Among recent reports of criminal cases, none generated more intense discussion than the tragic trial of a mother charged with murder. As it became a complex battle of experts, we engaged in the court’s painstaking scrutiny of the family dynamic. Watching it unfold, we all had our own ideas about the case.
A pivotal detail was the mother’s statement to police that one of her toddlers had been especially awful to her, so she’d killed that child first. Here was evidence of supreme irrationality. The notion that a 2-year-old could contrive to be horrible, by effort of will (as if recreationally or maliciously), was, in the colloquial sense, “insane”. And yet, in a reasonable decision, the jury rejected the legal defence of insanity or infanticide and found the mother guilty of murder.
If you could bear to think about it, and putting aside the complex legal and psychological dilemmas, the case provided insights into family dysfunction. You could speculate. What if the mother had quelled her homicidal impulses? What sorts of relationships would she have had with the children if they’d survived? She was described as conscientious, intelligent and a perfectionist. The children were beautifully cared for.
Would she have gone on presenting a perfect image, while asserting that the child who was especially horrible was a bad lot? Would she have enlisted others, including the other children, in that idea? This is not unheard of, as a type of covert abuse. Here’s an interesting detail: in a family with one problem child, if you successfully help that child, it’s not uncommon for the rest of the family to fall apart. Their system has depended on dumping negativity on that one, and when you disrupt it, they all lose their way.
Rationally, it’s impossible to extricate a 2-year-old’s designation as “awful” from the mother’s issues. The difficult child may have had the clearest perception that the mother was dangerous. Negative behaviour could arise from sadness, terror and rage. Perhaps the child’s appearance, or the fact the children seemed alienated ‒ too different ‒ was insulting to a perfectionist.
You could as easily call the “terrible twos” a parental phase, since parents’ reactions to a child’s growing autonomy can range from easy-going to terrible. Families are as complex as societies. It shows how superficial it is to ignore evidence, and to insist on platitudinous surface definitions. It’s as simplistic to say, “You came from the same family, so you must have had the same experience,” as it is to say, “You’re from the same society, so your life must be the same.”
Children are shaped by their interactions with the world. Personalities are malleable. Some badly behaved children end up completely law-abiding, but they require help with that. They don’t need adult hysteria and harsh punishment.
It’s this complex interconnectedness that makes the government’s proposed ram-raid bill especially problematic. Attorney-General David Parker has described the legislation as a potential violation of the rights of the child. It introduces a new offence of ram-raiding, punishable by up to 10 years in jail, applicable to 12- and 13-year-olds. As Parker has pointed out, children this age lack the capacity for abstract reasoning, and a welfare-based approach is more suitable.
Funnelling children into the criminal justice system is surely populist, shortsighted and counterproductive. It’s as irrational and dysfunctional as designating a 2-year-old “bad”.
Perhaps we should start regarding all children as ours. If the community’s problem children are behaving badly, we should wonder if our collective system plays a part in their alienation and distress. We need to find humane solutions and live up to our own adult social responsibility.
