Killer Dads (35 page)

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America is definitely not Finland. It's not only a sprawling, bumptious nation with 310 million people, but those residents are divided into starkly different
political factions and lifestyles with radically at-odds attitudes about families, child-rearing, gender roles, criminal justice, and the role of the government.

I assumed when I got to the end of my book, some solutions to the problem of fathers killing children would be obvious. They weren't. I set out to gather all the facts I could on the killings, assuming the information would unlock the key to motivations and mechanisms toward murder. They didn't. In some cases I was convinced I got to “the bottom” of a crime, but, just as I did during the lonely night I spent in the hotel room where William Parente killed his family, I found nothing but emptiness.

The problem is tremendously complicated, as complex as the human heart, shaped by eons of our evolutionary past as well as by the politics and economics and social pressures and our own child-rearing that brought us to this time and this place. Families struggle on their own to deal with crushing economic or health issues, and friends and relatives help if they're capable, and if they're aware a problem exists. Communities across the nation work to institute innovative public programs or bolster tried-and-true methods, all the while grappling with budgetary constraints. But much of the answer has to do with our attention to the issue of child abuse and homicide by their parents, and our intention to do something about it. Family-violence expert Richard Gelles believes we're confused as a society about how far to go to fix dysfunctional families, which is also complicated by a market-driven economy, finite resources, and attitudes about rewards and punishment.

“The real issue is that as a society we're really ambivalent about if we really want to help, and who we want to help,” he explained in a 2012 Big Think video interview. “So we set up programs that are safety net programs that almost always have a means test. For welfare, the means test is, well, just how poor are you? Housing, the means test is, how much housing do you need? For domestic violence, unfortunately, the means test is, are you the victim of a form of violence? For child abuse, the means test is, are their caregivers inadequate in terms of neglect or medical neglect or physical abuse or sexual abuse? Almost every government program has this test, which means there's an enormous bureaucracy hired to decide when the gate gets opened and when the gate gets closed. And that diverts monetary resources and energy that would otherwise be spent on the program itself.

“The second ambivalence is in fact that bright line: Who gets the services? And in a market economy, we're really reluctant to help everyone because we think, well, you don't want to reward behavior that we think is inappropriate. So why would you have a Welfare benefit increase with the second out-of-wedlock child, when we don't want children born out of wedlock to folks who aren't able to support them?”

Gelles isn't a big fan of government programs, many of which he considers “terribly ineffective” and incapable of delivering the kind of help needed, intended, and expected. The title of his latest book,
The Third Lie
, is “based on an old and not very good joke that there are three lies,” he notes.
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“The first one—this is the older part of the joke, of course—is ‘I'll respect you in the morning'; the second is, ‘The check is in the mail,' and the third lie is: ‘I'm from the government and I'm here to help you.'” He blames government program failures in dealing with family violence in part to a “disconnect between research and government social policy.” He accuses policymakers of using research “like a drunk uses a lamppost—much more for support than for illumination.”

The results are frustrating. “I cannot bear to be involved in more fatality reviews of little babies,” Gelles wrote in his 1996 book
The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children's Lives
.
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“I cannot bear the frustration of devoting a lifetime of research and practice to the ideal of protecting children only to find that current policies ignore the research results. We must change the system.”

Gelles has long been a critic of the policy push by US social-service agencies to “make all reasonable efforts” to keep families together, despite all signs that it may be the worst strategy for a child. “Most families, 98 percent of them, can be helped, but some are hopeless,” he told me recently. “In those cases the child must be removed from the home.” Many experts view the strategy to keep a child with a family at nearly any cost not only forced by official policy but necessitated by budgetary constraints because there are few other options for abused children and not enough funds to establish or support them. In Gelles's view, the policy is also part of a “larger ideology”—the “sacrosanct belief that children always (or nearly always) are better off with the biological parents,” he told me.

In
The Book of David
, Gelles examines the case of a boy he calls “David Edwards.” Despite repeated abuse at the hands of his mother, “Darlene,” who had severely abused David's older sister, the boy was returned to his home. He was eventually suffocated by his mom. “I became convinced that the system was just as responsible for his death as the actual perpetrator. While we may not be able to change people like Darlene, we could and should have prevented the death of her little boy,” he writes.
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The abuse and murder of children are “major social problems, public health threats to children, and crimes that require strong and effective response,” he added. “The child welfare system, which was instituted to protect children, continues to fail them. The problem is not simply that resources are lacking, but that the central mission of child welfare agencies, preserving families, does not work, and places many children at significant risk of continued injury and death.”
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Michael Petit of Every Child Matters points out a key difference in focus when civil authorities deal with violence against a wife and mother. As Gelles has also pointed out, domestic violence against a wife is dealt with by law enforcement, while almost all child-abuse cases are addressed by social-welfare agencies. When a wife is assaulted, the attacker is removed from the home by police; yet in the case of an abused child, it's the child who's removed from the home by a social worker, and the attacker is allowed to stay. While the family may also desperately require the aid of a social-service agency, a social worker is not usually the best person to deal with a violent male in the household, notes Petit. “He's not going to be deterred in that situation,” he explained to me in an interview. “It's no longer effective to sit down with that guy and say, ‘Let's talk. What's bothering you?' The most violent cases, whether against a woman or a child, must be handled in the criminal justice system.”

