Bad Santa. No, I mean REALLY Bad.

[DanaC]

If circumstance and motive are irrelevent, then it shouldn't matter whether it's the mother or the father, it should offend you no more or less.

Personally I think circumstance and motive are very relevant. It might not be relevant for the person who died. But then again the justice system (as indeed our burial rites) are not there for the dead, they're there for the living, us. Some murders are both a fatal attack on an individual, and a violent attack against a larger group, or against the things we as a society hold dear. Hence 'hate crimes'. Matters not one jot to the person who dies that they were killed for the colour of their skin, but it matters to us. To our society. The actual murder is not different. It's more like there's also an auxillary, more general crime against wider society.

From what he's argued, I gather that Radar doesn't think it matters why someone kills, only that they have killed. I think it matters why. A crime of passion is not the same as a sociopathic murder, nor a political assassination, nor a murder for financial gain. All those things are different.

By that logic some murders are more offensive than others. Personally, I am far less 'offended' by the father who kills his child out of a misguided but altruistic desire to save that child from something. The ones who have decided to kill themselves and think it kinder to take the family with them. They're utterly tragic. Usually not in a sane state of mind. That to me is deeply sad. But it doesn't offend me the way the jealous father does. The one that kills his children to punish his estranged wife, for instance. The one that kills his family because if he can't have them, nobody can.

It's not about the gender of the killer. It's about motives and reason. But the figures seem to suggest that the parent murdering purely for selfish concerns is more likely to be male. Mothers who kill are usually mentally disturbed. A parent (male or female) who knowngly and logically plans and carries out the murder of their own child is far more offensive to me than someone who lost the plot and did something terrible whilst they were not mentally competant.