Why Do They Kill?: Men Who Murder Their Intimate Partners

6. Child Abuse

148 6 | Child Abuse In my investigation of the perpetrators’ treatment of their children, radically different accounts were provided by the victims of attempted homicide than those offered by the killers. I asked the members of each group of perpetrators over twenty-five open-ended questions about their relationships with any and all of the children they had shared with their victims. Additional questions sought to ascertain whether there had been conflict between each perpetrator and victim over the handling of the children. For instance, question #179 for the killers was, “Did your treatment of the children change in any way in the days or weeks leading up your partner’s death? If yes, how?” For the victims of attempted homicide, this question was, “Did you notice any changes in how your partner treated the children in the days or weeks leading up to his final assault of you? If yes, in what ways?” I additionally had each participant fill out a thirty-item checklist of abusive or controlling behaviors toward children. The women were three times more likely than the killers to report at least one act of child abuse by the perpetrators. Victims’ Accounts Sixteen of the twenty (80%) victims of attempted homicide had children with their abusive partners. Ten of these women (63%) said that their partner had physically or psychologically abused the children. The following is a brief description of the child abuse in these cases. 1) On numerous occasions, the perpetrator put Tabasco sauce on his toddler son’s tongue or made him brush his teeth with soap on his Child Abuse | 149 toothbrush. Other times, the son would be yanked up by his arms or made to stand alone in a dark room for long periods. These behaviors were usually “punishments” in response to the boy singing or talking. 2) The father would slap his four-year-old son in the face and yell and “growl” at him, according to the mother. 3) Several times, a teenage girl was slapped or punched in the face and thrown against a wall. When she was seventeen, this girl took out a restraining order against her father. 4) A six-year-old girl was repeatedly “smacked really hard” in the face or on her hands by her father. 5) A two-year-old son was grabbed by the arms and thrown on a couch by his father. 6) One father would frequently scream at his three young children, to the point where they would be “cowering in the corner.” 7) One father, William, once grabbed and held a gun to his threeyear -old son. 8) Jacob would make his three-year-old daughter “bend down” so he could “paddle her.” 9) One father would frequently grab, hit, or “beat up” all four of his children. 10) Edgardo, age four, would often “hide in the fields” to escape his father’s physical and sexual abuse. As can be seen, children of all ages were subjected to abuse by the perpetrators . That most child victims were in their pre-teen years reflects that few of the perpetrators had children who were teens or older. Only three of the perpetrators of attempted homicide had biological or stepchildren who were thirteen or older. In two of these cases, the perpetrator had been physically and emotionally abusive to at least one of his teenage children. The third father had never been physically abusive to his children, according to his partner. Killers’ Accounts Nineteen of the thirty-one killers (61%) had biological children and one additional man had only stepchildren with the woman he killed. Seven of 150 | Why Do They Kill? the men had biological children with previous partners. Few of the killers admitted to having physically abused their children, and we did not have adequate sources of information by which to assess their rates of child abuse. Only four of the nineteen men (21%) with biological or stepchildren acknowledged any physical child abuse, and the level of violence reported was mild in comparison that which was reported by the victims of attempted homicide. All four of these men claimed only to have occasionally grabbed or slapped one of their children. A fifth man, James, admitted verbal abuse of one child but denied any physical violence. While reporting that police had filed a child abuse report against him and physical abuse of his infant son was substantiated by the Massachusetts...