(^50) | marieclaire.com.au
I
n April this year, the woman
known as ‘Australia’s worst
female serial killer’ sat
quietly in a courtroom in
Sydney, waiting to testify at
a judicial inquiry that she and
her supporters hoped would
overturn her convictions for
the deaths of her four babies. In 2003,
Kathleen Folbigg was sentenced to a
minimum of 25 years’ jail for killing
Caleb, 19 days old, Patrick, four
months, Sarah, 10 months, and
Laura, 19 months, over a 10-year
period from 1989 to 1999.
Folbigg, who has always
maintained her innocence, wore a
neatly buttoned cardigan as she faced
a panel of lawyers and a bank of
reporters with laptops and notebooks
in hand. Now 52, her soft face was
framed with grey curls. At one point
she wept as she was cross-examined
about a collection of diaries that she
had kept during her children’s short
lives, and after their deaths. She wrote
of her “dark moods”, her feelings of
failure and her lack of support. “In my
most dangerous mood I’m not nice to
be around,” she wrote on July 6, 1997,
after her first three children had
already died, and a month before her
fourth and final child, Laura, would be
born. When pressed at the inquiry, she
insisted that she didn’t believe herself
to be a danger to her children, exactly,
but that she was simply depressed and
overwhelmed. “A dangerous mood to
me equals depression, but it does not
mean dangerous ... as in, dangerous.”
At the time of writing, the inquiry
had not handed down its findings
about whether or not Folbigg’s
convictions will stand. The hearing
produced little or no new evidence to
indicate that her babies had died from
anything other than her intervention,
even if it’s not entirely clear that
Folbigg herself remembers the
incidents. But the resurfacing of this
infamous 16-year-old case once again
threw the dark and upsetting issue of
filicide in Australia into the spotlight,
and posed the question: what, if
anything, have authorities done since
Folbigg’s four babies died to stop
similar tragedies happening again?
The answer appears to be
surprisingly little. In February
2019, the Australian Institute of
Criminology released new data
about the under-researched and
poorly understood crime
of filicide, where a parent
kills his or her own child.
Between 2000 and 2010,
the rates of filicide in
Australia have remained
unchanged, which is
shocking enough in itself,
but what is particularly
alarming is that mothers
are killing more than
fathers. A total of 284 children were
killed during this time by a parent or
a step-parent, the equivalent of about
one child every two weeks. Of those,
133 were killed by their mothers, and
81 were killed by their fathers, with
the remaining children killed by
stepfathers (it should be noted that
stepfathers are over-represented
considering they are a relatively
small group in the first place). And
because data collection is so poor,
and some filicides may be classified as
accidents or not known at all, this
may be the tip of the iceberg.
In the same period, other
developed countries including the
UK and Canada have seen their
rates of filicide drop significantly –
although variations in definitions
and data collection methods
make it difficult to draw precise
comparisons, and experts in
both countries are unclear about
which measures may have caused the
improvements. But what is clear is
that Australia is not doing enough.
“It’s very clear that we’re not attacking
the problem at all,” says Thea Brown,
professor emeritus and director of
the Monash/Deakin Filicide Research
Hub, who has been studying family
violence for 30 years. “There seems to
be a sort of lassitude and reluctance
to confront what’s happening.”
Before any problem can be solved,
the issue needs to be understood. And,
on that front, filicide poses a unique
set of challenges. It’s an extraordinarily
complex crime, with its causes and
motives varying from
case to case and any
prevention strategies
necessarily falling
across several agencies
and sectors. A mother
at risk of killing her
newborn because she
is suffering from
postnatal depression
requires a completely
different intervention strategy to a
father who murders an older child
during an impulsive, violent attack.
But we are currently letting down
Australian children in both of these
scenarios, and many others as well.
When it comes to mothers who
kill their children because of mental
health issues – whether postpartum
or later in the child’s life – we’re not
doing much better than we were when
Folbigg slipped through the cracks.
In May this year, 33-year-old
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT
Kathleen Folbigg at the
inquiry in April this year; her
former husband Craig Folbigg
speaking to the media after her
conviction in 2003; and the
evidence that led to Folbigg’s
conviction 16 years ago.
FOLBIGG WROTE
OF HER “DARK
MOODS”, HER
FEELINGS OF
FAILURE AND
HER LACK
OF SUPPORT
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