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dzastrus t1_jaw1tig wrote

Reply to comment by kanzler_brandt in Genevieve Lhermitte: Belgian mother who killed her five children euthanised by Quirkie

The impulse to kill your children is ancient. When a mother or father sees their family unit breaking up or becomes socially ostracized they will see their fate as sealed. A mother would not be able to provide for children by herself. The children's future will be bleak if not ending after starvation or predation. Leaving them to the leopards is worse than killing them yourself. Humans have been dealing with this prospect a lot longer than we have had the desire or means to help those kids. Most people choosing to kill their children are also in abusive relationships. I don't know the particulars of this woman's case. I would think they have considered all of this. Still, it's a fascinating, rare throwback to a fundamental behavior.

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tsvangison t1_jax66dg wrote

There is a story that haunts me to this day. I watched an interview of old Indian men who went through the separation of India and Pakistan. This old man narrates how the muslims were going through Hindu villages raping women and killing anything and anyone in their paths. His entire family hid in bunker of sorts. There were about 8 females with him. The muslims discovered the bunker and were inevitably going to make their way through and kill them. So the men decided to line up their daughters and nieces, and one by one, chopped their heads off. In their mind this was a better way for them to die than to be raped and defiled by the muslims. This man was literally shaking as he spoke about this and he says he vividly remembers the sound of the sword as they did this. Fucking hell, people go through hell on this very earth.

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kanzler_brandt t1_jaw3pam wrote

The impulse to protect one’s children is, however, just as ancient - and more widespread. And it is precisely because it is so natural and widespread that more professional attention should be given to ‘unnatural feelings’ among parents, whether by OBGYNs or therapists or friends, whether feelings of apathy or something more violent. Even something as common as absent feelings of bonding accompanying postpartum depression is given scant attention, while the same issue in fathers is normalised; the result, in both cases, is that the problems are left untreated, and don’t always go away by themselves.

I know absolutely nothing about parenting or children but the knowledge that this is the social, taboo-fraught environment in which I would have to seek psychological assistance if needed makes me loath to start a family in the first place.

Edit: to clarify, I find the mother’s actions abhorrent and don’t mean to sympathise with a family annihilator, but I don’t think that adds much insight to the discussion

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dzastrus t1_jaw495a wrote

Great points. I should have added that my scenario is super rare. Still, it happens and when it does it gets a lot of headlines. Aberrations like this are very hard for most people to get their heads around and because of that there's not a lot of empathy for the perpetrator. edit: changed a word

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ParaBrutus t1_jb1nykh wrote

Meh I wouldn’t put too much stock in an evolutionary impulse to kill our children with compassion. A lot of species kill and eat their young during food scarcity because the parents have a better chance of procreating in the future than the offspring, and sometimes animals will kill offspring so the mother has capacity to find a new mate and bear its offspring instead. There are a bunch of reasons why primates kill offspring but none of them are altruistic from the offspring’s perspective: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_in_primates

I do think people find these particular child murders fascinating because women are generally much less violent than men. When men kill their children it’s just assumed it’s for revenge or some other selfish motive, whereas when women do it society likes to speculate that they are also victims in some sense.

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