“The bullet’s path was quite remarkable,” recalled Hartiala. “It damaged very little.” The girl was treated for brain swelling and was watched carefully, but the bullet, too dangerous to remove, was left where it was. The girl went back home in time to live with her mother, but not for long because of continuing problems at home, she told Kaija as they talked that day. She was raised instead by an “‘amazing’” aunt, the survivor said. “‘It’s just so horrible to think about,’” said the young mom, referring to her dad’s murder-suicide. “‘But what can you do? You go on to live your life.’” The encounter triggered very mixed emotions for Hartiala. It was “so tragic and shocking when I saw that girl shot by her father so many years ago, but also amazing to see her so long after sitting in front of me, looking healthy and happy, and with a little baby of her own now,” she told me.
Finland, with a strikingly low crime rate, especially by American standards, has suffered in the past from a disturbing incidence of family annihilations and child homicides by parents. More than 60 percent of all child homicides in a 24-year period from 1970 to 1994 were committed by parents, either by fatal battering, or shooting, drowning, suffocating, burning, stabbing, or intentionally killing their children in car accidents, according to a study on filicides and intrafamilial child homicides in Finland.1 The study found that the victims’ greatest risk was the day of their birth, though danger remained particularly high for the first four months of life. Of the 200 homicides by parents over that period, 60 percent were committed by moms, but 71 percent of the 75 murder-suicides were committed by fathers. Most of the murder-suicides involved a firearm. Mothers in 74 percent of the cases reported “mental health distress,” noted the study, while killer dads abused alcohol and/or were violent to other family members in 45 percent of the cases. Psychosis or “psychotic depression” was diagnosed for 51 percent of killer moms, and a personality disorder was diagnosed for 67 percent of killer dads and 4 percent of moms. The years of the study, the homicide rates of children under the age of one were over five times greater in Finland than the rates in Sweden and Italy, which had the lowest rates. The United States and New Zealand had the highest homicide rates for children ages one to four in the same period.
The study recommended that special attention be paid by healthcare providers to new moms suffering from postpartum depression, who typically have very clear symptoms, from insomnia to suicidal thoughts. “Intensive and rapid support is needed, especially in the care of the baby,” noted the study. In addition, “clinicians should pay attention to depressed, anxious and even psychotic parents. . . . Support and treatment should be given without delay because the crisis in the family may exacerbate within days. Parents with personality disorders and substance abuse need early intervention, even during the pregnancy, in order to be able to attach to the child and learn better skills in reading the child’s mind and intentions,” the report urged.
Finland was also losing children to injuries and accidents at home. “At one point, we decided this was something we had to focus on,” recalled Kaija. “In the case of accidents at home, we reached out to families and established educational campaigns to teach parents how better to protect their children, things like locking up household cleaning products. We turned things around,” she told me. (The outreach, of course, wasn’t fail-safe. In one case, a conscientious mom thought her kids would benefit from her idea to place a large plant at the bottom of a stairway railing to keep her sons from sliding down, only to have one of her boys impale himself on the plant stake when he shot down the railing, Kaija recalled during our talk. Fortunately, the stake went through his body without damaging any major organs. The mom was mortified; the son recovered.)
Though the nation is still struggling to save more children from accidents and violence, from 1990 to 2010, Finland cut its under-five child mortality rate in half, and its child and adolescent death rates were also slashed by 50 percent, according to a Child Safety Country Profile conducted annually with the Eurozone.2
“I think there’s a sense in Finland that we’re all in this together, and if we don’t fix our problems, no one else will,” said Kaija. “And many people believe they need to put some of their efforts into improving life in our communities. We’re also a much smaller nation than US, so I think it’s easier for us to decide the kinds of issues we want to focus on, come up with a plan, and institute it. That kind of agreement and unified intention and action, I suspect, is much more difficult in a nation the size of America,” added Kaija, who lived for several years with her family in California.
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America is definitely not Finland. It’s not only a sprawling, bumptious nation with 310 million people, but those residents are divided into starkly different political factions and lifestyles with radically at-odds attitudes about families, child-rearing, gender roles, criminal justice, and the role of the government.
I assumed when I got to the end of my book, some solutions to the problem of fathers killing children would be obvious. They weren’t. I set out to gather all the facts I could on the killings, assuming the information would unlock the key to motivations and mechanisms toward murder. They didn’t. In some cases I was convinced I got to “the bottom” of a crime, but, just as I did during the lonely night I spent in the hotel room where William Parente killed his family, I found nothing but emptiness.
