filicide
Legal and criminological term for a parent killing their own child
Filicide is an international legal and criminological term for the killing of one's own child, where the perpetrator is the child's parent or a person in a parental role. The concept is not tied to the legal system of any one country, but is used across jurisdictions as a precise designation for this particular relationship between perpetrator and victim. The word covers killings committed by biological parents, but in a criminological sense it may also include stepparents, adoptive parents, foster parents and guardians — the decisive factor is the parental relationship rather than biological kinship. In the cases Krimidex covers under this entry, the perpetrators are parents who have killed their own biological children.
Filicide in itself says nothing about the perpetrator's motive, mental state at the time of the offence, or the specific criminal-law classification in the relevant jurisdiction. It is a descriptive categorisation of the nature of the crime, not a statement of degree of guilt or sentencing range. Questions of criminal responsibility, intent and any mitigating circumstances are determined separately in the national criminal proceedings.
In the cases referred to in Krimidex — including Andrea Yates, who in 2001 drowned her five children in Houston, Texas, and Lori Vallow, who was convicted of the killing of her two children in Idaho — filicide is used as the legal-criminological label for the factual content of the offence: that a parent has killed their own children. The Yates case raised particular questions about insanity as a ground for acquittal in criminal law, while the Vallow case involved religiously motivated beliefs. In both instances, the term filicide describes only the character of the act, independently of the underlying circumstances.
