Children in military family killed through abuse and neglect has doubled since 2003 (USA)

Notice that frequent deployments are blamed and a lack of social service follow up.

Also see discussion here of the murder of Talia Williams in Hawaii, which we have reported on before. Her custodial father, NAEEM WILLIAMS, is charged with homicide and will be going to trial in January.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/09/military-child-abuse-deaths-090211w/

Deployments and child deathsExclusive investigation shows military failed some victims

By Andrew Tilghman - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Sep 2, 2011 11:29:25 EDT

The number of children in military families who have been killed through abuse and neglect has more than doubled since 2003, and has begun to exceed child abuse fatality rates in the civilian world, military records show.

In many cases, local military Family Advocacy Program officials had previous reports about those children and their troubled homes, but outreach efforts failed to save them.

Deaths of military dependent children related to abuse and neglect have risen steadily from 14 in 2003 to 29 in 2010, according to data from the Defense Department’s Family Advocacy Program office.

The trend peaked in 2008, when 36 child deaths were linked to abuse or neglect, a level that exceeds rates found in the civilian world. Those data are based on a Military Times review of more than 400,000 electronic records and FAP reports released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Pentagon officials cannot say for sure how many military children die from abuse each year. The office that maintains the FAP database was unable to say whether there has, in fact, been a rise in child fatalities or whether the higher numbers result from improvements in record keeping.

Keeping those records has become a new priority for the Defense Department. Last year, officials instituted an improved tracking system for child fatalities.

But it will be several years until those data will be reliable enough to identify trends, said Pentagon spokeswoman Air Force Maj. Monica Matoush.

Outside experts say an upward trend would come as no surprise, highlighting a rarely discussed symptom of stress on the force that is linked to the frequent war deployments of the past decade.

“Most research suggests that child abuse and neglect was lower in the military” than in the private sector, said researcher Deborah Gibbs, who has studied child abuse in the military under a Defense Department contract.


“That shifted once large-scale deployments started,” she said. “These are large and meaningful differences that are very clearly tied to specific events of the large-scale deployments.”

Gibbs and others say little research has been done on military child fatalities caused by abuse or neglect.

One study in North Carolina found that the rate of military child fatalities is about double the civilian average.

There is evidence that the FAP office may be underreporting child fatalities. Officials are quick to caution that the FAP offices do not necessarily hear about every fatality. And data from individual services show a significantly higher number of deaths.

Known to the system

In many cases of child deaths, military officials knew the children were in troubled homes.

According to the Defense Department, about one in five deaths in the past decade involved a child or family that was previously reported to the military’s family advocacy system for either child or domestic abuse.

The service-specific data show an even higher rate. The Army says six of the 14 children of soldiers who died from abuse or neglect in 2007 were the subjects of previous reports. And five other deaths should have been in the FAP files because those families were involved with other military or civilian assistance offices, Army documents show.

An Air Force review of 15 deaths found its FAP office had open files on about one-third of abusers. One underlying problem: “insufficient coordination between military health care providers, law enforcement agencies, civilian psychiatric facilities and the chain of command,” Air Force documents state.

The Navy Department in 2009 reviewed the deaths of 12 children and concluded that five were homicides. Of those, two had histories of domestic abuse on file with the FAP, Navy records show.

That contrasts with data from the civilian world, where 10 percent to 15 percent of child deaths occur in families that were on the radar of local social service agencies and had received “family preservation” help within the five years prior to the deaths, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Four warnings, no help

The first time 5-year-old Talia Williams’ troubled family drew attention from Army social workers came in January 2005, when military police arrested her stepmother for beating up her father, a soldier posted to Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.

The second warning sign came a month later, when a military day care worker noticed scars on the young girl’s arms. They sent Talia to a doctor. According to court documents, the doctor “could not say with 100 percent certainty that it was not abuse, but he could say with 98-99 percent certainty that it was not abuse,” and sent the girl home. The third time, a family friend lodged a hotline complaint with local civilian child protective services, directly accusing Talia’s father and stepmother of abuse. Caseworkers did not follow up or relay the complaint to the Army.

According to court documents, “The log completed by the CPS Intake worker … remarked that ‘step mother suspected of mistreating five-year-old, willre-contact with correct name and address’” — the last apparent record of anyone doing anything in response to that phone call.

