Talk:Filicide

This article requires a complete overhaul (as at March 1, 2022)

There are multiple issues with this article including: - American (US) bias - Incomplete summaries (eg listing only 4 of the 5 theorised motivations for filicide) - Incorrect, incomplete or biased presentation of statistics - Zero mention of domestic violence, almost no discussion of post-partum depression - Not thorough, comprehensive

Structurally, it would be helpful if the following were clearly covered: - Definition (including the fact that some definitions only include victims 18 years or younger while others include older adult children) - Prevalence (statistics), including murder-suicide filicides and familicides - Victims (profile, statistics) - Perpetrators (profile, statistics) - Methods (eg drowning, shooting etc) - Causes / drivers / risk factors - Policies & interventions (proposed and/or enacted) including a discussion of red flags / warning signs.

If I have time I'll try to edit, but posting a few links here in case someone else has the time and inclination: Filicide research in the twenty-first century (2019) Characteristics of homicide-suicide offenders: A systematic review (202) US statistics & analysis: Toward a More Holistic Understanding of Filicide: A Multidisciplinary Analysis of 32 Years of U.S. Arrest Data (2014) Australian statistics & analysis: When parents kill: The missed red flags and invisible victims of filicide (2021) Filicide in Australia, 2000–2012: A national study FINAL REPORT (2019) Others: An Examination of the Mental Health and Negative Life Events of Women Who Killed Their Children (2018) Familicide: A Systematic Literature Review (2019) Adverse childhood experiences and potential pathways to filicide perpetration: A systematic search and review (2020) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:A441:91B5:1:ECF0:F815:A06E:7595 (talk) 16:25, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

I am happy to help with the above, although it may take me a while. I've been trying to make a list of notable examples but it's grown quite large and I am beginning to wonder if it should maybe have its own page. PentagonPizza (talk) 01:05, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Question (2004)

Would fictional filicides, such as the death of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), be of interest in this article? --zandperl 19:57, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I think that would be great. (In a separate section of course.) - Hephaestos|§ 19:59, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Question (2005)

Why does this article say "Filicide is the act or fact of a parent, especially a father, killing his or her own son or daughter" when a (slim) majority of filicide actually occurs when a mother murders her children? See http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/wo.txt which says

Between 1976 and 1997 parents and stepparents murdered nearly
11,000 children.  Mothers and stepmothers committed about half
of these child murders.  Sons and stepsons accounted for 52% of
those killed by mothers and 57% of those killed by fathers. 
Mothers were responsible for a higher share of children killed
during infancy while fathers were more likely to have been
responsible for the murders of children age 8 or older.

(Of course, that's in the U.S. for a specific time -- is there support for the notion that this is a father-specific crime worldwide and that the father does this without guidance or cooperation from the mother or in conformance with social norms?)

--mcl

The word 'prolicide' seems to have a similar meaning. I have been unable to find an adequate distinction between the two words (online dictionaries either don't contain the word or don't provide an adequate definition). Perhaps someone with access to the OED or some similar reference could assist. At any rate, would information about this word be appropriate for this entry? --Bryan H Bell 03:29, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)

The inclusion of abortion in the place it has seems inflammatory and inappropriate. adoarns 13:31, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Abortion

Seems highly unnecessary. Doesn't come from the same "cide" root and should therefore not be part of the list. I'm going to remove it. 67.68.207.228 04:07, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

would pedicide be considered an actual word?

Spoiler

OK compared to the serious issue of folks murderin' their young'uns, this may seem like a minor complaint, but I just got Before the Devil Knows You're Dead from Netflix, and this article gives away the film's ending, and without warning! I'm going to add "SPOILER ALERT" in the article but it could just as easily be deleted as it does not add much to the topic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Stewartjk1 (talk • contribs) 00:14, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Derivation of the word "filicide"

The word filicide derives from the Latin word filius meaning "son".

I'm not sure if it should go in the article (or how it would be written if it did) but the word has the masculine form fili(us) for son, and the feminine form fili(a) for daughter. The masculine form is sort of the default setting, so it is technically correct to leave it as is, but it seems slightly misleading because the word is not actually inherently gender-specific.

Regardless, the second half -cide comes from the Latin words for "killer" and "the act of killing"; I'm pretty sure that part has to be included or the incomplete.

Usually I just reword parts of wikipeida lacking in grammar or clarity but I don't really know about when to change or add actual content, so if the things I've mentioned bear any merit I need someone else to figure out what to do about it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Invisigoth841 (talk • contribs) 19:41, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Although the word derives from Latin words, the word itself does not derive from the Roman world, since in that culture, the killing of a child by its own father was not considered a crime. The child's father was considered its literal creator, and was thus permitted actual power of life and death over it.

