Tuesday evening students, faculty, and interested adults filled McCord Auditorium in Dallas Hall to attend a lecture, “When the Bough Breaks: Parents who Kill Their Children” given by Jill E. Korbin, Ph.D. As associate dean and professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, Korbin received the coveted Margaret Mead Award in 1986 from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology amongst many others and has numerous publications.
A part of the Sixth Annual George and Mary Foster Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology, Korbin opened her lecture saying, “This is not the easiest of topics to discuss.” She was right. Her lecture not only raised numerous questions from interested audience members who have previous knowledge about this topic, but it impacted everyone.
A shocking fact Korbin referred to in her lecture was “Child maltreatment fatalities are the fourth leading cause of death for children under four years of age.”
Korbin presented her findings about the “maltreatment of children” by using her case study. Her study focused on women who were in prison for killing their children by abuse and neglect. This lecture deeply impacted its audience members because these women in prison are real-life cases of killing their children through abuse and neglect. As Korbin reports, these women “thought they were good mothers and want to be mothers after they got out of jail,” Korbin emphasized with objectivity.
“I spent a year with these women who were at the bottom rung of prison society… I talked with them and heard their view points,” Korbin said. “In prison, everyone called them ‘baby killers,’ even the staff.”
After developing a report about these women, Korbin remembers reading their criminal records for the first time. “Seeing the record in black and white, what these women really did was difficult for me after talking to them,” Korbin continues, I was just “trying to make sense of what happened.”
After spending time studying and conversing with the women who maltreated their children to the point of killing them, Korbin created a framework for her case study of the prison women. She referenced this framework numerous times throughout the lecture when she described how difficult it becomes to intervene with people who maltreat their children.
Korbin’s framework included a major factor in the continuous abuse and neglect of children in these maltreatment situations. She defines it as a “continuous cycle of abuse, signal, and denial.” Therefore, the abuse occurs and then the “mother who abused the child will tell someone what she did … this is a plea for help … a signal,” Korbin stated. Then the people who surround the mother remain in denial and never intervene. Once this cycle has begun it is difficult to stop because intervention does not always work.
Three main reasons presented by Korbin, why intervention does not work are as follows. The first is that intervention “is not always a straight forward matter. Primarily because women abusers can be defensive, and thus friends and family are geared to be supportive.” This leads into the cycle once again, denial to more abuse. Secondly, intervention is not always successful because it is difficult to get support from a child protection agency or social services. These organizations require a lot of time and paperwork and are not always effective.
Another major problem that escapes society today is the networks that these abusive mothers are involved with. Korbin indicates that, “women abusers have bad networks where abuse and neglect occurs so no one is in the position to be helpful.” Therefore, this cycle of abuse and neglect that can lead to fatality continues to cycle through these families’ lives.
Korbin remarks, “As a society we sort of let things fall through the cracks… we are all to blame” for these bad networks. If people in society paid more attention, then they could potentially “stop this cycle of violence,” Korbin asserted. Korbin advises her audience about “what we should do.” She reminds the audience “to make better efforts to identify and intervene with high-risk parents.” We need to “scrutinize children’s well-being and be collective about it.” Korbin’s last point reminds the audience that society at large needs to “provide universal support to parents… making better efforts to help prevent this cycle.”
In order to do this, Korbin proposes that we “need to devote natural resources which will be expensive but cost effective.” This message gives a real example of how society and our government are now looking more deeply into issues of child maltreatment inflicted by parents.
She concluded her lecture by reminding her audience that child abuse “is not a minor issue.”
“These high-profile cases are not unique and are not the only ones,” Korbin said.
