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Annexure B  -  Filicide statistics  -  Australia since 2000

Below is an extract from When parents kill - ABC News  - Hayley Gleeson  -  22 Mar 2021

"Filicide is the killing of a child by their mother, father or step-parent.  It is not as rare as some might imagine, with about 25 children are killed by parents every year in Australia, or one child almost every two weeks. Still, it’s a poorly understood phenomenon partly because it’s so complex: filicide isn’t as common as some other kinds of homicide and no two cases are exactly alike, meaning it can be hard to pin down patterns and perpetrator motivations."

Filicide in Australia, 2000-2012: A National Study‘ shows:

(a)        Filicide rates were not declining, but were stable in the 12-year period to end-2012 when 284 victims were killed by a parent or parent equivalent (such as a step-parent) and 274 victims were children under 18.  While the youngest children (under 4) are the most vulnerable, children remain victims throughout their school life and afterwards. The major categories of perpetrators were mothers, fathers, mothers and fathers acting together, step-fathers and step-fathers and mothers acting together. Step-fathers were disproportionately represented.

(b)        In the 12 years from 2000 to 2012 there were 284 victims of filicide, averaging 24 filicide victims each year.  Victims aged less than 18 years (n=274) comprised 96 percent of all filicide fatalities.

(c)        There were 238 incidents of filicide in Australia involving the death of 284 children

Femicide Australia Project research shows 108 adult men, 48 adult women and 17 children and young people were killed due to domestic violence in 2017. 

Australian Institute of Criminology reported that over the two years from 1 Jan 2012 to 31 Dec 2013 -

*        99 females died from intimate partner homicide; and

*        42 children aged 17 years and younger were killed due to domestic family violence.    .

The Monash University Filicide Research Project investigated filicide deaths that occurred in Victoria between 2000 and 2009. Fifty-two children were identified as being killed in the state over that 10-year period.

45 children were killed by parents in Victoria in 11 years to 2020.  The population of Australia in 2020 was 25.7 mil.  The population of Vic in 2020 was 6.69 mil, being 26%.  That extrapolates to 173 filicides across Australia over the 11 years to 2020, or 15.7 filicides each year across Australia, being well over one filicide each month..

A woman is still being killed each week in Australia.  We need federal leadership - The Guardian - Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Marie Segrave - 1 Mar 2021

"An Australian national study (Brown et al., 2019 examined 238 filicides between 2000 and 2012, and their findings were similar in a number of ways to the US study cited. The authors reported that filicide accounted for 7% of all homicide incidents, and the median offender age was 32 years. .A similar portion of fathers and mothers offended. Most victims were under 5 years of age, but only 4% of their victims were adults."

Cause of death was broad in scope: 

  • beating (24%),

  • strangulation/suffocation (14%),

  • stab wound (12%),

  • drowning/submersion (10%),

  • poisoning/injection (8%),

  • shaken baby syndrome (8%), and

  • gun shot wound (6%).

 

 

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