The fourth time, also in June, military police got a call from a neighbor about a screaming child in the Williams home. When MPs entered the home, they found Talia “upstairs in a room, naked and mute, standing near feces on the floor” with scratches on her face, court records state. When police questioned her father, Spc. Naeem Williams, he said she got scratched playing with a friend.

On July 16, doctors say Talia died from blunt head trauma, allegedly beaten to death by her father. He was charged with murder and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Now the Army faces a highly unusual lawsuit from Talia’s mother, who was living in South Carolina all that time. Tarshia Williams claims the Army was negligent in her daughter’s death amid clear warning signs, and that Army officials had a responsibility and duty to keep the child safe.

The Army’s defense is that its FAP office and other military officials have no real legal responsibility to keep Talia — or any child — safe from abuse.

A federal judge has rejected that argument. The case will go to trial in January.

Data discrepancies

Every year, the services convene fatality review panels that investigate deaths linked to child and domestic abuse. Since their creation in 2004, those review boards have consistently reported higher numbers of child deaths than the FAP office.

Dr. Barbara Craig, director of the Armed Forces Center for Child Protection in Bethesda, Md., cited those review boards when asked about an apparent rise in deaths.

“I sit on the Navy and Marine Corps spouse and child death review teams and one of my former staff members is on the Air Force team,” Craig said in response to an inquiry from Military Times. “It has not been our experience that we are seeing more child abuse and neglect deaths over the past few years.

“To the contrary, since the Armed Forces Center for Child Protection, in collaboration with the [Navy Bureau of Medicine] perinatal advisory board instituted a nonaccidental head trauma prevention program for new parents … the number of abusive head trauma cases has declined over the past decade,” she added.

Head trauma, a symptom of so-called shaken baby syndrome, is a common cause of death for young children.

Experts say the military is a tightly knit community that may be better at identifying troubled homes where children are in danger. But these tightly knit military bases and communities can be isolated from local civilian child protective agencies.

The military must report allegations of abuse or neglect to local civilian authorities, but “the military tends to want to care for its own rather than utilize the civilian network for assistance,” said Barbara Cohoon, a deputy director for government relations for the National Military Family Association.

That tendency is rooted in the belief that outsiders do not understand military culture and will offer less effective assistance, Cohoon said.

For years, rates of military child deaths linked to abuse and neglect were far lower than in the civilian population. But that may not be true anymore. FAP records show the 36 deaths in 2008 outpaced national civilian averages for the first time.

For a community the size of the active-duty military — which has about 1.4 million children, according to Tricare — that rate of child abuse deaths is about 2.5 per 100,000. National civilian averages are about 2.2, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Records provided by the individual services suggest the number of deaths is significantly higher. For example, the FAP office recorded 24 child deaths in 2006. Yet service records show at least 38 children died from abuse or neglect in 2006, according to data found in documents produced by the individual services and obtained by Military Times.

That amounts to a death rate of about 2.7 per 100,000 children.

A records mess

Officials both inside and outside the military have criticized the Pentagon’s efforts to track child deaths.

The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly rapped the Defense Department for failing to properly maintain domestic abuse records, which Congress mandated in 2000. A decade later, the Pentagon still provides “incomplete data” and “cannot analyze trends,” the GAO said in a report last year.

The services also complain that Pentagon policy complicates data collection and investigations. For example, a major challenge to getting accurate data is a policy that prohibits local FAP offices from investigating a fatality until after “all criminal proceedings have been completed.”

That can take years, which “severely delays the fatality review process … and possibly contributes to under reporting of deaths,” stated a 2009 internal Army report on child and domestic abuse deaths.

The Air Force notes that FAP offices that investigate child abuse have no authority to obtain personnel records on the service members involved. Such records would help investigators determine the cause of death in individual cases and help identify long-term trends.

State and local law enforcement officials who receive reports of abuse or neglect in families living off base are not required to notify local commanders. The Navy report said this information would be a “significant benefit” and has encouraged the Defense Department to push Congress to enact a law making that a legal requirement.

For many reasons, the Pentagon cannot vouch for its own data. Defense officials recognized the problem in 2008, while reviewing data from previous years. They found “a potential inconsistency in the way deaths had been recorded in the Family Advocacy Program Central Registry,” Matoush said.

Overshadowed by war

Domestic abuse was a major concern for the Pentagon about 10 years ago after Congress created a task force to study what many felt was a problem that deserved more light and heat. But the task force was overshadowed from the start when it delivered its final report to Congress on April 20, 2003 — the day the U.S. invaded Iraq.

