Infanticide: Mothers who kill

By MICHELE HEWITSON

On June 6 last year Tania Tokona drove her three youngest children to a cemetery 5km from the family home in Tirau. There she took her sleeping 18-month-old Simon and stabbed him to death with a pair of industrial scissors. Three-year-old Winiata was then stabbed repeatedly in his chest and throat; he suffocated to death in his own blood and mucus. Tokona's 2-year-old daughter, Alex-
andria, was spared.

The 31-year-old mother of five put the bodies of her two youngest sons in the boot of her Ford Fairmont and drove 250km to the Whanganui River where, in a failed suicide bid, she drove off the bank.

The tragic story had its legal ending in February when, in the High Court at Wanganui, Tokona was acquitted on the grounds of insanity. She is now in a residential care unit in the Waikato.

Such stories make headlines not only because of the rarity of the event — it is estimated that four or five women kill their children each year in New Zealand — but also, say Dr Sandy Simpson and Dr Josephine Stanton, senior lecturers in the department of psychiatry and behavioural science at the Auckland Medical School, because "the killing of a child is profoundly disturbing in that it violates the assumed sanctity of parental love."

The two have written the first New Zealand study to concentrate on the stories and experiences of mothers who have killed their children — personal accounts of very public, incomprehensible human tragedies.

For Stanton there was personal interest, "My experience as a mother."

When a mother kills her child, she says, it contradicts our basic assumptions about how people behave. But "many mothers can identify with it and infanticidal urges are common. I certainly had them."

Motherhood is, Stanton says, "an incredibly stressful, quite an alone and unsupported role. I belong to a relatively privileged group of women who have houses to live in and enough money. Yet, certainly, I've been in situations, like Playcentre, where we would all sit and talk about feeling we were right on the edge and not managing at times."

What interested Stanton was "not why people do abuse their children but how the rest of us manage not to, I suppose. My personal interest in it was: what had gone on for these women?"

What had gone on makes for some harrowing reading: "Because the way I saw the world and everything was like there was just no hope. And there was no light, there was no future for me, there was no future for anybody.

"First of all it was, look, oh I just don't want to live any more. Everything looks terrible. And then I thought, well, I just couldn't leave my daughter behind and I should do something about that."

Six women were interviewed — the small sample reflects the rarity of the event. Of 12 women identified as possibilities for interviews, one was too unwell, some were not considered suitable by their psychiatrists, and one declined to take part.

They were all mothers who had killed their children in the context of — like Tania Tokona — a major mental illness.

Those who fell into the other two main groups of maternal filicide — neonaticide, where a baby is killed on the first day of life, and fatal child abuse — were not included in the study.

The mothers interviewed were all in their 20s at the time the event took place and their children ranged from a few weeks to seven years. The time-frame of the killings ranged from one and a half years to 23 years from the event to the time of the interviews.

Most of the women killed one child, some more than one. The methods included stabbing, jumping with a child from a high place, setting fire to the house, attempted drowning and suffocation.

Simpson says it is important to understand that "they're not like most homicides, which tend to be necessarily an offence of viciousness. This is not. Generally, these women kill because they believe they're morally driven to do so, that it's vital. It's an extension of love, not an abdication of love. It's the illness distortion that results in the killing, not a vicious rejection of the child."

Tania Tokona spoke of "ghosts wanting her babies." Such delusions came through strongly in Simpson's and Stanton's research.

"I thought that the Devil was going to take [baby] in a cot death, that I had to save her and return her to the angels because if he took her she'd go to Purgatory, she'd be stuck there forever."

Most of the women were clear about having acted, at the time, in what they believed was in the best interests of their children. One mother describes the awful aftermath: "I sat down on the chair just holding her and just cuddling her and [the older child] was awake and I said,'I've got some sad news. I have just killed [baby.]

"When the police arrived they said, 'He's giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.'

"I said, 'Oh, no, you can't bring her back,' because I felt that all the good I'd done would be reversed."

One woman told of almost decapitating a child out of a sense of urgency, "to get it over quickly so that the child would not
suffer."

Another mother hesitated at the very threshold of the killing: "Once I started I couldn't leave her, to get, like once I started I couldn't ... I'd hurt her and I couldn't expect her to ever trust me again or anybody, so I had to finish killing her and, um, and then, um, then I rang the police."

Only one woman interviewed described the killing in a way which suggested a total lack of control over her actions: "And I stabbed and stabbed and my hand was coming again and again [demonstrates stabbing motions] and it wouldn't stop."

It is these human voices behind the tragedies that Stanton and Simpson set out to listen to. The experience, they hope, will help health professionals to better gauge what triggers such killings in a bid to prevent them and to help rehabilitate mothers who have already killed.

Simpson says one strong theme that came through the research was of "the need for help and a sense of risk in getting help. The risk is that, 'If I tell it like I fear it may be, maybe people will think I'm not fit to be a parent.' The huge importance of being a mother came through. It wasn't so much a role they wanted to get out of — quite the opposite."

As a mother, Stanton says, she could understand the desire and the pressures of attempting to be the best mother possible.

The women talked of "the efforts they had made to be a good mother ... of mincing steak instead of buying mince ... of playing with the child at home to make up for taking her shopping ... of choosing to stay at home rather than working."

As a psychiatrist, Stanton found it an interesting experience to hold interviews in a less formal situation than the usual doctor and client. She interviewed the women where they lived, whether that was at home or in care. "Listening to the women, they seemed much more human, much more understandable and relatable to."

Some of the women, described by Stanton as "missed cases," were anxious to not be seen as being mentally ill before the event. "It's a common impulse. People don't want to be seen not to be coping."

Others didn't recognise that they were ill. "For some of them, that was a huge leap when they got treatment. It was almost a relief to find that when they behaved like that it wasn't actually them in their normal selves."

Once you treat the illness, Simpson says, "the capacity to mother effectively may still well be there." (Some of the women have continued as parents, some have not. To protect identities these details are not given.)

None of the mothers had neglected or abused their children. They would have been seen, Stanton says, "as loving, conscientious parents. Their children were better cared for than my children were."

But the women saw a different picture of themselves — filtered through their illness — as mothers. Living in a world coloured the black of intense depression, such a world looked to many of them like a wrong place in which to bring up a child. A world, says Stanton, where, "If you really love your child you don't want that child to be in this world.

"You have specific delusions while believing that something terrible would happen to the child if the child were to stay alive. Which, if it was true, makes the act quite understandable."

It is an act which has a low rate of recidivism. The longest study, carried out over 50 years at Britain's Broadmoor Prison, found only one recidivist — a woman who later killed her husband. But as Stanton points out, it's a huge added burden to live with: "Parents will tell you when a child dies, for any reason, in a sense you never get over it. It's the added thing that you've done it yourself."

That terrible grief and loss leap off the pages of the study in two stark sentences: "If someone knocked on the door now and offered me my little son back I'd just be so happy. But [crying] they can't, you know."