Gelles is often quoted for his shocking comments about the violence of families and the dangers they represent to children. He has called the family the “most violent social institution” and the “most violence prone,” and he believes the family is at least as often a locus of violence as of love. He attributes dangers to a child within a family to a variety of causes, from the amount of time spent in a family (increasing chances of victimization) to the range of
ages and gender-role expectations that can trigger conflict. He says he hasn't moderated his harsh view of the family over decades of research, except to note that evidence indicates that women gain somewhat greater protections from violence from their mates as wives, rather than as lovers.

Despite Gelles's criticism of child-protection services in the United States, he does not believe they should be gutted, but that strategies should change, and services be strengthened. The problem of child abuse and child homicides by their parents demands more attention and funding to address the problem. He notes in
The Book of David
that a heavily subsidized convention center within miles of the home where David was suffocated still lies vacant. “A society that can subsidize a convention center and hotel, airport and shopping mall can subsidize the physical and emotional well-being of children. Not all programs will work and not every program is effective for every family and child,” he writes.
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“Yet this is an investment we must make, because the costs of not making it, the cost in dollars, suffering, and lives, is simply too high to pay.”

Neil Websdale agrees that the nation must expend more effort, attention, and funds on protecting children at home. “We need to intervene more effectively and we must begin with more social services and a better safety net to keep families from imploding,” he told me. “We must establish a process that pumps money into creating more caring communities to battle the isolation many families experience.”

Another key strategy in the battle to save kids at home is to gather as much information as possible on the problem. There's a hunger among academics, child-protection advocates, as well as professionals in child-protection agencies, law enforcement, and healthcare for more, and more accurate, data. Petit believes the persistent statistical undercount of child fatalities at the hands of their parents dampens public interest and engagement in battling the problem, but it also hinders effective preventive strategies not to have accurate information.

One way to glean the most complete information possible from fatal situations is the use of child-fatality review panels, which involve experts, advocates, social workers, law enforcement and healthcare professionals, as well as relatives and family members of a victim, in order to conduct
a kind of “social autopsy” of a child's death that involves examination of official reports of the deaths, investigations of public agencies that may have touched the victim's life, risk factors, and possible alternative actions that may have prevented the death. The aim is to find clues in one death to devise strategies to prevent another. Several different kinds of fatality-review systems exist to analyze a range of situations, from elder-abuse deaths, to infant mortality, to the domestic-violence death of an intimate partner and child fatalities. “The unifying feature of these different types of fatality reviews is that they are wide-angle, multidisciplinary case studies conducted in a climate that promotes open discovery of information,” noted a conference report by the National Center for Child Death Review.
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As the report states, “review teams obtain information on deaths from multiple sources for their discussions on the often extremely complex death events. The teams examine records, discuss the events leading up to and causing the death, and work to identify what could be done differently to prevent other deaths. They make recommendations to agencies and other decision makers for prevention activities and/or changes to service systems. The ultimate purpose is catalyzing action for prevention, rather than merely counting and calculating death rates.”

An increasing number of states have expanded use of the review panels and are now routinely exchanging information with other states in an attempt to create as broad an examination as possible of the deaths. The hope is to learn from one another and to develop a “best practices” approach to deal with children at risk. Neil Websdale first talked to some of the killers discussed at length in his book
Familicidal Hearts
through his work as former director of the National Domestic Fatality Review, which focuses on homicides of both intimate partners and children.

A kind of an über–fatality commission was being created in early 2013 under the “Protect Our Kids Act” (HR 6655) passed by Congress. The national commission will examine the issue of child-abuse fatalities and come up with recommendations to stem the tide of domestic child fatalities. Getting the law passed was a key focus of Coalition to End Child Abuse, which includes the Every Child Matters Education Fund, the National Association of Social Workers, the National District Attorneys Association,
the National Center for the Review and Prevention of Child Deaths, and the National Children's Alliance.

Many child advocates immediately mention gun control as an obvious way to save children's lives. Guns are particularly a factor in family annihilations. Firearms were used in vast majority of the murder-suicides tracked by the Violence Policy Center. David Adams, who has studied men who murder their intimate partners, pointed out at the 2012 conference on domestic violence, held by the National Institute of Justice, that guns are the “low-hanging fruit” that could be easily picked off to help stem the problem.

But there's also an interesting debate, particularly internationally, about what role physical punishment in the home might play in child abuse, abuse fatalities, and child homicides by parents. Gelles believes we must reconsider our tolerance of corporal punishment at home to make inroads against child abuse. “There's something troubling when a child experiences his first violence at the hands of someone he loves,” he told me. But he's not optimistic things will change soon in the United States. “I think you have to start with ending capital punishment,” he explained. “You can't arrest someone for spanking their kid when we're putting people to death.” Studies have found conflicting evidence linking corporal punishment at home to child abuse. But it's interesting that after Rahim Alfetlawi shot his stepdaughter in the head, he told his wife that he had “smacked her.”

In its latest report on child-abuse fatalities in industrialized nations, UNICEF authors weave a careful argument supporting the suppression of corporal punishment of children by their parents. Strictures against such treatment of kids at home is a logical part of a strategy to develop a “culture of peace” within societies that will be safer for children, they argue. Though poverty and substance abuse has been linked to child abuse, it's “unlikely that such problems will be fixed soon,” the report concedes.
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But it's important for adults to realize in the interim that regardless of the pressures of their own lives, they should not take it for granted that they can “take it out on the kids.”