FILICIDE

Filicide is the killing of at least one child twelve months or older by his or her parent.

 Reasons filicide might occur:

According to P.J. Resnick, these are some explanations as to why a parent might commit filicide.

1. An altruistic approach to filicide indicates that parents believe their child or children may be stuck in some kind of inescapable doom or the parents murder the child before committing suicide themselves.
2. Other parents kill as a result of acute psychotic disorders, meaning that they kill while experiencing epilepsy, delirium, or hallucinations.
3. Unwanted child. Killing a child (usually an infant) because of illegitimacy or a child that is conceived as a result of an extramarital affair.
4. In some cases, a child is accidentally killed because of "battered child syndrome." The parent does not intend to kill the child.
5. Rarely, children are killed as a way to revenge against a spouse.

 WARNING: This may be triggering for some people.  Here is a scenario of an act of filicide taken from The Law Bulletin of The American Academy of Psychiatry.

"There was a background of impulsive behavior. At age 24 and in the fifth year of marriage, he suspected his wife was seeing other men for sexual purposes. Employed on an evening shift at a factory, he would often join his wife at a bar around midnight and believed she was overly familiar with the men, which his wife denied. Such denial did not assuage him but left him depressed. On finishing early one evening, he arrived at the bar, but his wife was absent. He drove home and found his wife in bed with a man who was sleeping naked in his own bed. He got his gun and shot the man who apparently never awakened. As his wife jumped out of bed, and sought to run out of the bedroom, he shot her. While he was shooting his wife, their 5-year-old son appeared and was shot. A jury found him guilty of manslaughter."