Child Homicide

From governments that enact population-limiting legislation or commit wholesale neonaticide to families who purposely allow a weak infirm or unfavorably gendered infant to perish rather than expend limited resources neonaticide infanticide and filicide are practiced on every continent and by every level of cultural complexity.Taking an objective and diagnostic approach Child Homicide: Parents Who Kill examines the crime of neonaticide from all angles including historical cultural psychological and legal. Expanding on the first edition published as Endangered Children: Neonaticide Infanticide and Filicide this edition details child homicide in its many forms such as shaken baby syndrome and Munchausen-by-Proxy as well as the differing circumstances involved in infanticide and filicide. Unlike many books on the subject it investigates the behavior of the father--deemed responsible in roughly 75 percent of these cases--whether aggressive complicit or merely absent and his ultimate culpability under the law.The authors study the influence of today's media and how its lightning-fast dissemination of these shocking and often complicated stories affect public opinion copycat crime and legal bias. This book explains legal defenses including insanity differential post partum diagnosis such as post-partum psychosis and discusses new policies more appropriate therapeutic punishments and preventive measures.Child Homicide: Parents Who Kill places this phenomenon in its historical cultural and human context and makes us realize that this is not just someone else's nightmare.