The problem is tremendously complicated, as complex as the human heart, shaped by eons of our evolutionary past as well as by the politics and economics and social pressures and our own child-rearing that brought us to this time and this place. Families struggle on their own to deal with crushing economic or health issues, and friends and relatives help if they’re capable, and if they’re aware a problem exists. Communities across the nation work to institute innovative public programs or bolster tried-and-true methods, all the while grappling with budgetary constraints. But much of the answer has to do with our attention to the issue of child abuse and homicide by their parents, and our intention to do something about it. Family-violence expert Richard Gelles believes we’re confused as a society about how far to go to fix dysfunctional families, which is also complicated by a market-driven economy, finite resources, and attitudes about rewards and punishment.
“The real issue is that as a society we’re really ambivalent about if we really want to help, and who we want to help,” he explained in a 2012 Big Think video interview. “So we set up programs that are safety net programs that almost always have a means test. For welfare, the means test is, well, just how poor are you? Housing, the means test is, how much housing do you need? For domestic violence, unfortunately, the means test is, are you the victim of a form of violence? For child abuse, the means test is, are their caregivers inadequate in terms of neglect or medical neglect or physical abuse or sexual abuse? Almost every government program has this test, which means there’s an enormous bureaucracy hired to decide when the gate gets opened and when the gate gets closed. And that diverts monetary resources and energy that would otherwise be spent on the program itself.
“The second ambivalence is in fact that bright line: Who gets the services? And in a market economy, we’re really reluctant to help everyone because we think, well, you don’t want to reward behavior that we think is inappropriate. So why would you have a Welfare benefit increase with the second out-of-wedlock child, when we don’t want children born out of wedlock to folks who aren’t able to support them?”
Gelles isn’t a big fan of government programs, many of which he considers “terribly ineffective” and incapable of delivering the kind of help needed, intended, and expected. The title of his latest book, The Third Lie, is “based on an old and not very good joke that there are three lies,” he notes.3 “The first one—this is the older part of the joke, of course—is ‘I’ll respect you in the morning’; the second is, ‘The check is in the mail,’ and the third lie is: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.’” He blames government p
rogram failures in dealing with family violence in part to a “disconnect between research and government social policy.” He accuses policymakers of using research “like a drunk uses a lamppost—much more for support than for illumination.”
The results are frustrating. “I cannot bear to be involved in more fatality reviews of little babies,” Gelles wrote in his 1996 book The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children’s Lives.4 “I cannot bear the frustration of devoting a lifetime of research and practice to the ideal of protecting children only to find that current policies ignore the research results. We must change the system.”
Gelles has long been a critic of the policy push by US social-service agencies to “make all reasonable efforts” to keep families together, despite all signs that it may be the worst strategy for a child. “Most families, 98 percent of them, can be helped, but some are hopeless,” he told me recently. “In those cases the child must be removed from the home.” Many experts view the strategy to keep a child with a family at nearly any cost not only forced by official policy but necessitated by budgetary constraints because there are few other options for abused children and not enough funds to establish or support them. In Gelles’s view, the policy is also part of a “larger ideology”—the “sacrosanct belief that children always (or nearly always) are better off with the biological parents,” he told me.
In The Book of David, Gelles examines the case of a boy he calls “David Edwards.” Despite repeated abuse at the hands of his mother, “Darlene,” who had severely abused David’s older sister, the boy was returned to his home. He was eventually suffocated by his mom. “I became convinced that the system was just as responsible for his death as the actual perpetrator. While we may not be able to change people like Darlene, we could and should have prevented the death of her little boy,” he writes.5
The abuse and murder of children are “major social problems, public health threats to children, and crimes that require strong and effective response,” he added. “The child welfare system, which was instituted to protect children, continues to fail them. The problem is not simply that resources are lacking, but that the central mission of child welfare agencies, preserving families, does not work, and places many children at significant risk of continued injury and death.”6
Michael Petit of Every Child Matters points out a key difference in focus when civil authorities deal with violence against a wife and mother. As Gelles has also pointed out, domestic violence against a wife is dealt with by law enforcement, while almost all child-abuse cases are addressed by social-welfare agencies. When a wife is assaulted, the attacker is removed from the home by police; yet in the case of an abused child, it’s the child who’s removed from the home by a social worker, and the attacker is allowed to stay. While the family may also desperately require the aid of a social-service agency, a social worker is not usually the best person to deal with a violent male in the household, notes Petit. “He’s not going to be deterred in that situation,” he explained to me in an interview. “It’s no longer effective to sit down with that guy and say, ‘Let’s talk. What’s bothering you?’ The most violent cases, whether against a woman or a child, must be handled in the criminal justice system.”
