NCJ Number
161766
Date Published
1995
Length
297 pages
Annotation
This work examines the murder, humiliation, mutilation, denigration, and abandonment of children by parents.
Abstract
This book is the author's contribution to an open investigation of the parent-child relationship as it pertains to filicide and to cruelty toward one's children. He also considers the meaning of the parental function and the responsibility for assuming it in anyone who has a child. Of equal significance is the child's extreme defenselessness, a specifically human characteristic. The child's slow development and protracted dependency on its parents necessitates intense and prolonged protection from them and determines many aspects of the problems studied and analyzed in this book. The author proposes three actions to clarify and respond to filicide. (1) Create scientific institutions to study and investigate the extension, institutionalization, etiology, and motivations of filicide. (2) Create social institutions to educate parents and parental substitutes on procedures or behavior that might hinder or impede children's development or inhibit their capacities and to study the basic factors that promote good parenting. (3) Be constantly alert to and ready to denounce everything connected with filicide and filicidal institutions. The book contains extended discussion of the history of filicide, filicide in literature, and thoughts on filicide today. Footnotes, references, credits, index