That day was “totally bizarre,” said Deborah Tucker, a task force’s co-chairwoman who went to Washington to deliver and testify about the findings.

Lawmakers left the hearing room during breaks to check cable news reports about dust storms slowing down U.S. troops advancing toward Baghdad.

“We knew that day that what we wanted — for the department to focus on domestic violence and really help us create a segment of society that had eliminated it — was not going to happen,” Tucker said.

The office of the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness followed up on some recommendations, assigning key responsibilities to FAP offices.

But the Pentagon closed its Family Violence Policy Office in 2007 and rejected a request from the task force to reconvene and evaluate the Pentagon’s progress.

Lawsuits against the state, CPS regarding abusive fathers, official investigations of or by CPS (USA)

After a couple of requests, I have tried to draw up a very preliminary list of cases where lawsuits have been filed against the state or CPS (sometimes by moms, sometimes not). These are limited to cases involving the father's mistreatment of the children (murder, abuse/neglect, abduction, etc.). A few cases listed here involve "official" after-the-fact investigations of or by CPS.

This is not a comprehensive list by any means. Unfortunately, I never tagged cases involving a lawsuit, so they're difficult to find at Dastardly. But it's a start in terms of additional research.

If you know of additional cases, please feel free to contact me. And please send a link to a newspaper article or other documentation if you can. Thanks.

Washington State:
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2011/01/state-to-pay-285m-for-child-abused-by.html
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/06/lawsuits-filed-against-state-dshs-for.html

Michigan:
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/10/judge-jonker-mom-has-high-hill-to-climb.html
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/07/additional-information-on-custodial-dad.html

http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/09/detail-outlining-dhs-role-in-girls.html
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/09/ombudsman-report-tells-public-little.html

Arizona:
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/10/outrageous-cops-let-off-for-allowing.html

Tennessee:
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/08/mother-of-15-year-old-girl-murdered-by.htmlhttp://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/08/mother-of-girl-slain-by-sexually.html

Ohio:
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2011/01/custodial-dad-son-both-face-death.html

California:
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/08/dad-kills-2-year-old-son-during-court.html

Texas:
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2011/01/us-supreme-court-rejects-case-of-us.html

Pennsylvania:
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/09/grandmother-to-sue-county-for-boys.html

http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2010/02/dhs-not-at-fault-for-abuse-death-of-10.html

Kentucky:
http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/2009/07/mom-sues-over-babys-murder-by-custodial.html

"Parent" pedophile ring arrest (West Australia)

Seriously? Where are the "parents" in this pedophile ring? I only see mention of fathers.

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/parent-paedophile-ring-arrest-in-wa-20110104-19exg.html

Parent paedophile ring arrest in WA
January 4, 2011

AAP

A West Australian father who allegedly abused his five-year-old daughter and indecently filmed her to share the images with an international parent paedophile ring has been charged.

Police say the 32-year-old man, who cannot be named, indecently assaulted his five-year-old daughter.

In a separate incident, he indecently recorded the girl to share the images with others he was communicating with in an online chat forum, police said.

He was arrested at his home after police found a computer with other child exploitation material, which they say he intended to share in the chat forum.

Police say the man was part of an international parent paedophile ring, which involved parents using social networking sites in the United States, Britain and Australia to exploit their children.

The man was charged with indecently recording a child who is a lineal relative, distributing child exploitation material, possessing child exploitation with the intent to distribute, and indecent dealings with a child who is a lineal relative.

Jewish boy to remain in Israel, despite "kidnapping" (Tel Aviv, Israel)

This is another case where a father with a history of domestic violence managed to get custody under the Hague Convention after the mother and child fled the country (in this case, the US) and moved to Israel. The mother was never even married to this guy (identified only as DAVID.) Once in Israel (where she had grown up), Mom used the same name and made no effort to hide. Daddy made no real effort to retrieve the boy--didn't hire a private detective or any of that. Mom was subsequently caught in a routine traffic incident, and was jailed for 2 days (this, of course, being the non-abusive parent who is jailed. Not the one with the history of domestic violence). The poor child went into foster care.

The courts have now ruled that although this was "technically" a kidnapping, the child is acclimated to Israel, and the father had made little effort to see or interact with his son--even after Mom was arrested. So it was disruptive to send the child back to the US.

