‘Just Say Goodbye’ (January 2013 online edition)

‘Just Say Goodbye’male and female perpetrators of retaliatory killings were parents. They includedall filicide-suicides in this category because, even though they acknowledgethat the motivation in these cases was ‘a matter of speculation’, they state that‘retaliation seemed the most likely explanation’ (Nielssen et al. 2009).Meyer & Oberman (2001) highlight an important point made by Scott (1973)in relation to determining retaliation as a motive in filicide: ‘It is extremelydifficult to be sure that revenge was the real or only motivation; to find thatthere is currently a quarrel with the spouse is not sufficient reason for supposingthat revenge is predominant’. Some researchers may make an assumption that afilicide is retaliatory because it occurs in the context of separation.Retaliatory filicides are discussed further in the following chapter.Problems with filicide categories and determining mental illnessThe filicide categories, discussed above, are useful for painting a picture of someof the main forms of filicide. However, there are a number of problems withthe existing classification systems. Some filicides may fit into more than onecategory (Bourget et al. 2007). For instance, some filicide perpetrators with adiagnosed mental illness may also have been motivated by retaliation or havekilled their child as a result of fatal abuse.Unfortunately, the criteria for particular categories are often unspecified, so itis difficult to know which cases are included in which categories. For instance,some researchers may include attempted suicides in the filicide-suicide categoryand others may only include suicides that resulted in the death of the perpetrator.It is also the case that allocating cases to categories is a subjective process,with researchers often making judgments based on very limited information(Sidebotham et al. 2011).The mental illness category often appears to cover a broad range of behaviours.Many studies include depression and other types of mental illness such asschizophrenia and psychosis in the one category. If the filicide was accompaniedby the suicide of the perpetrator, there appears to be an automatic assumptionof mental illness as a causative factor for the filicide. For instance, one group ofresearchers state ‘psychic imbalance is per definition essential in the complexpicture that leads a person to commit murder-suicide’ (Galta et al. 2010).Many studies of filicide are undertaken by psychologists and psychiatristswho focus on mental illness. There are, however, significant difficulties withthe way in which mental illness is identified in filicide perpetrators. Manydiagnoses are made after the filicidal event, when the perpetrator’s state of mindis not necessarily indicative of what it was at the time of the event (HattersFriedman et al. 2005). At this point, the perpetrator is faced with the realityof having killed their child and may be displaying signs of acute distress andmental illness as a consequence of what they have done. In many studies the29