Reducing
Homicide: a review of the possibilities
- January 2003
by Fiona Brookman & Mike Maguire
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/rdsolr0103.pdf
Infant
homicide
Scale
of the problem
This deals with the killing of infants less than a year old. This
form of homicide is commonly referred to as ‘infanticide’,
although this is not strictly accurate. Infanticide is a legal term
used to describe instances where mothers kill their own babies in
a disturbed state of mind. As our discussion covers any killing
of an infant, regardless of motive or of the relationship between
perpetrator and victim, we shall use the more general term, ‘infant
homicide’. Infant homicide may be regarded as a sub-group
of the broader category of child homicide. However, there are some
important differences between the killing of babies and of older
children, which mark the former for special attention. First of
all, while within adult homicide, men predominate as offenders,
infants are much more likely than older children to be killed by
women. For example, between 1995 and 1999 in England and Wales,
90 per cent of the known or suspected killers of children aged 10-16
were male, dropping to 62 per cent for children aged below five
years, and 56 per cent for infants of less than one year. Secondly,
the proportion of child homicides in which the perpetrator is a
parent is exceptionally high among infants. Over the above-mentioned
period, 80 per cent of victims under one year old were killed by
a parent, compared to 49 per cent of those aged one year, and less
than five per cent of those aged 15 or 16.
Research
from Australia and North
America
has revealed similar patterns (Crittenden and Craig, 1990; Adler
and Polk, 1996). Taken together, these two sets of findings reveal
the general pattern that filicides (killings of children by a natural
parent) are committed in roughly equal proportions by mothers (47%)
and fathers (53%), but that where the child is killed by someone
other than a parent, males strongly predominate.
Finally,
however, the most striking difference between infant homicide and
other child homicide lies in the frequency of its occurrence. While
children as a whole have a low risk of being killed compared to
adults, babies of less than twelve months old are at higher risk
than any other single year age group, child or adult. Indeed, in
England and Wales they face around four times the average risk of
falling victim to homicide (measured as victims per 100,000 population).
This ratio has remained relatively constant since the Homicide Act
1957 (Marks and Kumar 1993:329).
The special
vulnerability of infants is by no means unique to the UK. Australian
researchers also report that children under one are the most vulnerable
to homicide (Strang 1996) and in the US child abuse homicides have
remained, since the mid 1970s, among the five leading causes of
death for those under five years (Christoffel, 1983). In Scotland,
too, infants less than a year constitute a high risk group, although
not quite the highest.
