-Self-absorption: They care only about they’re own personal pleasure. Their life, their relationships, their fun. The child is an after thought.

-Past history of abuse: History repeats itself as the saying goes. I see it all the time in my line of work. I take calls for a Medicaid HMO. The mom is call for the 14-15 year old daughter whose pregnant. You do the math the mom was 14 or 15 when she had her child. A lot times this comes from a bad, abusive, or lack of a relationship with one’s father.

-No self-worth: They put having a relationship as a high priority and they can’t bring themselves to end it. It’s the same with women who are abused themselves.

Did they sit there and watch while it was happening?

Did they suspect abuse before hand, but do nothing about it?

Not that it really matters. I was just wondering.

I'm sure there are a lot of reasons, but perhaps on reason is that the women themselves are victims of abuse and don't understand what a relationship is without abuse. I once worked with a girl like that. She never stayed in a relationship with a nice guy, and those that hit her (yes, she came to work with brusies on her face) she claimed she loved more than the world itself and couldn't leave them if her life depended on it.

Many of these mothers PARTICIPATED in the murder of the kids of all ages. Average age of about 4.

Some watched. Others claimed they were afraid (which I think is bull**** since a man has to sleep sometime) and any parent not willing to die for their kids is not worth the air they breathe in my outdated opinion.

Children who die from physical abuse often live in homes where there is domestic violence present. Domestic violence is terrorism, plain and simple. The entire point of the dominating agressor is to keep the spouse (and usually the children) in a constant state of terror. Each case has to be examined on its own merits, but oftentimes the woman is so terrorized she is not making the same rational judgements you and I might make. In addition, these women are often self-medicating the emotional pain with drugs and alcohol. It's a complicated situation to say the least.

An interesting aside... a close friend of mine works for the Oregon state women's correctional facility. Her observation - backed by statistics - is that 70% of women in prison suffer borderline personality disorder. Borderline personality disorder is often a direct result of child abuse.

Just as it is somewhat instinctive for male primates to kill the existing offspring of a newly aquired mate, it tends to be instinctive for a female to put off becoming a physically aggressive male's mate till she no longer has children she really wants to protect.

This may be a hard thing to face, but there are situations where females would genetically benefit from the elimination of weaker existing children in exchange for new children from a physically robust or otherwise desireable male.

In civilized society, we may call this behavior unacceptable and punish it. But that doesn't make it unnatural. This almost never happens in situations where the killer has not already accepted as a mate by the mother. Therefore terror is not the primary factor in this behavior. The simple truth is that it isn't always a genetic benefit for a mother to do everything that must be done if her existing children are to survive.

I would disagree with the statement that "The entire point of the dominating agressor is to keep the spouse (and usually the children) in a constant state of terror." There may be cases in which this occurs, but my own experience is quite different. The fear of violence in an abusive household is pervasive, but it is rarely brought to the point of terror. Besides, simple terrorism is never the point of domestic violence, or it wouldn't be domestic violence.

The point is control, and for that purpose terror is not desirable. The threat of violence is used in lieu of violence as much as possible. Occasional violence is necessary to lend credibility to the threat, so violence is "inherent in the system", so to speak. But while the morality of a disfunctional family may be argued, the fact remains that we rely on the same fundamental human dynamic for what we call "civilization".

A law is nothing more than a statement, backed by the occasional example, that a group of people will punish certain behaviors by resort to violence. Whether or not the laws are good or bad, and whatever you think of laws, there are no legal systems that are or ever have been based on anything else. And while there are plenty of social systems used by humans for various purposes, all human societies have a legal system in place. It is partly a matter of survival for societies that there be a system for punishing misbehavior, and partly because all humans naturally impose such systems on those around them unless a more powerful legal system prevents that.

You cannot escape from the fact that, as humans, you must choose a killer to give you law. While there are better and worse choices, it isn't unnatural that a significant number of women should choose the embodiment of law in the form their instinct recognizes, a physically strong and aggressive male. And, having chosen that male, will submit to his decisions even in the life and death of offspring.

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The fear of violence in an abusive household is pervasive, but it is rarely brought to the point of terror.

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I'm not sure how many victims of domestic violence you've counseled, or how many courtrooms you've sat in while petitioning for a restraining order, but I can tell you that each and every one of the women I worked with was in terror. I won't outline the graphic and grizzly things that happened to them. But the bottom line is that judges don't issue restraining orders unless the petitioner has a good reason to be in fear for their safety. You can't begin to comprehend how living in constant terror begins to unravel your sense of normalacy. A counselor I know who works with batterers equates domestic violence to a mountain range. He says the violent episodes are like snow-capped mountains - they stand out stark against the landscape; but the bulk of the mountainrange is made up of the extended foothills. Those are like the daily immersion in mental and emotional battering, tearing down your self-worth, sapping you of the will to live. Something snaps in you mentally when you are exposed to that sort of thing long term.