For Daddy's part: Can we just admit that this was a classic control move (a specialty among batterers) and that "love" or "concern" for his son played no part? The only difference between this guy and some other recent cases, is that the Dad wasn't slick enough to play the role of "aggrieved" father in a convincing manner.

Unmarried mothers should have full custody rights. Period. Especially when the unmarried father has a history of abuse. This should never have been allowed to become an international incident.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/137671

Jewish Boy to Remain in Israel, Despite "Kidnapping"

by Hillel Fendel

In a rare, precedent-setting decision, the Tel Aviv Family Court has ruled that a Jewish child need not be returned to his Chinese-American father, despite his apparent “kidnapping” by his mother.

Judge Varda Plaut ruled that the case is governed by the exceptions to the rule set down by the International Court of Justice regarding the kidnapping of a child from one country to another. The general ruling is that the child must be returned "immediately," even if might not be in his/her best interest to do so. The Tel Aviv court found that in the current case, in which the "immediacy" clause can no longer be implemented, the father made few efforts to seek out his son, and showed little interest in him even when he was found.

The case involves L, an Israeli who moved to the U.S. as a young girl, and a Chinese-American man, D. The two were never married, but had a son born to them in October 2001. The relationship between the two continued along a rocky path, in which the mother endured physical, sexual, and emotional abuse for which she participated in 27 sessions at a local sex-abuse help center. Finally, in July 2005, the two separated for good, agreeing that the mother would keep the child, with visitation rights for the father.

Some six months later, L. arrived in Israel with the boy, without David's knowledge. In July 2006, the father filed for the boy’s return under the Hague charter - but L., whereabouts unknown, did not respond, and the court ruled in the father’s favor.

Though L. did not change her name or otherwise hide, the boy's father did not hire a private investigator to find her, and remained unaware of his son’s whereabouts.

In early 2009, the mother was stopped for a routine traffic inspection, and her name came up on the police computer as wanted for kidnapping. She was held for two days in jail, and her son was taken from her and placed with a Chabad foster family that he knew. With help from her lawyer, attorney Nechama Tzivin, L. was freed from prison and her child returned to her, and her request to overturn the original ruling and re-try the case was accepted.

The final ruling has now been handed down: Though L. technically did kidnap her child, for which a warrant for her arrest was issued and is extant in the United States, her son is now so acclimated to his surroundings in Israel and to his mother, and his father is so removed from the case, that it would be cruel to send him back to the U.S.

Judge Plaut ruled that the issue is not whether the father initiated proceedings within the Hague-set limit of a year of the kidnapping, which he did, but whether he tried actively to seek out his boy’s return. She noted these facts: He waited for nearly two and a half years before his son’s mother was caught “by accident;” in the ensuing months, he did not make efforts to visit his son; when he had the chance to make weekly phone calls to his son, he did so only 7 out of 24 times.

“All these together,” Judge Plaut ruled, “lead to no conclusion other than that the father has already made peace” with the fact that his son will live in Israel with his mother.

In addition, the judge noted that the boy refused to even look at his father during a session with the court-appointed psychologist; that he spent nearly the entire hour clinging in fear to his mother, relaxing only when asked about his friends and school in Israel; and that the father had previously voluntarily given up another one of his children for adoption.

The boy will therefore remain in Israel with her mother - they currently live in a kibbutz, and he attends a public-religious day school - and D. was ordered to pay Lily 25,000 shekels plus VAT in legal costs. .

Family Court rulings may be appealed in a District Court within 15 days, and an appeal was in fact filed a day after the ruling was issued. (IsraelNationalNews.com)

Dad murders mom, abandons daughter at railway station (Auckland, New Zealand)

We've posted on dad NAI YIN XUE before.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10618536

Abandoned little girl and body in boot of car
By Andrew Koubaridis 4:00 AM Wednesday Jan 6, 2010

The sight of little Qian Xue standing alone, abandoned at a busy Melbourne railway station by her father who left her and walked away without even a backwards glance was a scene that shocked most New Zealanders.

So too was the one outside her family's Mt Roskill, Auckland, home where the body of her mother, An An Liu, lay in the boot of her husband's car for days undiscovered by police who hadn't opened it because they didn't have a search warrant.

Her husband, and the girl's father, Nai Yin Xue became one of New Zealand's best known fugitives.

A Chinese-language newspaper publisher by day and a martial arts expert by night, he fled to the United States and stayed under the radar for months until he was caught by a group of Asian Americans who recognised him from media reports.

