When fathers kill their children: Evidence of a troubled society

A family album photo of five children killed by their father following a
domestic quarrel in Kuresoi. Mr John Kiprono Kirui, (father), who also injured his wife, Betty, killed himself.

What you need to know:

  • We could go on and on and on to chronicle this grinding catalogue of madness, but the point has already been made: man, though designed by nature to be protector, is quickly turning annihilator. But, why?
  • The Guardian newspaper editor Mark Townsend sees it as a masculinity crisis, but psychiatrists and psychologists think Mukobero, Kiprono and Aluda represent the growing tribe of criminal minds branded as ‘family annihilators’.
  • And while mental illness and other neurological problems may be a plausible explanation, Dr Achar Muga, a Nakuru-based counselling pyschologist, has a revealing explanation: murderers of this kind are made, not born.

Whether a father, husband, brother, son or whatever role a man assumes in the society, he is the protector, the provider, the armour on which all forms of danger fall before they get to his family.

That is why when he turns on the very people he has religiously taken care of, the society is shaken to the core as it wonders what could make him abandon his traditional role to star as a villain in blood-curdling family carnage.

Yet it happens. A lot.

On the chilly evening of April 29, 2001, for instance, Jamin Mukobero, described by those who knew him as kind and gentle, picked up a machete and hacked his expectant wife Susan to death.

Then he dashed into a nearby hut where their three sons had hidden in terror and killed them before descending on four other members of their family, bringing the total of his victims to nine.

Yet this murderous man was, at least in the eyes of his brother, “hardworking, kind and generous.”

He was not a lone species though. Months later, John Kiprono Kirui, a 47-year-old farmer, also hacked his five children to death before committing suicide after a domestic quarrel at their home in Kuresoi, Nakuru County.

Earlier this month, a labourer collected his eight-month-old daughter from the hospital on the pretence that he was taking her to a better facility only to bury the infant alive in the full glare of his seven-year-old son.

And only recently, Gerishom Aluda, 35, locked himself, his wife and three children inside their grass-thatched house in the Vindizi village of Vihiga County and set it on fire.

We could go on and on and on to chronicle this grinding catalogue of madness, but the point has already been made: man, though designed by nature to be protector, is quickly turning annihilator. But, why?

The Guardian newspaper editor Mark Townsend sees it as a masculinity crisis, but psychiatrists and psychologists think Mukobero, Kiprono and Aluda represent the growing tribe of criminal minds branded as ‘family annihilators’.

The term, first used in 1986 by famed American forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, describes fathers who kill their children, and frequently their wives as well.

And while mental illness and other neurological problems may be a plausible explanation, Dr Achar Muga, a Nakuru-based counselling pyschologist, has a revealing explanation: murderers of this kind are made, not born.

According to Dr Achar, the social institution within which family annihilation takes place exists alongside the economy, education, polity and religion in the framework of the modern society.

The pressure that has been exerted on the man in these difficult times has left him heartbroken, depressed and beaten down that even a little disappointment can drive him to that murderous rage.

Ninety-five per cent of family annihilators are male and share similar traits that place them on lower social cadres in the society: they are underemployed, undereducated and from modest socio-economic backgrounds.

Dr Achar adds: “Despite their disadvantaged economic situations, these men are usually the seniormost in their households and a little failure on their part is sneered upon as no one wants to listen or understand their difficult lives.”

The patrilineal African society has asked so much of the man and given him so little in return, brewing a deep sense of entitlement from him.

Setting mental illness aside, all studies querying what drives these men must bring into context the way in which they have constructed their sense of ‘self’.

Unlike the mother who naturally cares for her family and puts their needs before her comfort, the father wants to provide and be seen as the head of the family.

Aided by the society, the African man has built his identity and masculinity around the twin roles of provider and the figure of overall authority, so he will do all in his power to ensure this is not threatened.

The killing, therefore, is a way of regaining control of, or obliterating, the impending crisis.

This explains why they will often not only kill their partner and children, but also destroy their property by setting fires.

It is an eradication of everything that constitutes the ‘self’ that he has constructed.

Those who knew these men prior to the moment they committed the atrocities said they ‘snapped’, but Dr Muga says the perpetrators did not commit the crimes spontaneously, but planned them.

Gerishom Aluda from Vihiga, for instance, forced his wife and four children in a room after supper then doused the house with petrol in the wee hours of the morning, while John Kiprono Kirui from Kuresoi County had sharpened his machetes early that morning in preparation for the killings that would follow later.

As the children played during the day, as they chased each other around the compound, he knew they would never see another sunrise, or grow into teenage, or celebrate their next birthdays.

