A study reviles, on the average, about five parents are killed by their biological children in the United States every week and same goes with India too. Matricide and patricide are both very rare events when considered in terms of the thousands of individuals arrested every year for murder. Killings of mothers and fathers each constitute about 1 per cent of all homicides in which the victim-offender relationship is known. The overwhelming majority of offspring arrested for killing mothers were adults (age 18 and older). The percentage of matricide offenders who were adults averaged 84 per cent over the 32-year period; juveniles (age 17 and under) made up only 16 per cent of matricide offenders over the years.
Approximately a large per cent of matricide offenders acted alone when they killed their mothers. On an average about one to10 offenders are arrested each year for acting with co-defendants to kill mothers. Important gender and age difference emerged in examining matricides in which co-defendants were involved. Interestingly, the offenders involved in multiple-offender incidents, were females. Juveniles were significantly more likely than adult offenders to use accomplices in killing per cent. Some of these youths had killed their parents. When I heard the stories and investigated the backgrounds of youths who killed their mothers, fathers, or both parents, it was clear that abuse and neglect typically played a role in these killings. The cases of kids who killed parents were very different from adolescents who killed under other circumstances.
This is high time when our society collectively needs to take a call. The youth is raised in a chemically dependent or other dysfunctional family. An ongoing pattern of family violence exists in the home. Conditions in the home worsen, and violence escalates. The youth becomes increasingly vulnerable to stressors in the home environment. When these conditions are present, parents or other adults need to take action to get help. Children and adolescents are most likely to kill to end abuse or to get their own way. Sometimes they kill because of severe mental illness. However, severe mental illness is not as much of a factor with young parricide offenders as with older parricide offenders.
Adults who kill their parents, particularly those who are middle-aged, are likely to kill their aging parents because of severe mental illness, such as psychosis or severe depression. They also kill for antisocial reasons, such as to get their parent’s assets. Abuse alone is rarely the driving force for an older adult to kill a parent because a healthy adult has options that a child under 18 does not have. A healthy adult, for example, can leave the home of the aging parent or cut ties with an abusive parent, when conditions warrant it, such as the deteriorating health of an aging parent, perhaps, complicated with substance abuse. Problem lies in uncontrolled angry mind in one member of the family.
Anger is a disease that is common in one out of 10 people in India. First, it should have a good medicine. Rest, they can understand the situation of any odd kind once that moment of angriness is under controlled. Murdering own people or killing anyone for that matter is unusual thing. Human beings have evolved with a propensity to kill one another that is six times higher than the average mammal. Human bloodlust — from war to murder — traces back millions of years to our primate ancestors. Humans are far from the only species that kills its own. Murder has been observed in animals and the tendency had been passed down to humans from their evolutionary dynasties.
India is witnessing a dramatic spurt in crimes with the law enforcement agencies increasingly becoming weaker to nab the criminals. The rule of law has been considerably eroded over the years as it is evident from the ever increasing cases of rape, kidnapping, murder, extortion, trafficking, robbery and many other petty crimes. The inability of the courts to dispense justice on time and the incompetence of the police to bring the perpetrators to book have emboldened the criminals to take the law into their own hands. Some states have become synonymous with crimes while many states and cities have been found to be relatively safe.
However, the NCRB always publish the number of murders and crimes but these numbers are based on FIRs alone, the unreported killings are more than the reported killings. Crimes for which FIRs are not registered are not accounted for in the official data. But unlike other crimes, data for murders are understood to be closer to reality as there is a little incentive and possibility in under-reporting murder cases. Further, as compared with other crimes, murders are less likely to pass unnoticed. Absolute numbers, however, are still high — 32,127 murders were recorded in 2015, which means 88 people were killed every day. In fact, murders in 2015 alone were almost similar in number to terrorism-related fatalities in India over the last two decades. As per data from South Asia Terrorism Portal — which compiles figures from news reports and is likely to be an underestimate — 34,691 civilians and security men were killed in terror attacks in India from 1994 to 2016. The incidents of murder have not changed much. Between 2006 and 2015, the figure was between 32,000 and 35,000. In the decade before, 1996-2005, recorded murder incidents were between 32,000 and 38,000. As per National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data from 1952-2015, 1992 saw the maximum number of deaths in one calendar year — 40,105. Further, data reveals that the murder rate for India in 2012 was almost half compared to the world average. Among 209 countries for which comparable data was available, India ranked 133 (higher rank means higher murder rate). In 2015, the major motive of murder was ‘Personal vendetta or enmity’ (4,758 cases), accounting for 14.8 per cent of the total murder cases followed by ‘property dispute’ with 3,540 cases (11 per cent). It’s a very sad thing about India; the values of its own culture are compromised in the adoption of western culture. Political, social, gender base, family crimes or on rise but we the people just read it and move on. Somewhere we all need to give a thought and restore humanity by instilling human values.
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