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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

What a few good women can do
On Mother's Day, a million mothers will march for gun control.
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
[03/13/00]

A child shoots a child
It isn't about guns; it's about neglect.
By Beth Broeker
[03/13/00]

My brother's keeper
I have saved him all my life, but now there are too many miles between me and the paraded condoms, the muffled awe.
By Chris Colin
[03/10/00]

"Terminus"
A harrowing poem about rape and murder in the Balkans.
By Nicholas Christopher
[03/09/00]

Witness for the persecution
Croatian novelist and journalist Slavenka Drakulic tells a story of breathtaking brutality. We interview her about her new novel and her experiences.
By Kate Moses
[03/09/00]

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Linda Langford, who analyzed underlying factors in five years of domestic homicides in Massachusetts as her doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, believes that some men -- particularly abusive or potentially abusive men -- see themselves as victimized by recent changes in traditional male and female roles.

"We are in a social transition from more fixed roles to more fluid rules," she says. "Women are gaining power in more generalized ways. People with more traditional values have a problem with that.

"There's a sense in which men's proprietaryness over women and their children is being challenged. The fact that women are gaining independence might send them into a greater panic. But it's not what anybody else does that makes them the way they are -- they are what they are, and they find excuses to justify their behavior."

And the excuses, if not for brutality then for collective outrage, are increasingly stated with barely concealed hostility, by certain men's groups and fathers' rights organizations, often on the Internet.

Hundreds of Web sites dedicated to fathers' rights openly blame the women's movement for their unjust oppression.The Fathers' Manifesto, for example, calls for the repeal of most family court decisions that grant custody and child support to women:

"The present feminist concept of women's 'independence' really means a government-enforced entitlement to be paid for the rewards of being a mother, without the responsibilities that go with it: to men, to children especially, and ultimately to the world at large," says the manifesto.

"We vow," it continues, "to remove all government involvement from family matters by the establishment of the father as the head of the family, under God."

It is when a man's control over his family is threatened that his rage can lead to murder. To be reminded of an intense dependency on a woman while losing control of her becomes an insurmountable emotional task, say experts. Acceptance is out of the question; reassertion of control, by whatever means necessary, becomes the alternative.

"It's 'I'm going to annihilate my family and myself, if this woman is going to leave. I'll kill her before I let her go,'" says Nancy Isaac, co-author with Langford of the Harvard study.

"Something that signifies the relationship is over -- that sparks a killing spree," says Mindy Mechanic, psychologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and an expert in post-traumatic stress in abused women. "They feel like they can't survive without the woman -- as though she's the lifeline. If you realize everything you have and want and need is unattainable to you, what do you have left?"

Children are not usually the primary targets. They might be substitute victims, if the woman isn't available; or they are seen as obstacles to the man's relationship with the woman; or they could be revenge victims, killed as a way of hurting the woman in the worst possible way.

"If you think about domestic abuse, it's a system of power and control," says Langford. "The children are a tool of that control."

And there is sometimes a perverted "Father Knows Best" element when a man slays his own children. The neatly typed note left by Barton before his murderous Atlanta rampage showed that he had persuaded himself that he was protecting his children by killing them.

"I killed the children to exchange them for five minutes of pain for a lifetime of pain. I forced myself to do it to keep them from suffering so much later. No mother, no father, no relations," he wrote.

(He "spared" them by bludgeoning them with a hammer in their beds.)

It's a form of "righteous slaughter," a concept spelled out by UCLA sociology professor Jack Katz in his book "Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil."

"When people do impassioned killings, they think they're doing something righteous by upholding some universal value," says Katz. "At that moment, they think that everyone would agree with the action they're taking."

David Adams of Emerge interviewed a man convicted of killing his estranged wife after luring her to their former home to watch videos with their children. The man made sure she had too much to drink, got her into bed and then, once she was asleep, bludgeoned her with a baseball bat and stabbed her in the neck.

Adams asked the man a series of questions, including whether he felt a woman who disobeys her husband deserves to be beaten.

"What if you believe she shouldn't be beaten, but she should be killed? the man asked.

"What do you mean?" asked Adams.

"I don't believe in hurting a woman -- that's why I waited for her to fall asleep," the man replied. "But I believe you should take the marriage vows seriously."

And, oh, yes, the man added, he'd had sex with her before he killed her. He knew the coroner would discover his semen inside her body. He wanted the man he suspected his wife was seeing to know that he, the estranged husband, had been the last to have her.

Next page | The numbers of women killing husbands and boyfriends have plummeted