Perhaps because of the harrowing and perplexing nature of these crimes, very little research effort has been put to study family annihilators in Africa, but a notable effort has been put towards filicidal murders, where the man kills his children but has no intention of ending his life.

British criminologists have studied the grim phenomenon, and their findings are used a lot to answer the whys and wherefores of this type of crime.

Investigators sought to understand what inspired family annihilators, and their findings returned remarkable resemblance to what Dr Muga believes is the push behind such murders.

The research spawned four taxonomical categories of the perpetrators, namely the self-righteous, the disappointed, the anomic and the paranoid.

Of the four, Dr Achar says, Kenya’s family annihilators are rarely paranoid.

“After a long history of frustration and failure through childhood and into adult life, these men want revenge and control over their threatened masculinity,” he explains.

The British study, titled Masculinity and Child Homicide and published in the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, lays down a detailed profile of the offending men: the methods they used, the traits of their victims, their age and their occupation.

While women have been known to kill their children — and spouses too — research found that majority of such women suffer from post-partum depression and other mental illnesses, while the men were swimming in rage, anger and disappointment.

Differences also occur in the way most women kill their children, with the majority choosing to poison them as a way of distancing themselves from the resultant deaths.

“They would then rationalise that it was the poison that killed their children, not them,” explains Dr Achar.

The self-righteous killer, the taxonomy details, has a standard on which his family must fit. Normally being the breadwinner of the family gives him the prerogative to wage a significant degree of control, he believes.

His masculinity is premised on this idealised family and he will invest his all to ensure that this family stays intact, therefore, he hopes, it would be understandable that he would explode when he feels all his sacrifice to take care of his family is undermined .

Mukobero, who killed nine members of his family, broke his back at a construction site, toiling and moiling to support a pregnant wife and their eight children.

For him, probably, he felt he had given too much to have room for substitutes or second-bests.

The same worried Gerishom Aluda in Vihiga, who at the slightest evidence that his wife was cheating on him, torched his house with the wife and the three children inside.

On the other hand, Mukobero may not have hated his children, Dr Achar says, but he may have blamed his wife for his miserable life and was overwhelmed by his own powerlessness.

“He may have had a ‘twisted love’ where he believed he was saving the loved one from pain, misery and hardship,” Dr Achar explains.

Simply put, the family is slipping from his hands and should be destroyed.

Similar to the self-righteous man is the anomic killer, who links his family to economic success.

In a fiercely capitalist society such as Kenya, the pressures of economic success are detrimental to non-economic institutions such as family.

He has ‘success markers’ for his family: his wife and children must have a decent roof over their heads and dress as all other able families, therefore any potential disapproval or rejection by his peers and society in the absence of these markers is akin to social death to him.

Bishop Phoebe Onyango, the Executive Director of Africa Churches Foundation, agrees: “Looking after the family has become a burden,” she starts.

“Arable Land that can feed a family is becoming scarce in some regions, food is not in plenty like it used to, and the society is not as generous as it used to be.... Life is expensive and jobs are hard to come by.

“Even with prices of food perpetually soaring despite a stagnant salary, the man is expected to clothe, feed and shelter his family lest he be labelled a failure. Who wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by that?”

The perfect recipe for tragedy is concocted when these men lack the support of their wives, who may constantly remind them sarcastically that they have not lived up to the expectations of the society.

And there is nothing as bad as a man who feels degraded by those who should be seeing him as a hero, Dr Phoebe says.

But these crimes do not come from nowhere as the normal person may think.

Most of these people have experienced problems and frustrations such as an abusive childhoods, rejection or a profound sense of loss after the death of a ‘significant other’, or a person whose opinion mattered to them.

Such problems are worsened by the fact that the men are usually quite socially isolated, have tremendous difficulty at home and work in vain to achieve happiness and success.
The American forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz says the reason they cannot talk about their profound feelings of frustration and inadequacy is that they feel they have failed, and they simply cannot accept it.

They feel utterly humiliated and respond with the ultimate act of revenge.

Gradually, repeated frustration erodes their ability to cope, so much so that even modest disappointment seems catastrophic.

The tipping point is some catastrophic loss or impending tragedy that threatens to undermine their sense of self and amplifies their feelings of impotence and powerlessness, such as an alleged affair by his wife.

While this points to severe psychological problems with underlying personality issues and maladaptive coping strategies, this in itself does not necessarily constitute a mental illness.

According to Pastor Elias Mwaura Githuka of Christ Is the Answer Ministries in Kisumu, this generation has a crisis of men who are not socially balanced because they have very little examples or people to teach them to assume their roles as husbands and fathers amidst all the demands poured on them.

“Proper pre-marital counselling is a starting point,” he advises.