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1.    The crime of Filicide.  Spouse Revenge Filicide can be reduced, and in many years eliminated

Filicide is the killing of a child by their mother, father or step-parent. 

Fathers and step-fathers commit roughly half (say 12 Filicides) of the 25 circa Filicide murders each year across Australia over recent years.  Casual empiricism of the gory executions of children by fathers or step-fathers chronicled in Annexure A suggests that approx one third of those 12 circa Filicides committed by fathers or step-fathers annually (say 4 Filicides annually) fall within the category of Spouse Revenge Filicide where a parent or step-parent 'puts to death' a child, or children, to enact traumatic revenge upon their former spouse.

This Petition's goal is to materially reduce, and avoid in some future years, the four children circa that are executed annually by fathers or step-fathers with the intent to make their spouse suffer extreme mental anguish. Crucially, the severity of the afore-sought Sentence upon male 'child-executioners' that are judged to be a Spouse Revenge Filicide, will also reduce the frequency of the other Four Categories of Filicides, because learning of a few barbarous males that had executed their child, step-child or children, being savagely flogged and a week later hung by the neck until dead, would have a flow-on effect on other parents experiencing domestic anxiety -

a)       contemplating killing their child or children; or

b)       husbands/intimate partners committing Femicide. 

Section 4 evidences that humans habitually prioritise life over death, even if it requires accepting up to 20+ years Sentence in a tiny jail cell as Punishment for manslaughter, rather than contest a 1st Degree murder charge.  Ipso facto, the prospect of being Sentenced to hanging by the neck, a week after an painful infliction of Corporal Punishment will materially reduce all Five Categories of Filicide, as well as the incidence of Femicide.

Annexure B 'Filicide statistics - Australia since 2000' provides data (that supports the above average of 25 Filicide deaths across Australia annually) from -

*        Australian Institute of Criminology

*        academics and Monash University, including "An Overview of Filicide" - Sara G. West, MD 2007; and

*        journalists including "When parents kill" - ABC News - Hayley Gleeson - 22 March 2021

Below are details of nine children executed by their father (or step-father) in the last 3½ years that fall within the category of Spouse Revenge Filicide.  There has been at least one other similar Filicide murders in Australia since 2018:

1. On 19 Feb 2020 Hannah Clarke and her three young children were doused in petrol and burned alive by estranged husband, Rowan Baxter, in Brisbane.

2. 31 years old step-father, Justin Laurens Stein, has been charged with the murder of his step-daughter, 9 year old, Charlise Mutten, whose body was found in a barrel on the banks of the Colo River in Jan 2020.

3. In Sept 2018 then 24 years old, Anthony Robert Harvey, killed his two-year-old twins, Alice and Beatrix, his three-year-old, Charlotte, and his wife (their mother), Mara Lee Harvey, 41, at their Bedford home in Perth.  He killed grandmother, Beverley Ann Quinn, 73, when she visited the next morning.  Harvey used blunt objects and knives to slaughter his unsuspecting family. 

4. Step-father, John Edwards, shot dead his teenage step-children, Jennifer and Jack, in West Pennant Hills, Sydney in July 2018.  His actions followed a history of domestic abuse and separation, and ended in his ex-partner Olga’s death by suicide five months later.  A senior police source called her death a “slow murder”.

The above four recent Filicides involving the execution of nine young children are listed towards the top in Annexure A.

This Petition references a few eminent psychoanalyses of virtually every facet of Filicide that have followed the inaugural milestone research by Phillip Resnick MD, a Professor of Psychiatry at Cleveland, OH in 1969 'Child murder by parents: A psychiatric review of filicide'.  One such paper is An Overview of Filicide by Sara G. West, National Library of Medicine 2007. Perhaps the most poignant/pertinent word in Sara West's explanatory paper is the ultimate word in her final sentence of that paper.        

        "Filicide, tragically, is a permanent act, and the key to avoiding the devastating effects, for the perpetrator, the victim, and the community, is prevention."

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