"How DARE anyone make excuses for fathers who murder their own children"

She's 100% right-- filicide for any reason save the most bizarre and hard to imagine isn't any more excusable to any degree as the murder of anyone else. I have to take exception though to this part of her essay:

"Which is just one of the disparities that signal why, on a balance of probability, moral, legal and structural rights are correctly tilted towards mothers and away from fathers.

To be clear: mothers do kill.

In fact, of all children killed by a parent, half are killed by their mothers. But the difference is that men, as shown by the examples above, are known to be able to kill out of spite.

When women kill their children, they almost always do it because they are mentally ill.
...
The sanctity of their lives is embedded in her soul in a way that it is not in their father's and that simple fact is enshrined in the workings of a law that some men call biased and the rest of us call common sense.'

The kids are just as dead. And perhaps if the custody racket were not skewed toward the mothers but instead the fathers, I am very sure we'd see mothers killing their kids out of spite of the father in the way she describes the current set-up. She tried to slip that one in there, but I can't let is pass. And as for the last para I quote above-- well, she is in her own zone on that one. Does she know what it feels like to be a father? No. This is just anti-father bigotry, plain and simple.

The author claims there's no excuse for fathers who kill, but then gives a big excuse for mothers who kill--they're mentally ill. Sure, sometimes.

Men, of course, are never mentally ill.

She's wrong, of course. Plenty of mothers who kill are not mentally ill by any stretch of the definition. Mothers are the most likely killers and abusers of children. But keep that quiet--no one is ever supposed to say that. It's not PC.

I make no effort to excuse fathers or mothers who kill--but the pain of losing your kids in divorce is surely greater than the pain of the postpartum depression used to excuse Andrea Yates.

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm04/figure4_2.htm

oregon dad

Some Men believe that if they can't have their Children, then no one else can either. Along the lines of Bill Cosbys' line "I brought you in, I can take you out!" If Men were given equal rights with their Children we wouldn't be discussing this situation, now would we? It always amazes me when an animal is mistreated and lashes out the cries of foul are incessent, but when a Human Being, a Male is mistreated and lashes out, well politics as usual. Change the system, and free the victims!

David A. DeLong

be the first!

i am betting people are trying to post, and set this angry woman straight.
she will no doubt cherry pick what hits the screen. hard to just put parts of
blogs out there tho. they make no sense. i call this throwing rocks.

it just shows a lack of character on her part. and what woman who kills children
isn't told by her, probably free lawyer, to take the insanity plea? S.O.P.
for what passes for amerikan women. could the blame men game get any more lame?

It's happened before, and it will continue to happen. Murder is murder is murder is murder is murder... but let's not COMPLETELY ignore one very fundamental reality: the dissolution of the marriage and his custody (or lack thereof) schedule - WAS - a factor in this mans actions.
Please take a moment and review a few studies into 'mothers who murder their children' as well as review the US DoH&HS/ACF CMRs for the past FIFTEEN YEARS... and the commewntaries resultant therefrom.
And try to find similar debates/discussions/arguments.
Hint: you won't
They're not here.
Gunner Retired

It probably won't be posted though. I just basically exposed the hypcocrisy that lies therein by pointing out how the title of the article is "How DARE anyone make excuses for fathers who murder their own children", yet she quickly does that for mothers who murder their own kids. I also mentioned that figure about how 40% of murder victims are killed by their own mother. If women almost always kill their children out of mental illness, shouldn't this figure be lower, or the number of females with mental illness be higher? Theory debunked, right there. The article really is little more than bigotrous garbage reminescent of an angry mother in court trying to make men look bad. I don't understand how people who write as badly and as biasedly as Carol Sarler could even be considered real journalists.

Evan AKA X-TRNL
Real Men Don't Take Abuse!

All comments at this article seem to be blocked. I wonder why.

Sarler is a typical feminist, too bigoted to even recognise her own hypocrisy. Mothers who kill are all mentally ill, suffering from some ailment that has been inflicted on them; fathers who kill are all just pure evil. In other words women are never evil by nature, but men are. How convenient for anyone who is desperate to cling to the tired old "woman good, man bad" mantra.

If Philcox were truly an evil individual, rather than a normal person who was driven to an evil act, then we must have seen ample evidence of his evil throughout his life. After all, if you are intrinsically evil by nature, you cannot help but perform evil acts all the time.

So was Philcox a terror of his kindergarten, a bully at school, a thug in his youth? Did he have an endless criminal record? Was he a notorious troublemaker, always lashing out and hurting others at every opportunity? Had he been arrested many times before for abuse of his wife and children? I have seen no evidence of this. All we see is what appears to be a normal family man, but going through the familiar mincer of the so-called family court system - in other words about to lose his children and his house for no good reason. The common denominator in about 99% of these tragedies. Yet shrews like Sarler still cannot make the connection...

Civilisation: man's greatest, and most unappreciated, gift to women