Mothers never harm their children, do they?

I have included this story below, because so often in the media we find that when mothers kill their children, the first response is to label them as mentally ill, whereas a father charged with similar crime is damned for his actions.

The women is "placed in psychiatric care", while a father charged with a similar crime would be in a prison. When women engage in violent acts it is seen as out of place and the media is often quick to justify their actions by pointing out how they were abused, mentally ill, or a vicitim etc.

Society has difficulty accepting that mothers are anything but pure and caring, stories like the one below challenge this perspective and thus in my attempt to bust the "gender myths" I have included it. Because as the great feminist catch cry goes "woman can do anything" including being great mothers, outstanding leaders and child killers.

Both men and women are capable of reprehensible acts, but when gender myths suggest that it is only a man's domain I feel compelled to provide some evidence to undermine this belief.



German police find five dead boys in house

By Erik Kirschbaum in Berlin | December 06, 2007

FIVE boys between the ages of three and nine have been found dead in a house in the northern German village of Darry today.

Their 31-year-old mother has been detained on suspicion of involvement in the "violent" deaths of the children and has been placed in psychiatric care, police said.

"Based on preliminary investigation the motive appears to be a psychiatric illness of the woman," police in the northern city of Kiel said.

Police said they were still investigating and would not make any further comment. Darry, a town of 450 residents, is 40km east of Kiel, near the Baltic Sea.

The mother had turned herself into police, the NDR 1 Welle Nord radio network reported, saying she had drugged the five boys before suffocating them with plastic bags.

Teachers at the local school had notified the youth welfare office about the run-down appearance of two of the boys, who had come to school without coats, Spiegel Online reported.

It said workers from the local youth welfare office planned to visit the family today.

In a separate crime earlier today in another part of Germany, police said they found a third corpse of an infant girl wrapped in a plastic bag on the balcony of a 28-year-old woman arrested last week.

Police in the eastern town of Plauen said the woman said she gave birth to the girls in February 2002, January 2004 and September 2005, and that they had died suddenly.

The bodies of two other girls were found in a suitcase and a freezer.

The woman was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter.

Police said the woman, who has two other children aged one and seven, denied killing the girls.

Police began investigating when the girl born in 2002 did not report for school registration.

They found her corpse in a suitcase stored in a basement, and then they found the second corpse in a freezer before making today's discovery.

The cases follows the starvation death of a 5-year-old girl last month in the eastern town of Schwerin.

Also, in 2006, a woman was jailed for 15 years for killing her eight newborn babies. The remains of the babies were found wrapped in plastic bags and buried in flower pots, buckets and a fish tank on her property.