Autism and filicide

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I found a couple of studies suggesting that about half of all victims of filicide are autistic.

I can't find one of them now, but here's filicide-suicides: http://jcn.sagepub.com/content/28/6/745.abstract

(n.b. a large number of filicide victims are too young to be diagnosed. Remove them from the analysis and the percentage rises further, but the raw numbers are more important)

Given the large number of filicides (I have seen estimates ranging from 500 to 1000 - here's the lower end: https://news.brown.edu/articles/2014/02/filicide ), it would seem at least 250 autistic people are killed by their parents every year in the United States alone. For comparison, about 100 black people are killed by the police every year. It's a staggering number. The sites that attempt to document every case don't get close, probably because most cases don't get media attention.

It's so staggering that I would really like some more data. Does anyone have any more data about the percentage of filicides involving an autistic child, or even better, the raw numbers?

Last edited by The_Walrus on 29 Nov 2014, 8:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Holy cow, that's an absurdly high number!

Those high numbers almost made me lose my dinner.

Not a surprising result at all. People are selfish and they don't want to deal with the problems of raising an autistic child. So, they go down the easy road and blame the child for being born that way and saying that they are doing them a favour.

OK, here's a provisional infographic:

https://infogr.am/filicide-of-autistic-children

I really hope these ridiculously high numbers are due to poor data, but I don't think better data is likely to bring them down much

(For the interested, I calculated the number of autistic people killed by their parents by taking the proportion of Californian murder-"suicides" where the child was diagnosed autistic - 54% - and multiplying by the annual number of filicides across the whole US. Obviously this is not ideal but it is the best that can be done with the current data)

A horrible but interesting subject. I believe the figure and will read more about it.

This is why we should dump our TV's.

The TV is a distorting lens and nothing else.

I saw a video of an autistic kid acting out, I can imagine how that would cause a lot of stress but I didnt know it lead to murder.

Disturbing.

thank you The Walrus for telling us

That is horrific beyond comprehension.

Not only that, but check out other statistics on similar subjects. On other posts I have mentioned statistics concerning child abuse. And guess what... children with disabilities face more abuse. From emotional abuse to medical negligence. Out of the disabled children, one of the larger groups facing abuse is... you guessed it... autistic children.

And why are 81% of all filicide victims male?
And only 30% of the perpetrators have been verified with having a mental illness!! !

I have noticed a mistake in the infographic. The title says "children", but actually it includes parental murders of adult offspring, so that could be misleading.

I just found this article that talks about the subject of Autism and filicide:

http://www.science20.com/science_autism ... al_illness

This is an extremely interesting article.

The conclusion that stands out for me is the differential impact of various parental coping skills. I think it suggests that parents should be trained in coping skills, and recognizing effective and ineffective mechanisms should be part of that.

This study clearly refutes the simplistic idea that is often raised in support of murdering parents that the severity of their child's symptoms somehow pushed them to their crimes.

Is anyone here good at calculating appropriate relative risks?

I tried to calculate a few but I don't know if they're relevant.

- The risk of an autistic person being killed by their parents relative to an NT is about 101 times. I had trouble calculating the Confidence Intervals due to the large size of the control group, but the lower boundary is at least 85 times.
- The risk of an autistic person being killed by their parents relative to the risk of a black person being killed by the police is about 27.85 times (95% chance that the interval 22.55 to 34.41 contains the true relative risk - note that this assumes the previously calculated numbers are correct. If only 1 in 20 police killings are recorded then the risk is only about 1.4 times)

The upper one seems most relevant but the confidence interval is pretty wide. Do we need more data to be able to use it appropriately? Or is the rarity of filicide of NT children an issue?

The latter one - is it inappropriate to compare two different risks in this way?

Among the set of children under 8 who get murdered- 61 percent of the time- the murderers are the parents.

Since the perps are usually the parents-when the victim is that young- its to be expected that children with inborn handicaps would be a high proportion of the victims.

So that isnt really surprising.