A clarification of the representation of study findings

As one of the authors, along with my colleagues from the Monash Deakin Filicide Research Hub and the Australian Institute of Criminology, I would like to clarify Angela Shanahan’s representation of our findings. The National Filicide Study (2000 to 2009) found that male parents and step parents together killed more children than female parents; mothers killed more children than fathers; stepfathers killed the next largest group; and parents or step-parents acting jointly the smallest group. It is not helpful to demonise any perpetrator group. The study’s statistics are alarming — that in Australia one child is killed by a parent or step-parent almost every fortnight and the numbers of deaths over the last decades have not declined as have the numbers of other family homicide deaths. Action to prevent filicide is urgently needed and dividing the perpetrators into parental groups is done by researchers to support and target intervention.

Thea Brown, Professor Emeritus, co-director of the Monash Deakin Filicide Research Hub, Monash University