By James Lewis
There are four distinct types of men who kill their families. These four types are as follows:
1. Self-righteous – This is when the killer seeks to locate blame for his crimes upon the mother who he holds responsible for the breakdown of the family. For these men, their breadwinner status is central to their idea of the ideal family. (Case study: Brian Philcox)
2. Anomic – The family has become firmly linked to the economy in the mind of the killer. The father sees his family as the result of his economic success, allowing him to display his achievements. However, if the father becomes an economic failure, he sees the family as no longer serving this function. (Case study: Chris Foster)
3. Disappointed – With this type, the killer believes his family has let him down or acted in ways to undermine or destroy his vision of ideal family life. An example may be disappointment that children are not following the traditional religious or cultural customs of the father. (Case study: Mohammad Riaz)
4. Paranoid – Those who perceive an external threat to the family. This often social services or the legal system, which the father fears will side against him and take away the children. Here, the murder is motivated by a twisted desire to protect the family. (Case study: Graham Anderson)
Each category has slightly different motivations and many cases have a hidden history of domestic abuse. Cases in family killings have become more common since the year 2000. David Wilson of Birmingham City University, UK, has said that the reason for this increase could be that “men feeling they need to exercise power and control” over their family, as it is often men who invest “too heavily in a very stereotypical conception of what it means to be a husband and a father within an institution called a family” and “Their view of the family is very black and white, and doesn’t reflect the increasingly dynamic role that women can play in the economy and in the institution of the family itself.”
A new study differs from previous explanations for the family killer. These have pointed to revenge or altruism as causes or that an incident leads a man to snap. Professor Wilson explains the nature of some families could be a reason why fathers had seemed loving fathers and dutiful husbands, and is for this reason that he believes that it is important to take domestic violence seriously and encourage “more people to become aware of other people’s lives”.
However studies investigating these types of killings use newspaper reports, therefore Keith Hayward, a professor of criminology at Kent University, stated that it is valuable work that other researchers could further develop, but constructing “typologies” from second-hand media reports was problematic, and “not always helpful for policy development”. While criticising the latest study, Professor Hayward does recognise that getting access to the killers was in many cases impossible, but without detailed insight into their life histories, “it’s all interference”.
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