Nuttyskin (talk) 21:31, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

New name

I am not convinced filicide is a commonly used word. I have renamed this category to the commonly used phrase. If people can show that filicide is actually widely used in actual discussion of the issue than they are welcome to, but it is far more common for people to just say "Bob murdered his son" or something to that effect, and to never refer to filicide.John Pack Lambert (talk) 22:48, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

• name change suddenly without discussion? Category is considering renaming for the concise new term (Filicide) to make search easier. --Shakesomeaction (talk) 03:54, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

The rename was proposed merely on the grounds that this article has this name. No one has explained any good reason for this name over the name I proposed other than that this article happens to have said name. The fact of the matter is that "Parents who killed their children" is much more common. I still think the rename used is better in line with commonplace name policy. This is a latin word that I do not believe is actually widely used in English.John Pack Lambert (talk) 22:32, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

This discussion is missing a point. "Filicide" is both the act and the person who commits the act of killing one's child. The article is mostly about the act, so the unilateral rename doesn't make sense to me. And yes, the term is used in English. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 02:23, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Friedman source

The article said: "filicide is the third leading cause of death amongst American children five to fourteen years old." This was sourced from the Friedman article to which I do not have access. However, I thought this was a bit unlikely, so I checked, and found statistics for 2011. Homicide, not filicide, is the fourth, not third leading cause of death for children 5-14. So I removed the sentence. Makes me doubt though how trustworthy the rest of the text based on this source really is. Lova Falk talk 13:55, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I have access to the Friedman article, but am not allowed to publish all of it (copyright and stuff). However, as you can maybe guess from the abstract, the article does not contain any original research, so the original sources may be found elsewhere. As far as I could tell, the article did not contain the claim that "filicide is the third leading cause of death". All in all, the article seems legit, that is: the source is reliable in my opinion, but it is difficult that a lot of people from the wikipedia community cannot check whether the article actually claims something written here. If anyone has the time, maybe (s)he can check out the references in the Friedman article (particularly the first 15, as they are the ones used in the general introduction) and use them instead. For now, I will remove the unreliable reference tag, although I agree that a better (more open) reference is desirable. Sjcjoosten (talk) 12:37, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Intuitively Implausible FBI statistic

The figure quoted from the FBI seems wildly implausible when it is believed several hundred children are killed by a parent each year in Australia, with one-fifteenth the population of the United States. Perhaps the FBI fails to account for so-called "cot deaths" or SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), or the very many deaths of children by "accidental trauma", many of which, in Australia at least, are presumed to be in actuality filicide. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.182.156.150 (talk) 01:26, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

52% and 57%?

Those numbers do not seem right.

This may be referring to other causes? But no, not several hundred deaths by homiicide in Australia I'm sure. Will look into what the reliable sources actually say. However this article seems to have been neglected over time for some reason. Also statistics quoted are from the 1990s. There are many much more recent reliable sources. Charlotte135 (talk) 01:40, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't know..IP said that in Australia SIDS deaths are 'presumed to be in actuality filicide'. If that is true, then that number is certainly plausible. Which is terrible, if I might add..SIDS is not rare, and even though some proportion of cases inevitably are in actuality foul play, I cannot believe that they make up more than a minuscule fraction (sadly this cannot ever be known one way or another). This is the same country, too, that disgraced that poor lady on the national level, and sent her to prison for years for killing her baby, then decades later it was proven that she'd been telling the truth and a dingo REALLY DID take her baby. Firejuggler86 (talk) 20:43, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Concerning Question 2004

I think a new page concerning fictional filicides (Medea, Lavinia, etc.) would be appropriate. There may be someone more knowledgeable about how we should go about doing this though. It just seems odd to add a section to the page named "fictional filicides."

LatinAddict (talk) 22:55, 9 May 2016 (UTC)latinAddict

Interesting idea LatinAddict. Not sure that this could not be incorporated in this current article although I see your point as to whether it would be appropriate.Charlotte135 (talk) 12:19, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

The article contradicts official statistics from the US

The article claim that "while overall, fathers were significantly more likely to kill their children than mothers" but according to official statistics from the US(https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm06.pdf) mothers are much more likely to kill their children than fathers. in 2006 27.4 percent of all child murderers were mothers who acted alone while only 13.1 percent were fathers who acted alone and the statistics were almost the same in the previous year(https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm05.pdf) with 28.5% of the murders committed by mothers and 15.8% by fathers. The data from 2007 and 2008(2007: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm07.pdf 2008: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm08.pdf) were presented differently but still most child murderers were women(56%) while men were the minority(42%) and it is safe to assume that male child murderers have much bigger percentage of non-parent child murderers. These data collected by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services are much more reliable than that research made by three experts in the UK and were collected from a much bigger population.--ThunderheadX (talk) 21:32, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Filicide in Australia

hi, just added to the article, an external link to a national report on filicide in australia, the ABC also has an article on it here ("When Parents Kill") which may be of interest to death/crime project editors to add to article. Coolabahapple (talk) 23:46, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Margaret Schlosser

"she amputated the arms of her eleven-month-old daughter,"

In my understanding an amputation is a professional procedure. Since, according to the wikipedia article Dena Schlosser, she died of blood loss immediately after, I would call that "severed" or "cut off" instead of "amputated" 2001:8003:4213:A200:391D:D8E4:3E43:555A (talk) 02:54, 5 October 2023 (UTC)