t to know..
Halleluiah! Blogger recognizes my cookies!
Oops, no it didn’t and still doesn’t. My server had taken a ‘time out’ so the silly computer fixed me up with a previously saved ‘temporary internet file.’ Sure fooled me for a couple minutes, though.
I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now .. The Byrds
But Professor, doesn’t a mother killing her own children pretty much define “Insane”?
Rather than a subconscious view of ‘child as chattel,’ there may be a deeper, indeed instinctive reason why fraternal and maternal filicide are viewed differently. Ms. Lithwick touches on it when she says “.. the law treats individuals who burn down other people's houses as criminals and institutionalizes those who burn down their own.”
From a sociobiological perspective, maternal filicide is certainly not a rational behavior in terms of genetic survival and, except in very unusual circumstances, we would consider it highly aberrant behavior for females of any species.
On the other hand, for the male, killing children he knows or suspects are not his offspring can be rationalized as a pro-genetic survival trait—reducing competition for one’s own offspring—thus rational rather than aberrant behavior. In fact, we do see fraternal filicide throughout the animal kingdom, including the remainder of the hominoids, but only very rarely do we see maternal filicide.
It’s pretty much beside the point, but the statistics in the Slate article are as sloppy as any I’ve seen. First, what is the sample size? Given the media hysteria over the Yates case, I suspect it’s exceedingly low. What is the nature of the sample? Do these ‘murder’ statistics include the horribly sad ‘shaking the baby’ deaths that come more from ignorance than malice? None of these numbers mean a thing without this information.
Given this, only a newbie blogger would be forgiven for the link provided in the Slate article: “A 1969 study by Dr. Phillip Resnick, the "father" of maternal filicide .. found that while mothers convicted of murdering their children were hospitalized 68 percent of the time and imprisoned 27 percent of the time, fathers convicted of killing their children were sentenced to prison or executed 72 percent of the time and hospitalized only 14 percent of the time.”
The link doesn’t take you to Resnick’s study supporting the statistics, but rather to a CBS News article on Resnick’s testimony in the Yates case which neither presents nor defends any statistics whatsoever. The link only gives the appearance that Ms. Lithwick is linking her source for the stats. Furthermore, these statistics only show that the courts can be more sympathetic for filicidal mothers than for their male counterparts. Neither they, nor any of the other statistics in the article go to the question of whether Yates is ‘insane’.
Ms. Lithwick asks: “While it may once have been true that women were the sole—and often frustrated—caregivers of small children, mothers now work, yet they don't kill their colleagues; they kill their babies. Why?” This is just silly. If I wanted to be flip I might suggest that Ms. Lithwick has never been around children much. But frankly, I suspect that it’s just a hell of a lot easier to kill an infant or child than it is to kill another adult.
Finally, note that in the CBS News article it does state that: “.. Yates confessed to killing her kids and even prosecutors concede that she was mentally ill back then.”
I’ll leave this with one last thought: No one ever pleads permanent insanity, do they?
As everyone who uses Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 5.5 is surely aware, Microsoft has announced this morning [now yesterday] that Internet Explorer 6 is now available for download for users of Windows 98. Frankly, considering the number of problems I’ve been experiencing with the internet in the last few days, and I know I’ve been comparatively lucky, all I need is another batch of bugs. I think I’ll ride with IE 5.5 until I hear some reviews on the new product.
Via Steve Den Beste, this is just plain unbelievable:
Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, has 