Everyone Agrees that the Murder of a Child is a Dreadful Crime

Except when a woman is the killer

When Rowan Baxter murdered his estranged wife and three children by pouring petrol on their car and setting it on fire in Brisbane, Australia in February, 2020, the news reports were unsparing with the sickening details, describing the raging flames that engulfed the children and relating how Baxter’s wife, Hannah, who escaped the car with “her skin melting off,” begged neighbors to save them. Readers were encouraged to dwell in imagination on the unhinged cruelty of the father, who “tried to stop bystanders from rescuing them as they burned to death before stabbing himself in the chest when he knew his evil deed was done,” as the Daily Mail Australia narrated. (In fact, nothing could have been done to save the children; the father merely screamed at passersby.)

Even the headline made sure no reader could fail to simmer with contempt: “Gutless father who set family car alight tried to stop bystanders saving his three children as they burned to death inside.” Various relatives of the dead woman were quoted calling the ex-husband a “heartless monster” and a “disgusting human being,” and dozens of reports quoted statements about Baxter from Hannah’s friends and family as if they were fact.  

When the detective in charge of the investigation suggested at a press conference that it was possible Baxter was “driven too far” by events of the preceding year, his comment caused an immediate uproar because he raised the mere possibility that a fierce custody battle, rather than innate cruelty, may have influenced the murder-suicide. That detective was immediately taken off the case and replaced by a woman who said he should not have spoken as he did.

It was clear that Baxter must be seen as an emblem of pure masculine evil. Nothing must be allowed to humanize him, nothing to assuage public outrage. When Premier Jacinta Allan of Victoria, Australia announced her new Parliamentary Secretary for Men’s Behavior Change (focused on “prioritizing the safety of women, children, and communities”), readers remembering Baxter would have had no trouble recognizing the need. No one, after all, doubts the reality and impact of men’s violence.

Women’s violence, however, is another matter. Less than a year later in Australia, this time in Melbourne, a mother was the killer of three children, and the reporting was entirely different. A report of the crime, “Police reveal Tullamarine’s Perinovic family home deaths likely a murder-suicide,” is typical in eschewing sensationalism; it refrains in the title even from identifying the mother as the killer. Katie Perinovic, the same age as Rowan Baxter when he committed murder, is listed with her children as one of the “victims of Thursday’s tragedy,” and the mood evoked by the report is one of uncomprehending sadness rather than outrage. Neighbors remember a lovely family and wonder how to break the sad news to their children. The event is repeatedly referred to not as a “shocking murder-suicide” (as in the case of the Baxter car inferno) but as a tragedy, a “heartbreaking experience” for everyone involved, almost as if it were a natural disaster rather than a deliberate human act.

No cause of death is given, no horrifying details are provided, and there are no comments from family members of the bereaved father calling the mother a “disgusting human being” or “heartless monster.” In another report, neighbors gave glowing depictions, calling her “the best mum” and “one of the nicest people you’d meet.” An earlier report, before it was determined that the mother had carried out the killings, referred to “gruesome injuries” inside the family home, but these were not mentioned, or explained, in later reports. It seems clear that in the first hours of the investigation, the father was a suspect; if he had been charged with the murders, we would have heard a good deal more about the “gruesome injuries.” But with the mother as the killer, such details came to be seen as inappropriate.

This is how it is when mothers kill their children. The reporting minimizes the woman’s agency, inviting readers to empathize with the mother’s pain and to see her act not as an expression of vengefulness or hatred, but as a cry for help. Such techniques are in evidence in the reporting on a double-murder/suicide in Boston, Massachusetts on Christmas Day, 2019, in which a mother, Erin Pascal, having argued with her husband earlier in the day, pushed or threw her two young children, one four years old and the other 15 months, from the top of a tall parking garage, and then jumped to her death after them.

It’s hard to tell what actually happened from some of the reporting, which states, for example, that “Christmas Day marked a horrible tragedy that claimed the lives of two children under the age of 5 and their mother, who is suspected in their deaths.” Note the syntax: it is the “tragedy” that caused the deaths (even including the mother’s) at least as much as the mother herself. A mother’s violence is so inconceivable that it cannot be directly confronted. District Attorney Rachel Rollins even articulated it thus, telling reporters during a press conference that “Yesterday, the unspeakable happened and now we are all struggling to make sense of the circumstances surrounding these deaths.”