Gelles is often quoted for his shocking comments about the violence of families and the dangers they represent to children. He has called the family the “most violent social institution” and the “most violence prone,” and he believes the family is at least as often a locus of violence as of love. He attributes dangers to a child within a family to a variety of causes, from the amount of time spent in a family (increasing chances of victimization) to the range of ages and gender-role expectations that can trigger conflict. He says he hasn’t moderated his harsh view of the family over decades of research, except to note that evidence indicates that women gain somewhat greater protections from violence from their mates as wives, rather than as lovers.
Despite Gelles’s criticism of child-protection services in the United States, he does not believe they should be gutted, but that strategies should change, and services be strengthened. The problem of child abuse and child homicides by their parents demands more attention and funding to address the problem. He notes in The Book of David that a heavily subsidized convention center within miles of the home where David was suffocated still lies vacant. “A society that can subsidize a convention center and hotel, airport and shopping mall can subsidize the physical and emotional well-being of children. Not all programs will work and not every program is effective for every family and child,” he writes.7 “Yet this is an investment we must make, because the costs of not making it, the cost in dollars, suffering, and lives, is simply too high to pay.”
Neil Websdale agrees that the nation must expend more effort, attention, and funds on protecting children at home. “We need to intervene more effectively and we must begin with more social services and a better safety net to keep families from imploding,” he told me. “We must establish a process that pumps money into creating more caring communities to battle the isolation many families experience.”
Another key strategy in the battle to save kids at home is to gather as much information as possible on the problem. There’s a hunger among academics, child-protection advocates, as well as professionals in child-protection agencies, law enforcement, and healthcare for more, and more accurate, data. Petit believes the persistent statistical undercount of child fatalities at the hands of their parents dampens public interest and engagement in battling the problem, but it also hinders effective preventive strategies not to have accurate information.
One way to glean the most complete information possible from fatal situations is the use of child-fatality review panels, which involve experts, advocates, social workers, law enforcement and healthcare professionals, as well as relatives and family members of a victim, in order to conduct a kind of “social autopsy” of a child’s death that involves examination of official reports of the deaths, investigations of public agencies that may have touched the victim’s life, risk factors, and possible alternative actions that may have prevented the death. The aim is to find clues in one death to devise strategies to prevent another. Several different kinds of fatality-review systems exist to analyze a range of situations, from elder-abuse deaths, to infant mortality, to the domestic-violence death of an intimate partner and child fatalities. “The unifying feature of these different types of fatality reviews is that they are wide-angle, multidisciplinary case studies conducted in a climate that promotes open discovery of information,” noted a conference report by the National Center for Child Death Review.8 As the report states, “review teams obtain information on deaths from multiple sources for their discussions on the often extremely complex death events. The teams examine records, discuss the events leading up to and causing the death, and work to identify what could be done differently to prevent other deaths. They make recommendations to agencies and other decision makers for prevention activities and/or changes to service systems. The ultimate purpose is catalyzing action for prevention, rather than merely counting and calculating death rates.”
An increasing number of states have expanded use of the review panels and are now routinely exchanging information with other states in an attempt to create as broad an examination as possible of the deaths. The hope is to learn from one another and to develop a “best practices” approach to deal with children at risk. Neil Websdale first talked to some of the killers discussed at length in his book Familicidal Hearts through his work as former director of the National Domestic Fatality Review, which focuses on homicides of both intimate partners and children.
A kind of an über–fatality commission was being created in early 2013 under the “Protect Our Kids Act” (HR 6655) passed by Congress. The national commission will examine the issue of child-abuse fatalities and come up with recommendations to stem the tide of domestic child fatalities. Getting the law passed was a key focus of Coalition to End Child Abuse, which incl
udes the Every Child Matters Education Fund, the National Association of Social Workers, the National District Attorneys Association, the National Center for the Review and Prevention of Child Deaths, and the National Children’s Alliance.
Many child advocates immediately mention gun control as an obvious way to save children’s lives. Guns are particularly a factor in family annihilations. Firearms were used in vast majority of the murder-suicides tracked by the Violence Policy Center. David Adams, who has studied men who murder their intimate partners, pointed out at the 2012 conference on domestic violence, held by the National Institute of Justice, that guns are the “low-hanging fruit” that could be easily picked off to help stem the problem.
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