They seized him, tied him up and called police. He was extradited to New Zealand, setting the scene for one of the country's most high-profile murder trials.

Xue continued to deny strangling his wife. But his tie, carrying his DNA, was found knotted around her neck in the boot of his car.

And within hours of her death he fled the country, leaving Qian in Melbourne and catching a flight to the States. He was desperate to leave Australia, telling the travel agent he would go anywhere and pointing at several faraway destinations.

At the trial, evidence about Xue's character - his mood swings and jealousy in particular - was presented to the jury.

He'd threatened his wife before and was convicted of domestic violence a year before she died after he punched her in the head and menaced her with a knife.

That incident caused her to move to a women's shelter and eventually to Wellington. Xue is said to have broken into the building where she was staying, creeping around in the dark as he looked for her armed with an axe.

With the prosecution case over, the defence was able to outline what it said happened to An An Liu.

It wouldn't be enough to simply deny involvement. So Xue accused his wife of extramarital sex and through his lawyer Chris Comeskey suggested her death could have been the result of a bizarre sexual act gone wrong.

The suggestion was An An Liu died as a result of auto-erotic asphyxiation and her body was dumped by her terrified lover in Xue's car to frame him or to dispose of the body quickly.

The all-female jury didn't take long to reject this story, finding him guilty of murder.

NBC blasted for "checkbook journalism" in Goldman custody case

Again, I have to wonder why dad DAVID GOLDMAN is treated like royalty when so many other parents, especially mothers, get NO help with locating or recovering their missing and/or abducted children. They especially don't get chartered planes offered up on a golden platter like NBC did for Goldman. What is up with that?

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/zontv/2009/12/society_professional_journalis.html

December 28, 2009
Goldman case: Journalism group rips NBC News

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) blasted NBC News for practicing checkbook journalism to obtain an interview with David Goldman and his son, Sean, in connection with a headline-grabbing international custody case. NBC News paid for the plane that took Goldman and his son from Brazil (where the boy was living) to the United States.

SPJ's Ethics Committee said in a statement released Monday that it is "appalled" that "NBC News breached widely accepted ethical journalism guidelines by providing the plane that carried David Goldman and his son Sean back to the United States from Brazil...."

The statement went on to say: "NBC conducted an exclusive interview with David Goldman during the flight it financed and another exclusive interview once the Goldmans returned to the United States. Journalists know this practice as 'checkbook journalism.' The SPJ Code of Ethics urges journalists to act independently by avoiding bidding for news and by avoiding conflicts of interest."

NBC News has been involved in other forms of questionable "journalism" in connection with its top-rated morning show, "Today," where the Goldman interview first appeared.

In November, an NBC production company produced an hourlong interview show for TLC featuring the cable channel's reality TV star, Kate Gosselin. Natalie Morales, a correspondent and anchor for NBC News, conducted the interview for the show that aired on TLC in the cable channel's "Jon & Kate Plus 8" weekly lineup spot. TLC and NBC News were essentially production partners in the show at a time when Gosselin was also appearing on the "Today" show as someone in the news.

But the Goldman payout is far more obvious and egregious.

Here is more from the SPJ statement and its Ethics Committee condemnation of NBC News:

By making itself part of a breaking news story on which it was reporting — apparently to cash in on the exclusivity assured by its expensive gesture — NBC jeopardized its journalistic independence and credibility in its initial and subsequent reports. In effect, the network branded the story as its own, creating a corporate and promotional interest in the way the story unfolds. NBC's ability to report the story fairly has been compromised by its financial involvement.

"The public could rightly assume that NBC News bought exclusive interviews and images, as well as the family's loyalty, with an extravagant gift," Ethics Committee Chairman Andy Schotz said.

The news media's duty is to report news, not help create it. The race to be first should not involve buying — directly or indirectly — interviews, an unseemly practice that raises questions of neutrality, integrity and credibility.

"Mixing financial and promotional motives with an impartial search for truth stains honest, ethical reporting," Schotz said."Checkbook journalism has no place in the news business."

The SPJ Code of Ethics also urges journalists to "clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct."

"NBC must now, belatedly, explain why it entangled its news reporting and corporate interests in this story, as well as the terms of any deal it made with the Goldman family," Schotz said. "NBC also is ethically bound to adequately disclose its active role in the story in each of its future reports on the Goldmans."

