Child killers: What causes one to murder their child?

On August 11, Eva Nagawa, was arrested in Abim District where she was found trying to register for a national identity card. It was alleged that the 26-year-old had killed her nine-year-old niece in Luweero District, after suspecting her of stealing Shs5,000. Her neighbours said she used an electric cable and a stick to batter the girl and when her niece collapsed and died, Nagawa fled. She was arrested after being on the run for a month and was charged with murder in the Chief’s Magistrate’s Court. She is currently on remand.
Nagawa is not the first person to be arrested over murdering a child. There have been many other sad and horrific tales of people, even parents murdering their own children. According to the Police Crime report 2014, 56 children were killed as a result of aggravated domestic violence. These are the ones that were reported to police. Many more go unreported.
Such stories send shivers down many spines. What would cause a man or woman to murder their own flesh and blood? What explains the killing of innocent children by the people who are supposed to protect them? According to Dr Irene Apio Wengi, a forensic psychiatrist at Butabika National Referral Hospital, most of these violent acts are perpetrated by family and peers.
“It is only in rare cases that a stranger will kill a child,” she says. Although such heinous acts may be too complex for the ordinary person to grasp, experts point out a few factors that might be responsible. These factors include genetics, comorbidity and the environment, among others.
“Most of the time, criminals plead not guilty on grounds of insanity and it stands in court. The reason why this is legally acceptable is because after they have gone through forensic psychiatry to examine them thoroughly, it is often discovered that the offender had some mental illness symptoms at the time they committed the crime,” Dr Wengi explains.
Consider a scenario where a 14-year-old beheads a classmate in retaliation for a childish prank. It sounds gruesome but it is true. According to Samuel Kimbowa, the occupational therapist at Butabika National Referral Hospital, the beheaded boy hid the school uniform of his would-be-murderer Smith Kisitu (names have been changed to protect his identity) but returned it to him after a while. Having identified the person who had played the prank on him, Kisitu went to the trading centre, bought a machete, had it sharpened and waited for the perfect moment to carry out his revenge. One morning, he spied his victim in the school library, went and picked his machete, entered the library calmly and with just one blow, separated the boy’s head from his shoulders and walked out again with enough composure to wipe the dripping machete in the grass so as not to stain himself with the blood of his victim.
When the child was taken to be assessed, Kimbowa discovered that Kisitu’s childhood had been fraught with parental neglect and extreme abuse which created in him a variety of mental problems, a situation experts refer to as comorbidity. Comorbidity is where an individual suffers from more than one disorder.
“Kisitu’s childhood formed violent, vengeful and an unrealistic sense of punishment triggers in him. Once these triggers were set off, he was unable to regulate his emotions thereby surrendering his logical reasoning over to emotional reasoning,” Kimbowa explains. To the casual observer the individual might appear ‘normal’ but beneath they have no control of the direction of their thoughts and actions.
Illnesses that lead to murder
Dr Wengi reveals that mental symptoms vary but the commonest that leads to child murders is postpartum psychosis. This is a spectrum of disorders with maternity blues at the mild end of the spectrum, depression in the middle and frank psychosis on the extreme end. This type of disorder usually affects women who have had babies in the recent two months.
Scientists say it is caused by the severe drop in reproductive hormones oestrogen and progesterone after the woman gives birth, causing an effect on the brain.
“A person experiencing maternity blues will experience tearfulness, restlessness, hopelessness, be irritable, and have tantrums; it lasts three to four days and goes away. Depression lasts longer than two weeks and they have suicidal and homicidal thoughts, are fatigued, have no appetite, and mood disorder symptoms. At the extreme end there is psychosis, where the woman starts getting delusions and hallucinations,” explains Dr Wengi.
She gives an example of a case of a patient who burned her three children to death in the house. During treatment the patient revealed that she was tired of her husband’s sexual advances that she perceived as rape. It was discovered that she had developed depression shortly before her marriage after she discovered that she was HIV positive.
