also poses considerable challenges to psychologists, governments and the law, and they are only recently attempting to understand what drives a parent to this most terrible of acts, and how it might be prevented in future.
Research suggests that it is difficult to generalise. Parents kill their children for a variety of reasons, and a subsequent suicide might not necessarily have been planned. But what emerges clearly through the statistics and case studies is that a parent is often driven to kill by the very nurturing instinct they seem to have abandoned. Experts call it "altruistic filicide". At the moment of the killing, they are often acting out of a sense of love and protection, though this is distorted to a horrific extreme.
When Mary Keegan and her sons Glen (10) and Andrew (six) were found dead in their Firhouse home in Dublin this week it once again put the issue in the spotlight. Other than in cases of infanticide - in which the child is under one year old and killed by its mother - Garda statistics make no distinction between filicide and any other homicide. However, it would appear that before this week's events at least 16 children have been killed by their parents in the State since 2000. In many of these cases, the parent then took their own life.
Most of these deaths occurred in a cluster during 2000 and 2001, when deaths such as those of six-year-old Deirdre Crowley (shot by her father) and of two-year-old Robyn Leahy (stabbed by her father) led the Government to commission research into the phenomenon. The then minister for social, community and family affairs, Dermot Ahern, asked the Family Support Agency to examine whether there was a broader trend behind the cases in which fathers had killed their children after marital breakdown, and whether the State might be able to put better supports in place to prevent further deaths.
SUCCESSIVE MINISTERS FINALLY got the project moving last year, when an expert group was assembled and included representatives of Barnardo's, the National Children's Office and the Central Mental Hospital. However, it quickly ran into the problem posed by having such a small research sample. Its remit was broadened to include cases other than post-separation deaths, but even then it was felt that it would be difficult to investigate cases without compromising the families' privacy or even gaining their co-operation. The project has now stalled. And when the attempt fizzled out last year it became clear that Ireland needed to look at other countries in seeking to recognise and prevent such potential deaths.
Research into filicide in Sweden, Finland, South Korea, China, Canada and the US has offered some insight.
Motives identified include: mercy killings (in the case of ill children); a psychotic reaction in which the parent might believe they are being commanded to kill the child; an altruistic belief that the murder is in some way saving the child from a greater harm; accidental death from maltreatment; or killing a child as revenge against a spouse.
While there is little evidence as to whether men or women are more likely to kill, there seem to be certain gender differences.
Fathers are less likely to kill for perceived "altruistic" motives, and more likely to do so during abusive emotional outbursts. Killings are often triggered by the breakdown of a relationship (something that seems discernible in a handful of Irish cases). Men are also more likely to take their own lives after the event, possibly because suicide is more prevalent among the male population generally. They also have a greater tendency towards familicide, the killing of the entire family.
Women, according to the studies, are more likely to use a "hands-on" method, such as drowning, suffocation or strangulation, while men are more likely to use a weapon. Mothers also seem more liable to kill younger children than fathers. Globally, the killing of teenage offspring is extremely rare.
While severe post-natal depression does occasionally lead to a psychosis in which a mother can become delusional, the very low numbers of children killed before the age of one suggest that longer-term mental illness plays a part. In many countries, the courts tend to be sympathetic in this regard, with women more likely to be found guilty but insane than in other murder cases.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, STUDIES have found that in most cases of filicide-suicide the parent has a previous history of mental illness. Filicidal women have often become socially isolated to the extent that the relationship with their partner and children may be their only major social interaction. And while these mothers generally express how much they love their children, they tend to have a sense of personal inadequacy and a lack of parenting skills. It is the parent's belief that he or she is killing their children as an act of kindness - how the irrational becomes rational - that is most disturbing.
"The core of this is the delusional system," explains Dr John Bogue, a forensic psychologist at NUI Galway. "And these delusions can be very powerful. The whole basis of delusion is that it's a firmly held belief, it's absolutely the reality for the individual, and so rationality goes out the window. So in the case of 'altruistic homicide', the love of the parent gets diverted into protecting the children against something like, for example, imminent thermonuclear war, or disease. The maternal or protective influences are enmeshed within the delusional system."
Dr Bogue recalls a case in Scotland in which a man killed his children because he believed events in the Middle East were about to trigger a nuclear war. "To us, looking from the outside, it's an extremely violent and tragic act. But for that person at that moment, it might be agonising and they may be very distressed, but they would be absolutely convinced that this is the correct course of action to take."
In the case of filicide-suicides, the child might be seen as an extension of the parent. "If somebody's in such a severe depressive state that they have a feeling their circumstances are hopeless, and by extension their loved one's circumstances are hopeless, the suicidal motivation can extend to significant others," says Dr Bogue.
REGARDING POSSIBLE PREVENTION, research has concluded that doctors should be alert for cases in which the child might be "over-loved", considered an extended part of the self or is the focus of paranoid delusions. The problem for psychologists is that it is often very difficult to identify a potential problem. It is not uncommon, after such deaths, for neighbours and family to comment on how the parent seemed perfectly normal. They may have even continued everyday chores - going to a match or booking a holiday - right up until the terrible act.
Identifying those at risk, says Dr Bogue, can be very difficult, because even extreme mental illness might not be outwardly obvious. "More often than not, the risks have been successfully managed and we don't hear anything about it, but on those occasions when an individual is outwardly presenting themselves quite normally they could well be operating in a delusional system."
It is extremely difficult to prevent murders, even when we have a good idea of who is likely to commit them, explains Dr Ian O'Donnell, of University College Dublin's Institute of Criminology. "With gangland killings, we know these are young, urban men, with poor levels of education, probably with criminal records. Even with that kind of information, which narrows it down significantly, it's going to be virtually impossible to predict which of these individuals is going to end up taking a life or being a victim. And when you're talking about filicide, an even rarer event, it's very difficult to talk about risk factors."
Because such a large number of people share characteristics, such as post-natal depression, it is very difficult to identify everyone at risk. Even after an event, especially when there are no survivors, it can be difficult to get any clear answer as to why someone acted the way they did.
In suicide cases, even notes that are left behind seldom reveal many answers, says Dr O'Donnell. "It's extremely difficult to come up with a tool that's accurate to an acceptable level. And what I mean by that is that if you included everybody who satisfied the risk criteria, there would be so many people you could do nothing." The phenomenon might initially seem like a modern one, but Dr O'Donnell observes that a sub-strand - the killing of babies by their parents - is not new to Ireland. "In the 1950s, one in six homicides involved the killing of a baby. In 1952, for example, the majority of recorded homicides involved babies. People have short memories.
"And the other thing is that we thought differently of children then. They weren't invested with the same amount of care and attention as they are now. So it was partly the shame side of it and the stigma, and also the economic consequences of another mouth to feed."
In modern Ireland, however, each time a parent kills a child it raises questions. The Government recognised that the numbers of separated fathers killing their children needed to be examined. Other cases have queried the way in which we treat mental illness.
Answers, though, have not come easily. It is thankfully rare, but it is a terrible fact that children are more likely to be killed by their parents than by anyone else. It would appear that the only certainty is that this week's tragedy will not be the last.