The ”struggles” of reporters are apparent in the choice of words for headlines and other descriptions. Some had trouble using the word “pushed,” choosing the more agent-less “fell,” as did NBC News: “The two young children who fell from the top of a Boston parking garage on Christmas were likely killed by their mother before she jumped to her own death.” Here the mother’s responsibility for the killings was not omitted, but the image of what she did was made hazy. CBS News was more direct, but still wary of a definite assertion: “Rollins [the district attorney] said it appears the two children fell before Pascal, according to CBS Boston, implying Pascal may have pushed the two children from the garage before leaping off herself.” The words “may have” were not logically necessary in the sentence (the verb was “imply”), but they were psychologically useful.

The Metro distinguished itself with more emotive language, referring in its headline to the “mother who threw her screaming kids off a parking garage.” It was one of the few papers to report that passersby heard the children screaming as the mother struggled with them on the roof top. It’s hard to believe that if a father had killed his two children in this manner, evidence of their terror in the final moments would not have been mentioned.

One anticipates here the chorus of voices eager to point out how rare women’s violence is. These are outliers, the voices proclaim: men are the overwhelming danger, and efforts should be focused on men. In the few cases in which women kill, it is because of mental illness or desperation. But this is untrue. While men do commit the majority of lethal violence against adults, particularly other adult males, women commit at least equal if not significantly more violence against the most vulnerable: children and, especially, babies.

Most people are unaware of this reality because pundits and academics, as well as reporters, are not interested in making it widely known. It is often difficult for an independent researcher to find hard data on how many babies and small children are killed by their mothers every year. When parental homicide figures are given, the data is often not separated according to the sex of the perpetrator. And most researchers agree that homicides of babies often look like deaths from natural causes, and are therefore left out of homicide tallies.

Even a superficial glance at the numbers, however—unreliable as they are—will dispel the myth that women’s murderousness is unworthy of serious and sustained attention.

Most studies of mothers who kill are feminist studies, with every incentive to downplay the prevalence of female violence. “Experiences and perspectives of women who have committed neonaticide, infanticide and filicide: A systematic review and qualitative evidence synthesis,” for example, was published in 2022 in the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing by feminist researchers Giulia Milia and Maria Noonan. Noonan is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Health Sciences at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where she conducts research on women’s mental health in relation to pregnancy and child-rearing.

In the article, she and fellow researcher Milia are sympathetic to maternal killers of children, accepting women’s self-reports of regret and minimizing their responsibility. They assert that child killing is “rare,” but their own numbers tell a different story: Across 33 countries, mothers were found responsible for 55% of filicides (the killing of children under 18 years); for 72% of infanticides (the killing of children under one year) across 13 countries; and for 100% of neonaticides (the killing of children under one day old) in 13 countries.

“Gender and Homicide,” by Professor of Criminology James Fox (published in 2019 by the NCJA Crime and Justice Research Alliance) quotes feminist postulates about the differences between male and female violence: “Whereas men tend to employ violence as an offensive move to establish superiority, women typically view violence as a defense of last resort.” Such arguments do not fit neatly when it is a baby who is killed. Fox reports that “Two-thirds of infanticides [in the United States] are perpetrated by women” and that “Eighty percent of homicides where the victim is under one year old are perpetrated by female killers” (see his full study here).

According to data presented in “Homicides Among Infants in the United States, 2017-2020,” an average of 267 infants (under one year old) die in the United States every year. 80% of 267 is 214.

This means that, roughly, every 41 hours (or about 1.7 days), a woman kills an infant in the United States. Most often, though not exclusively, she kills her own child. It is a “rare” crime, as Milia and Noonan state, but not rare enough.

In their analysis of mothers who kill their children, Milia and Noonan make what seems a rookie mistake in accepting what convicted female criminals say about their crimes after the fact. “The majority of women who committed neonaticide, infanticide or filicide,” they write, “regretted the act and regretted not seeking help from family and healthcare professionals.” Milia and Noonan also stress the conditions of “poverty, abusive relationships [and] poor family and social support” that to some extent excuse or at least explain the women’s deadly violence. Here were women with few life choices and few sources of support.

But it is impossible to gauge the sincerity of female killers’ post-conviction self-reports, and even just a few examples drawn from recent headlines raise questions about Milia and Noonan’s sympathetic, mitigating characterizations. 