DOJ National Institute of Justice: Murder-Suicide in Families

New information from the U.S. Department of Justice National Institute of Justice on Murder-Suicides in Families.

Hat tip to Joan for finding this.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/crime/intimate-partner-violence/murder-suicide.htm

Murder-Suicide in Families

Cases in which one intimate partner murders another and the children and then kills him- or herself are rare and usually garner widespread media coverage. This type of murder-suicide is called familicide.

In almost all of these cases, the killer is a white, non-Hispanic man [1].

Cases in which women kill their male partners, their children and themselves are extremely rare and thus gain even more widespread media coverage.

Learn more about:

Risk Factors
Role of Guns
Role of Shelters
Role of the Economy
Risk Factors
Common characteristics of murder-suicide in families include:

Prior history of domestic violence [2], [3].
Access to a gun [4], [5].
Threats, especially increased threats with increased specificity [6].
Prior history of poor mental health or substance abuse, especially alcohol [7].
Previous history of abuse is by far the most dominant risk factor. In one study, 82 percent of the men who killed their intimate partners were known to the authorities — treatment professionals, the military or the criminal justice system, for example [8].

In most cases, the man exhibits possessive, obsessive and jealous behavior. There is a gradual build-up of tensions and conflicts after which an event leads the man to act. The triggering event is often the woman's announcement that she is leaving.

The time immediately after a woman leaves an abusive partner is the most dangerous [9].

Read an article from the NIJ Journal about a tool to help assess a woman's risk of being a victim of murder suicide (pdf, 6 pages).

Role of Guns
The data are clear: More incidents of murder-suicide occur with guns than with any other weapon. Access to a gun is a major risk factor in familicide because it allows the perpetrator to act on his or her rage and impulses.

In 591 murder-suicides, 92 percent were committed with a gun [10]. States with less restrictive gun control laws have as much as eight times the rate of murder-suicides as those with the most restrictive gun control laws.

Compared to Canada, the United States has three times more familicide; compared to Britain, eight times more; and compared to Australia, 15 times more.

Read more about gun-violence prevention.

Role of Shelters
Domestic violence shelters are meeting the needs of abuse survivors and their children, providing services like housing, mental health counseling and legal assistance. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of domestic violence survivors rate the assistance they received at their shelters as "very helpful," and another 18 percent rate it as "helpful."

Read more about what women say about shelters Exit Notice.

Role of the Economy
The very low number of murder-suicide incidents makes it hard for researchers to understand exactly what role the economy plays in these cases. What is known is that economic distress is a factor, but it is only one of several factors that trigger a man to murder his family. In most cases, the couple has a history of disagreement over many issues, most commonly money, sex and child-rearing.

Although personal economics like the loss of a job may be one of several critical factors, most experts agree that the strength or weakness of the national economy is not related to the frequency of murder-suicides, despite media coverage that suggests otherwise.

Next section: Practical Implications of Current Domestic Violence Research.

Notes
[1] Logan, J., Hill, H.A., Black, M.L., Crosby, A.E., Karch, D.L., Barnes, J.D. and Lubell, K.M., "Characteristics of Perpetrators in Homicide-Followed-by-Suicide Incidents: National Violent Death Reporting System — 17 US States, 2003-2005," American Journal of Epidemiology 168 (November 2008): 1056-1064.

[2], [9] Campbell, J.C., Glass, N., Sharps, P.W., Laughon, K., and Bloom, T., "Intimate Partner Violence, Trauma, Violence & Abuse," 8 (July 2007): 246-269.

[3], [4], [6], [7] Koziol-McLain, J., Webster, D., McFarlane, J., Block, C.R., Ulrich, Y., Glass, N. and Campbell, J., "Risk Factors for Femicide-Suicide in Abusive Relationships: Results from a Multisite Case Control Study," Violence and Victims 21 (February 2006): 3-21

[5] Adams, D., Why Do They Kill: Men Who Murder Their Intimate Partners, Vanderbilt University Press, 2007.

[8] Sharps, P.W., Koziol-McLain, J., Campbell, J., McFarlane, J., Sachs, C., & Xu, X., "Health Care Providers' Missed Opportunities for Preventing Femicide," Preventive Medicine 33, (November 2001): 373-380.

[10] Violence Policy Center. (May 2006). American Roulette: Murder-Suicide in the United States (pdf, 21 pages) Exit Notice. Retrieved July 22, 2009 from the Violence Policy Center Web site.

Date Entered: October 14, 2009