“Although the husband knew about her status, he married her and had four children with her. The lovemaking was his way of expressing his devotion towards her but it made her extremely resentful,” Dr Wengi narrates. One day her husband found her admitted in Mulago hospital after taking an overdose of sleeping pills with the aim of committing suicide. Another time, she cut her wrists and was rushed to a clinic where they treated her wounds and sent her back home. “All these are textbook symptoms of depression; had someone thought of committing her into a psychiatric treatment programme, she would not have reached the extent of murdering her three children,” Dr Wengi notes.
The severely depressed mother of four, killed her children when one night she got a matchbox and lit the electric wires with the intention of killing herself and four children during a psychotic episode. At first she claimed that she had no idea how the fire had started but her 10-year-old son the other survivor, testified against her. He said that they had pleaded with her to let them out but she had refused to give them the keys. They struggled with her but she overpowered them. “The depression had altered her mindset and filled her with negativity, fear and resentment. She thought her husband would eventually abandon her to die a horrible death caused by HIV/Aids. With her death, the man would marry someone else who would mistreat her children, so killing her children and herself seemed like the only solution,” explains Dr Wengi. She is now serving a life sentence under the care of a psychiatric team in Luzira Maximum Prison.
Traumatic childhoods
For another young woman, being sexually molested as a child led her to kill her baby. When she was taken to Butabika hospital for assessment, it was discovered that her mother had allowed her brother to sexually assault her for a long time as a way of protecting him from contracting HIV. Whenever she got pregnant, they would get her to abort. Later, her father also started using her and the pattern of pregnancy and abortion followed. When she finally left home she became a serial abortionist until one child survived three attempts and was born. After the baby was born, she killed him and that is how she was arrested.
“She was severely depressed and delusional. To her, she was doing the baby a huge favour, saving him from living in an ugly world that had caused her nothing but pain,” the doctor explains.
“A person’s character and personality are fully formed by age seven and these personality traits remain with them throughout their lives. It is shaped through an interaction of two factors, genetics and their environment. You have probably heard people say, ‘that family has a bad temper’, or ‘that family is joyful’. That means that a parent can easily pass on aspects of their personality to their offspring,” Kimbowa says. He further explains that the type of parenting you had, whether loving or abusive, pampered or neglected also influences character.
In Kisitu’s case, his childhood was dominated by harsh conditions and severe punishment. “A child who comes from a home where they are starved, hung upside down on a tree and flogged till they bleed, for something as minor as forgetting to wash dishes after lunch will definitely have an unrealistic sense of punishment when their turn comes,” Kimbowa explains. These are things that Kisutu experienced in his childhood. Kimbowa recalls that Kisitu remained remorseless when questioned about killing a fellow child, stating that his victim deserved to die, until late into his treatment.
It is important to understand that there are no adult offenders, all violent traits form during childhood. A child who exhibits traits of defiance against authority, vindictiveness, manipulation, no remorse, violent and aggressive interaction with others, a propensity for violating social norms and drug use is most likely to become an adult offender.
Kimbowa says that if a person was severely abused as a child, they might be assimilated by society but live with triggers so close to the surface. Some of these triggers include societal factors like poverty. “It is not a mere coincidence that a majority of infanticide [crime of killing a child] and filicide [crime of killing one’s daughter or son] cases happen among the low-income earning bracket. The truth is that poverty puts a lot of stress on the brain leading to psychotic episodes that might include murders,” the therapist adds.
But poverty is not the cause for all cases, and in some instances, psychiatrists fail to find any illness to explain one’s actions. Last year, an 18-year-old murdered his two step sisters to get back at their mother who used to mistreat him. According to Dr Wengi, the boy followed the two teenage girls (13 and 15 years) to the well one afternoon, tied them on a tree, raped and strangled them to death. After ascertaining that the girls two were dead, he went home and told their mother to “go and see where your precious daughters are”. “As expected, everyone thought he must be insane. Otherwise where would a small bodied boy get the energy to carry out so much ugliness against two teenagers? They brought him here, when we assessed him for all psychiatric symptoms, we found that he did not have anything wrong with him. We discovered that he had what psychiatrists call mens rea,” Dr Wengi narrates. Mens rea refers to a guilty mind, where a person commits a crime knowingly, purposely or recklessly. Sometimes people just choose to commit murder.