In what seems to have been a carefully planned revenge killing, a woman in San Antonio, Texas, Savannah Kriger, is reported to have texted her husband ‘Say goodbye to your son’ and video-recorded her little boy’s last words to his dad before she shot him in the head and then killed herself in March, 2024; she expressed regret that the child’s father couldn’t be with his son, presumably so that she could have killed him too. Before the murder, she had driven to her husband’s house and did damage there, destroying his property; at her own home, she fired gun shots into wedding photos and her wedding dress.

The CEO of Family Violence Prevention Services in the area, knowing nothing of the woman or her circumstances, provided a pathos-rich diagnosis, saying “We will never know the complete picture. We only know the level of despair this mother must have had.” In fact, we don’t know anything about the woman’s state of mind. Many of her actions before the killing seem calculated and vindictive rather than despairing, designed to inflict the most excruciating and lasting pain possible on her ex-husband. Before taking her son to the park where she would kill him, she spoke to her husband on a video call, telling him “You don’t have anything to go home to now. You don’t have anything at your house either. And you won’t have anything at all at the end of the day.”

Killing their son was obviously meant to deprive the father of meaning and joy in his life. That was what mattered to this mother, and the little boy was merely a means to that cruel end.

In another disturbing case, this time of fatal neglect, an Ohio woman, Kristel Candelario, left her 16-month-old daughter alone in their home while she went on vacation for ten days in the summer of 2023. The 32-year-old mother told no one about the child’s plight and seems not to have thought of her during her holiday. When she returned home, her daughter was dead from dehydration. Pictures showed the mother on the beach in Puerto Rico, smiling for the camera.

At her sentencing hearing, she expressed a remorse that was at times indistinguishable from self-pity, stating, “I’m extremely hurt about everything that happened. I am not trying to justify my actions, but nobody knew how much I was suffering and what I was going through.” The self-justification is repugnant, yet was echoed by the killer’s mother, who said that her daughter’s “depression and anxiety ended up consuming her.” It is possible to believe such excuses only if one blocks out thoughts of the mother’s extraordinary callousness during those sun-filled days while her little girl suffered and died.

These are only a few examples; similar recent cases of indifference or callousness can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. They raise serious questions about the claim that women typically use violence as a last resort. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that women, unlike men, are more hesitant to engage in risk-filled violence. Female killers typically murder those who are too weak or incapacitated to fight back.

In Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers, Penn State Professor Marissa Harrison investigated mothers who killed three or more of their children, discovering that a significant number of the murderous mothers killed to gain attention in an extreme form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP). MSBP is almost entirely a female syndrome: women make up 92% of perpetrators (p. 61). Harrison notes that just as mothers with non-lethal MSBP enjoy the sympathetic attention and praise they receive when tending a sick child, so mothers who kill may “enjoy the role of grieving mother” (p. 261). Female killers of children often exhibit qualities such as “lying, exploitation, manipulation, callous disregard for the welfare of others, and a lack of remorse” (p. 66).

In his study of gender and homicide, James Fox quoted feminist criminologists who contend that “women may actually be punished doubly for their offenses—once for breaking the law and once for violating gender norms.” One must suppress a hoot of pained laughter. On the contrary, the majority of pundits portray mothers who kill children as victims deserving compassion (see also here). In “Mothers who kill: A look at infanticide,” Doughty Chambers strenuously defends British infanticide laws that provide a defense of disturbed mind, which often results in a non-custodial sentence such as a stay in a hospital. Chambers notes that “personality characteristics marked by immaturity, impulsivity, passivity and low self-esteem” as well as “lack of economic and/or psychological resources,” may all contribute to diminished capacity. The fact that such qualities seem broad enough to describe nearly any unhappy mother does not seem to trouble Chambers. She agrees with a colleague that many such cases call “for compassion, not punishment.”

Regardless of one’s feelings about the meaning of maternal homicide, the fact remains that women kill children in numbers that are not insignificant. Some portion kill for convenience, out of anger or dislike, or even for sympathy. Their expressions of regret may or may not be genuine, and do not change the fact that the women did not seek help when they could have and did not restrain their urge to kill. Some excel in the arts of psychological manipulation. The excuses that our societies have enshrined in law and in received opinion demonstrate the lengths we are willing to go to deny and aggressively reinterpret women’s capacity to use lethal violence against the most vulnerable beings in our midst. And this is not even to touch on the hidden reality (more on this subject in future) that many violent men were abused by their mothers when they were children.  

If we are in any way serious about reducing violence in our societies, especially against children, we must first dispense with the idea that women play little role in it.