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Besides, simple terrorism is never the point of domestic violence, or it wouldn't be domestic violence.

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Within the field, there is an effort to change the phrase to "intimate partner violence." Domestic violence can be brother against brother, child against parent. Intimate Partner Violence is a description that more closely reflects the reality of the situation.

Most people have no concept of how pervasive this sort of violence is in our society. I only know statistics in the US, but one out of eight women have been physically or sexually assaulted by an intimate parter at some point in their life. That means the woman you stood next to in the grocery line at the store, a person you saw at church, someone in your family has experienced intimate partner violence. Young women ages 18-24 are at highest risk with the risk increasing with pregnancy. Men can also be victims, and while their numbers are underreported, women are by far more likely to be a victim.

You are quite correct about Power and Control. The way that a batterer gains power and control over the victim is by inducing a sense of fear. Yes, the victim becomes numb to it, but that doesn't mean the feeling is gone. It's just not crippling.

JB Scaggs' initial point in this thread was around women who allow children to be killed - who stand by and watch, or even participate. I'm not disputing the henious nature of that crime.

But I want to know why that should be any more henious than a father who chokes his daughter and her best friend to death and leaves their dead bodies in a park, or a dad who chops up his wife and unborn son's bodies and dumps them into a bay, or a man who bludgeons his children and leaves them for dead.

There is no "worse than" in these scenerios. They are all despicable. We have a stronger reaction when it's the mother who does it because it's more rare, not because it's more horrific.

You mostly have experience with women who are reacting to the aftermath of an unusually terrifying event. If they'd been terrified the whole time, that event wouldn't have been unusual enough to provoke a change in behavior.

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judges don't issue restraining orders unless the petitioner has a good reason to be in fear for their safety.

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I can't quite believe that our justice system, or any human system, is this perfect.

Anyway. I don't think a human being is capable of being terrified 24-7. Terrified a lot, yes.

There's something to looking to evolution and survival for general trends, but "letting a new man kill my child" is definitely not a general trend. There are things people do that definitely don't make evolutionary sense. Child abuse in general, for example. Remember the Child Called It? He could have died, and the mother's labor (both kinds) would have been for nothing, evolutionarily speaking. But she was compelled to hurt him.

Alice Miller's thought is that being abused, then not expressing it (because that would bring on guilt from accusing the parents), leads to a sort of callousness to oneself, and thus to others. Including one's own children. Which then causes more abuse, and the cycle repeats. Certainly when someone commits an atrocity -- or tolerates it -- there has to be a certain callousness. The woman in Rwanda who told the death squads where to find orphans. Nazi guards.

There might also be narcissism. Maybe momma thinks how awful it is that her new man is doing this, but it also makes her a victim, and there's something exciting about the role. I think there are plenty of parents (and non-parents) who are so All About Me that they really don't notice others except in so far as it affects them.

A father is duty bound to protect his children and wife. One who does not do so or even hurts them is scum. It is true that more men tend to be physically violent.

But In my research (and my on personal experience) I have dicovered that violent women are given far more time before the courts step in (and these instances are very rarely reported) and that many times the families (father, grandparents, uncles, etc) are in a race to save these kids from a dangerous mom. Many times with no help whatsoever from the courts or police.

In my case my ex-wife was arrested for attempted murder, assault and battery, and assault of a police officer. This was about the tenth incident- previously the police refused to make an arrest on her- it wasn't until they saw the knife she was weiiding and then attacked a police officer that they acted at all. Four weeks later all charges were dropped and she was awarded custody of the kids (even though there were twenty some odd witnesses, school teachers counselors, and pastors who told the courts she was a danger to the kids). The next five years was spent tracking her all over the united states moving coast to coast- she married a guy took his money and abandoned him. Abscombed with about a dozen distant family members money. The court finally got involved- why because one the children decided she had enough and told the police she wanted to live with her father. Until that point tens of thousands of dollars had been spent trying to save those children from mom's abusive boyfriends, druggie friends, living in cars, etc, etc.

My case is considered mild. There is a certain type of woman - very different from the average woman. Who will do everything in their power to keep their kids- and at the same time allow or even orchestrate their children's demise if not literally then emotionally. (my 13 yearold daughter decided toleave after her mother asked her to prostitute herself to her mom's friends- actually my daughter tried to hang herself first and when that failed finally got a hold of me-)