| Abstract: | The focus of this paper is on men who murder children. The dataare drawn from a larger study of Murder in Britain,1 which examinedall types of murder and included data from a total sample of866 case files of both men and women convicted of murder andserving a life sentence in England or Scotland. This analysisis based on a subset of ninety cases of men convicted of themurder of a child. Two types of child murder are compared: menwho kill children within the family (FM, n = 49) and men whomurder children outside the family context (NFM, n = 41). Thetwo types of murder are compared in terms of the childhood andfamily backgrounds of the perpetrator, the circumstances atthe time of the murder and elements of the murder event itself.The main findings reveal many significant differences betweenthe two groups of perpetrators, indicating a need for more nuancedpolicy and practice responses to the murder of children. |
