What is Filicide?

Filicide is the term used for parent's who murder their own children or step children. The children can be from any age from newborns to adults.. According to a U.S.  study done in 2014 based on 32 years of data there are at least 500 filicide instances in a single year. according to this study at least 50 of the cases of filicide from the last five years were on the disabled. Within the last three decades the act of filicide has decreased since the 90's and did not increase with population increase.

A majority of filicide has children 6 and under fill up 72% of filicides. 10% were between 7 and 18 and 18% were on Adult children. 1/3 of all the deaths were of infants who were less than a year old.It was found that during times of higher economic stress that there are more cases of filicides (infanticide) involving infants.

A father killing their son is more possible (29.5%) than a mother killing her son (22.1%) In the cases involving daughters a mother will more than likely kill her (19.7%) than a father (18.2%). The rarest cases are with step mothers killing their step son (.5%) or step daughter (.3%).

Parents were more than likely to use their hand when murdering their child. Some examples are forced drowning, beating and or choking which is the case with 69% of infanticide. As the victim gets older weapons like guns are used which is the case with 72.3% of adult victims. Contact weapons like bats and edged weapons like knives were less likely used. Men were more than likely to use a gun than women. Stepparents are more than likely to use guns (40%)  than biological parents (21%).

Many parent's kill their children for many reasons. Some kill their children due to their child's disability, and some do it because the child was unwanted. Some even kill their children and themselves. There are just so many reasons as each case has is different.

SOURCES
https://news.brown.edu/articles/2014/02/filicide
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/filicide
http://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ASAN-Anti-Filicide-Toolkit-What-Is-Filicide.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2174580/