Family annihilations have been on the rise over the last fifteen years. It’s not a topic that gets much attention, which is surprising, considering how shocking and sensational such a thing is. And I have to wonder, is that because the public (or rather the vast majority of the people who make it up) expect or even accept the concept?
The term is self-explanatory. Someone annihilates their entire family. We’re not talking about a mob hit or an act of domestic terrorism from someone outside the family unit. We’re talking about wholesale destruction and obliteration from within. Nearly without fail, the person who perpetuates this crime is the father/stepfather/boyfriend. When it’s not the father, then it’s probably the son.
The reason we know the name Lizzie Borden is that it’s never the daughter and almost never the mother, hence making that a notable case. (There are also some great arguments against that slaughter having been at the hands of Lizzie, if you want to read up.)
Not everything is a matter of sex, of men v. women, but one gender definitely has a monopoly on this particular variety of atrocity. But why?
The woman who drowns her kids is a trope that Western media loves. Really, any patriarchal society has reason to prop it up, because not only can it be weaponized to falsely parallel women who don’t want children with full-on murderers and make child-free women look like they might have moral deficiency bordering on criminality, but it serves as a perfect deflection for those who want to point out and, god forbid, talk about the alarming trend of men murdering their families. “But women do it too!”
Ah yes, we love a good false equivalency.
But putting those few, often dubiously sourced, and bad-faith examples of female family annihilators aside, we need to talk about what’s happening here.
Because at the heart of it, we find the quintessential patriarchal contradiction.
Family annihilations almost always end with the perpetrator killing himself, but in those few times when that’s not the case and investigators and psychologists can speak with him about why he did it, an alarming trend of justification begins to emerge: he believes he was shielding his victims from something worse.
What something could be worse than those last moments of terror his family felt when he assassinated them in the living room or shot them one by one in their beds while the last in line might have known he was coming but been unable to escape? What something could be worse than having the man who swore to protect you being the one who took your life? What something could be worse than those final seconds and the bitter realization of betrayal and confusion followed by a moment of pain then a future erased?
We actually know the answer to that, at least according to the interviews. Quite often, the thing the man was “shielding” his family from was his own sense of shame. That could be financial shame—he’s lost all his money or a con he was running got found out—or social shame—maybe an infidelity was about to be exposed. It could be anything that might make him feel bad. And rather than dealing with those feelings, he fed himself a lie until he bought it that his shame would also be felt by his family, and they would rather die than feel that vicarious shame. He wasn’t protecting them at all; he was always protecting his own ego. No shocker there for the emotionally literate.
Another common motive? His partner was planning to leave and take the children with her. In this case, he’s somehow justified the logic of “if I can’t have them then no one can” as validation for mass murder. What idea or system of ideas could possibly lead someone to believe there’s anything heroic about any of those justifications?
Because these men want to think of themselves as the hero. We all do, to some extent. Or at least, they probably don’t want to believe they’re the villain. Perhaps it’s the thin veil of pretense being pulled back after the murders that leads to this situation ending so often in suicide, but unless the perpetrators leave a note, we’ll never know.
Kate Manne talks about this concept in brutal and frank detail in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, but I really want to hone in on it briefly, because it’s just so important for everyone to see through. Until we reach a tipping point of people who understand the perverse logic that operates at all levels of our society, women and children will continue to be murdered by men in their family.
“But women murder people in their family too!”
If that’s where your brain goes every time I mention men murdering their family, I want you to pause and ask why. Why does a focus on male homicide make you want to deflect? Who trained you to protect that reputation at the cost of ignoring the statistics?
In 2020, out of 11,635 murders in the United States, 8,977 were committed by men, 1,320 were committed by women, and 1,338 were committed by an unknown subject. If we assume that the unknown subjects breaks down proportionally to the known subjects (it’s sound statistical analysis, don’t worry), then that would mean that men murdered 10,143 people and women murdered 1,447 people. To sum up, 87% of all homicides in 2020 were committed by men. Can you imagine if that was switched? Can you imagine if, in our society, 87% of murders were committed by women?
We’re having our rights stripped enough these days as it is. I can’t imagine we would be allowed to even leave the house if those were the crime statistics.
But we accept it in men. Maybe not you individually—and I certainly don’t—but as a society, we absolutely do. If we didn’t, we would be having more conversations about that and fewer about women’s bodies, bizarre hypotheticals about nonexistent voter fraud, and why guns are a man’s god-given right to own even as he uses them to murder his family.
So, please, no one try to tell me we don’t accept it, because we very much do, and that’s because all of us are filled with the silent scripts that come into play in the days leading up to a family annihilation. Never has it been cleared that men in this country feel entitled to women’s bodies. And children’s, too (looking at you Catholic Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, USA Gymnastics, US border detention centers, and Boy Scouts of America). If it hadn’t been for a few people sounding the alarm and not letting up about the abuse, the systems in place would have kept allowing it to happen.
Because they were built for that.
Let that sink in.
The status quo is and has been for as long as Western Civilization has been around, to let abuse happen to women and children. So long as the perpetrators are men, you let it slide. They probably knew best, right?
I live in my little feminist bubble, no doubt. Can you blame me? I don’t especially want to be around people who don’t believe I’m an equal to men and entitled to the same freedom of choice as someone with male sex organs. Why would I?
But the result is that it’s always shocking to me when I hear someone defending the patriarchy. I forget those people exist. “Men need to be in charge because we are the protectors.”
When? When exactly are men the protectors, and more importantly, from whom?
Men protect this country abroad. Okay, but women weren’t allowed to serve in combat until recently. Maybe that’s why.
A man protects his family. From who? I know plenty of single mothers who manage to keep their children safe. And how many times have fathers blamed their daughters after finding out they were raped? Why would girls and boys so often not want their fathers to know about their victimization?
And what about family annihilations?
Marriage to a cop has made it crystal clear who most families need protection from, and it’s not an outside force. It’s not the boogyman, it’s not the government, and it’s not Satan. It’s the abusive boyfriend, the abusive father, the man who feels entitled to the bodies of those he claims to protect. So entitled, that the mere prospect of having to face them in a state of shame justifies murder in his mind.
These ideas are so sick and so twisted, and yet they’re everywhere and in everything—corporate culture, every level of government, public spaces, school, church—literally anywhere other people can be found.
We want to slice off the visibly rotten part of society that is family annihilation and say, “That’s separate from everything else, it’s an anomaly,” but the rot runs through everything and is only most sharply manifested in that spectacle.
So maybe that’s why we don’t talk about it. Just like we don’t talk about how almost every shocking mass shooting that’s hit the media in the last twenty years has started with the murder or extreme physical abuse of a female relative or partner. We’re worried how much more we’d have to talk about if we picked up that thread of the conversation and pulled. We’d have to examine our complicity in allowing male violence and entitlement to others to be the default in every system. So instead, when someone like me brings up something like the epidemic of male violence, inevitably the chorus chimes in with their tired old tune to spare possible hurt feelings:
“Not all men.”
No shit, Sherlock. Not all men, but still too fucking many.
If you want a truly haunting peek into the real life consequences of this sick mindset, watch American Murder on Netflix. It’s one of the most disturbing true crime documentaries I’ve ever seen.