The data that informs Alexandra Topping and Jessica Murray’s reporting this week is gleaned from the 2,000 Women report, conducted by the Femicide Census. The fact that women are sometimes killed by their sons will not be news to experts in the field – but even they may not know the frequency with which it is happening.
“If you work in domestic abuse settings, you know about the abuse of older women,” Alexandra said. “It wouldn’t be entirely surprising. But nearly one in 10 murders of women by men being sons killing mothers – I think the extent of it would shock even those in the sector.”
Why is this happening?
“The data shows us that mental health problems play a big part,” Alexandra said – 58% of cases analysed in the report, and 70% of cases where women were killed by their sons and grandsons in a linked academic study to be published soon. “But in a lot of cases, these are women who have gone to the authorities with their fears. One thing that really stood out to me is the cases where a mental health problem has been identified, and there may be an order in place that a young man can’t have contact with other women – but he can continue to have contact with his mother, and no risk assessment is done.”
Another bleak social factor appears to be the increase in the numbers of young men living at home well into adulthood. “That is often because of a lack of affordable housing,” Alexandra said. “We see cases where that puts more pressure on family dynamics, and also means that mothers are just living in closer proximity to their sons.
“What is also fundamentally true is that these killings cannot be treated in isolation. And even in many cases where mental health is a factor, the same thing is at the root of sons killing mothers or intimate partners, and that is misogyny.”
How does this change our understanding of femicide in the UK?
Before the Femicide Census started gathering data on the killing of women by men in 2015, there was very little data available on the circumstances of these cases. As the project’s founders Karen Ingala Smith and Clarissa O’Callaghan write here: “By collating femicides, we can see that these killings are not isolated incidents, and many follow repeated patterns.”
There is now a growing body of research. But even as the data has been developed, the particular issues of sons killing mothers, and of older women being killed by men, has been poorly understood. The new report helps address that gap.
“It’s really a hidden problem,” Alexandra said. “The experts say that we don’t know enough about this in part because it’s a subject shrouded in shame: women being abused by their sons may not feel able to reach out for help. Or it may be that the help simply isn’t there. You can’t provide the support unless you know the problem exists, and these statistics aren’t available anywhere else.”
Aren’t fathers just as likely to be killed?
It is true that fathers and mothers are killed by their children in roughly similar numbers – but that fact masks some crucial points that lend weight to the case that this is a specifically misogynist problem. First, there is the fact that in the overwhelming majority of both types of case, the killer is a man. “There is no shortage of daughters suffering mental health problems, but they are vanishingly unlikely to murder a parent,” Alexandra said.
Second, there is the fact that matricide makes up a much larger proportion of all killings of women than patricide does of killings of men – and while that is partly because more men are killed overall, it is also true that those cases are much more likely to be in violent altercations: women are much more likely to be killed because they are women.
Third, there is the grim fact that mothers are more likely than fathers to be the victims of “overkilling” – that is, extreme attacks where the level of violence used is significantly in excess of what would be necessary to cause death. And finally, the cases of fathers being killed are more frequently linked to childhood abuse.
How does the system deal with these cases?
