(WOMENSENEWS)--Consider these recent headlines:
"Teen Escapes as Father Kills Family" (in Florida)
"Maryland Town Anguished, Baffled After Man Kills Wife, Three Children and Self"
"Four Dead in Baltimore Hotel"
"Police Continue Probe into Murder-Suicide of Wilmington Family" (California)
"Despondent Dads Driven to Kill Loved Ones" (California, Washington, Maryland)
Until recently, cases of a parent killing his or her whole family were extremely rare. According to Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Violence Policy Center, these cases "were so rare we didn't bother to count them as a separate category."
But 2007 saw several such cases, in which fathers were usually the killers. In Alabama, one father threw his children off a bridge; in New Jersey, a man drowned his daughters, then hanged himself; and a California man shot his wife and two daughters in a parked car before turning the gun on himself. Over the next two years such mass killings have escalated.
Harsh Economy a Factor
A scan of news reports shows these horrible crimes becoming even more common, occurring at the rate of one every week or two.
If that rate holds up, the increase is huge. The previous rate was one or two every three months, according to Rand of the Violence Policy Center.
A doubling in murder-suicide from one or two per day--the average for the United States--to more than two or three a day is also evident from my news tracking this year.
Most experts cited in news reports emphasize the correlation between the killings and the economic downturn. And in our book, "Death by Domestic Violence: Preventing the Murders and the Murder-Suicides," my co-author and I did find that unemployment and other financial difficulties were themes in whole-family murder-suicides.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Connecting Violence against Women with the Economy
Thanks to an anonymous poster on my "Rihanna's Comeback" blog post for highlighting a recent article on Women's eNews: "Spike in Murder-Suicides Raises 'Manhood' Issue":
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7 comments:
you're welcome. ;P
I wasn't saying that the economy doesn't have an effect on the incidence of DV, I'm saying the association has yet to be proven. I do DV/SA research and when I mention that fact to people, I keep hearing stuff like 'Things must be getting worse in this economy'. Its all because of these anecdotes from local tv - ppl forget that local news and even national news networks often collectively focus on particular subjects, making things that are happening consistently seem like they have been getting out of control recently.
I can tell you, in my city the family related homicides were concentrated in poor neighborhoods before the economy went out of control - but I can't say that economics alone had anything to do w/ all of those cases.
I'm sorry NinaG but it is proven. As I said in my previous comment that this post references, there is over 20 years of quantitative research on the connection between things like economic stress and domestic violence. As someone who worked for 15 years in the DSV field, attended local and global conferences on it, and presented and published on it, I can attest to both anecdotal and statistical data backing this up.
Your anecdotal evidence seems to imply you are conflating two things that are not being conflated here: ie that:
Supposition A - poorer people, or people living in poorer neighborhoods, are often said to be more violent (and that the over policing of these neighborhoods pads the stats that support this) when DSV crosses all classes and supposition
And
Supposition B - violence goes up when people are experiencing economic stress
are equitable.
I don't think anyone here is actually making that argument. Both ABW and I have simply referred to supposition B which is proven in the literature & grassroots activism. Neither of us, if I can make an assumption about ABW for a moment, would argue supposition A as it is both classist, potentially racist, and utterly unsupported by the literature or grass roots activism.
Hopefully this clears up the confusion about what is being said and what is factually evidenced in the last 20+ years of research and 30+ years of shelter and outreach services. And you are right to point out that this work is quite different than simply looking to local news. I provided the link to enews b/c, as I said, it is an accessible piece with *anecdotal* evidence related to the discussion as opposed to research written in highly specialized and less accessible language.
PS. anyone who really wants to track this information down can always do a journal search or go through the national clearinghouse stats for more specialized infor/research, or if the shelters in your area publish annual reports you can also find their stats and narratives in slightly more accessible language as well. There are also quite a few dissertations on it as well as books, Powell's has a pretty good search engine for pinpointing such things. These are only a few ways to find the info off the top of my head.
Not an altogether difficult phenomenon to understand. Just as racial and other various socioeconomic animus rise during difficult financial times, why should violence in men/women relationships not respond in kind? Especially in the black community, where black males like myself seem to suffer from black women being favored in the job market.
black males suffer from racism in the job market. If black women were eliminated from the job pool, black men would still be under and unemployed b/c of discrimination.
Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!!
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