AUSTRALIAN REPORT
Tanja Ludwig jumped to her death
from a cliff near Wollongong, south of
Sydney, with her two-year-old daughter
Tilly in her arms. She had recently
separated from her partner, but friends
said they noticed nothing amiss before
the tragedy happened. However, her
last Facebook post may have revealed
something about her state of mind.
“It’s OK not to be OK. We all need
support sometimes,” she wrote next
to a list of counselling services.
Distraught friends told reporters later
that they hoped Ludwig wouldn’t be
judged by her final, appalling act.
“It’s important that people realise
she’s not a monster,” Ludwig’s friend
Janae Johnston told the media. “She
was trying to help herself.”
Cries for help, particularly from
mothers struggling to cope, should
never, ever be ignored, as bereaved
father John Richards (not his real
name) knows only too well. Richards
had only four weeks with his newborn
son in 2008 before he was smothered
to death by his mother, who ultimately
avoided jail because of her mental
health. When he thinks back to the
events that led to that moment,
he can see the terrible storm of
circumstances that should have raised
alarm bells. His ex-wife had a family
history of mental illness, she had
suffered extensive childhood trauma
and complained repeatedly of not
feeling able to cope with her newborn.
But no-one intervened. Years after the
event, Richards thinks of the death of
his son with a resigned numbness.
“It’s very easy to blame the health
professionals, but they can’t
read minds,” he says.
Former detective chief
superintendent Russell
Wate, a leading expert on
child death investigations
in the UK, says that in his
country there are services
set up to better intervene
with mothers who may be
at risk of filicide. “Often
we think of mothers who
kill their children as
having a psychotic episode,
but it’s often more the
result of low moods,
something that a GP
would pick up rather than
a mental health worker,”
says Wate. In the UK,
new mothers are visited
regularly by health workers
until a child turns four. They are
trained to look for how mental health
concerns may be affecting the mother,
but also consider whether the children
in a mother’s care could be at risk.
“England has a much wider and
deeper range of services associated
with parents and children and they
have developed more concerted
plans for dealing with child/parent
problems,” Brown says. “Whereas here,
our geography means we have large
areas with few people living in them.
So you get an unavailability of – or
inaccessible – services. And then,
when dealing with the adult, [a service
provider] may not even recognise that
the adult presents a danger to a child.
If a mother is having psychiatric
treatment, it doesn’t occur to them
to ask, ‘Who is looking after her child?
Does she present a danger to the child
and should I be putting something in
place to protect that child?’ It seems to
have been something we’ve let drop off.”
In 2018, another Australian
mother nearly killed her entire family,
despite the fact that she had reached
out to a psychiatrist to make her
intentions clear. The unnamed woman
from Adelaide fed her four children,
who were aged between 10 and 17,
chocolate milk that had been laced
with sleeping tablets with the intention
of killing them and then herself. The
children reported “feeling funny and
strange, abnormal and slow” before
falling asleep, according to the judge
who heard the case and later sentenced
the mother to three years’ jail.
Mercifully, the woman changed her
mind and rang a friend to confess
what she’d done and the children wereNeonaticide is a form of
filicide that involves a
mother killing her newborn
child within 24 hours of
birth. It’s usually committed
by women who are in denial
about their pregnancy, often
because they’re young and
lacking support, or because
the pregnancy is the result
of violence, such as rape.
Quite often, the birth
happens at home and
the mother either kills her
infant or abandons it to
die on its own. It’s believed
many neonaticides are
never detected.
During 1991 to 2001,
there were 70 known
neonaticides in Austria.
Then, in 2001, an innovative
solution was implemented.
Every hospital in Austria
began to offer what is
known as ‘anonymous
births’. A pregnant woman
can go to a hospital and
give birth without revealing
her identity and leave her
baby to be adopted, or if
the birth happens at home,
she can drop her newborn
at a ‘baby hatch’, which is
equipped with alarms to
alert relevant community
services that a baby is there.
Between 2002 and 2009,
the country recorded just
19 neonaticides.
Associate professor
Claudia Klier, head of
paediatric psychosomatics
at the Medical University of
Vienna, thinks Australia’s
vast geography would make
baby hatches impractical,
but “all hospitals should
give women the option
of [an] anonymous birth”.Tanja Ludwig’s
two-year-old
daughter Tilly;
and Ludwig
(right).AUSTR I A’S
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