From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Filicide is the deliberate act of a parent killing their own son or daughter. The word filicide derives
from the Latin word
filius meaning "son". Filia in Latin also means
daughter.
In some cultures killing a daughter who is deemed to have
disgraced the family is a common occurrence (see honor killing).
A 1999 US Department of Justice
Study concluded that between 1976 and 1997 in the United
States, mothers were responsible for a higher share of children
killed during infancy while fathers were more likely to have been
responsible for the murders of children age 8 or older.
Furthermore, 52% of the children killed by their mothers were male
(maternal filicide), while 57% of the children
killed by their fathers were male (paternal
filicide).
Sometimes there is a combination of murder
and suicide in filicide cases.
Known or suspected
filicides
Filicides in myth and
fiction
- In the book series Warriors, Yellowfang kills her son
Brokentail. It was a mercy killing because Brokentail was blind and
sustained very bad, permanent injuries. Yellowfang killed him with
a heavy heart to end his suffering.
- In the 2007 film Stephen King's The Mist, the
main character, David Drayton, murders his son to save him being
slaughtered by vicious creatures.
- In the PS2 God of War (video
game) series, Kratos is
tricked, by Ares, previous god of war, in the series, into killing
his own child and his wife. Kratos decides to get back at Ares for doing so, as well as for
what Ares did to Athens.
- In the PS2 sequel to God of War (video
game), God
of War II, Zeus kills Kratos, though the protagonist
changes events in time and prevents this from happening, making it
attempted filicide; in the process Zeus stabs Athena , his daughter, through the abdomen,
killing her.
- Titus
Andronicus, Shakespeare - Title character kills his
daughter Lavinia. This is an attempt to restore her honor after she
was raped, her hands were amputated, and her tongue
cut out. Titus previously kills her attackers (then apparently puts
pieces of the men's dead bodies into a pie that he serves their
mother), marking this play as Shakespeare's most gruesome.
- La Llorona (The
Weeping Woman) - This Hispanic American folktale tells of a
woman, Maria, whose husband is unfaithful. In her rage, she throws
their children into the river, where they are drowned.[1]
- In the Medea of Euripides, Medea kills her children, in retaliation for
being abandoned by her husband, Jason.
- In The
Bacchae, also by Euripides, Agave kills her son Pentheus while possessed by
Dionysus.
- Agamemnon sacrifices
his daughter, Iphigeneia, to the goddess Artemis in Aeschylus' The Oresteia and
in Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis.
- Orchamus, a king in Greek mythology
ordered his daughter Leucothea buried alive upon learning that she
was in love with Apollo.
- In the HBO series Oz, white
supremacist Schillinger has his son killed by providing him with
poisoned narcotics while he is in solitary
confinement.
- In the video game Castlevania, a
witch named Actrise relishes the memory of sacrificing
her child to the Devil in return for eternal life.
- In the Ulster
Cycle of Irish mythology, Cuchulainn unwittingly
kills his son Conlaoch when
Conlaoch arrives in Ulster and, under a geis from his mother, the warrior queen Aoife, refuses to give his name
to the king. Cuchulainn recognizes his son by a golden ring only
after he inflicts a mortal wound with his magical spear, the Gae
Bolga.
- In the 1990 film The Grifters, con
artist Lilly Dillon unintentionally kills her son while trying
to take his money.
- In the 1987 novel Beloved by Toni Morrison and
the 1999 film
adaptation of the same name, Sethe murders her two-year-old
daughter to save her from being returned to slavery.
- Hercules of Greek mythology
killed his wife and children in a fit of rage induced by Hera
- In the Fox Network show Justice, a woman is tried and
convicted of shooting her son, who threatened to reveal the
mother's drug dealing business.
- In the Fox Network show 24, Graem
Bauer (Paul
McCrane) is killed by his father, Phillip Bauer (James Cromwell)
before he can reveal Phillip's involvement in the nuclear attacks
against America in Season 6.
- In the V.C. Andrews novel Flowers
in the Attic, Corrine kills her young son Cory and then
tries to kill her other children (including main character Cathy)
with arsenic in order to get her parents' inheritance.
- The 2007 film Before the Devil Knows
You're Dead ends with a scene in which the character
played by Albert
Finney smothers his son (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) with a
pillow after Hoffman's character confesses that he was responsible
for the botched robbery that resulted in his mother's death.
- In the story line of Alternative Rock band "Coheed and
Cambria", Coheed is tricked into killing three of his children,
Maria, Matthew, and Josephine. His son, Claudio, manages to
escape.
- In the Death
Note anime, Soichiro Yagami threatens to kill his son,
Light, but the murder attempt was simply an act (using a revolver
loaded with blanks) to determine whether or not Light was the
notorious serial killer, "Kira".
- In the Family
Guy episode, Lois Kills
Stewie, Peter and Lois Griffin kill Stewie.
- In the "evil" endings of The Suffering video games, Torque
murders his two sons and wife.
- In William
Styron's novel Sophie's Choice, the title
character is ordered by a Nazi to choose between her two children,
telling her that the one she chooses will live, the other will
die.
- In the director's cut of the 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven, Sibylla
of Jerusalem poisons her son Baldwin V to spare his
suffering when he is diagnosed with leprosy.
- In Silent Hill: Homecoming, several cult members
sacrifice their children. Also, in one of the endings, Alex
Shepherd is murdered by his father.
- In Silent
Hill 3, Harry Mason mentioned in one of his notes he left
behind in Silent Hill that he considered killing his foster child
Heather/Cheryl at one point in his life.
- In the Septimus
Heap book series, the third book Physik has the character Queen Etheldredda
who killed her own daughters so that she will have unparalleled
control over the kingdom and no one can be her successor.
- In Kathryn Lasky's book series Guardians of Ga'Hoole, Nyra, evil
queen of the Pure Ones, tries to kill her son Nyroc (later Coryn)
after he left the Pure Ones. However, Nyra's close ally, the
Striga, kills Coryn in book 15.
- Lucius Junius Brutus, one of the
founders of the Roman republic, famously condemns his sons to death
who were conspiring to overthrow the newly established order. See
Machiavelli's Discourses on
Livy, Book I, Chapter 16 and Book III, Chapter 3.
- In The events of Soul Calibur IV, Ivy was attack by Cervantes
De Leon, who biologically is Ivy's father, Cervantes cosumed most
of Ivy's soul and thought to have killed her. but Ivy used an
artificial soul to save herself.
- In Genesis 22:1-24, is a story from the Hebrew Bible in which
God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah, and
he almost does so.
- In Horace Walpole's 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, the main
protagonist Manfred, a usurping prince, murders his daughter
Matilda.
- On the finale of the TV show Alias, CIA agent Sydney Bristow
(Jennifer Garner) is nearly killed by her mother and former KGB
agent, Irina Derevko (Lena Olin) during a desperate fight on a
Tokyo rooftop. Sydney kicks Irina onto a glass ceiling where she
falls to her death.
- In the Bandai Namco series Tekken the character Heihachi Mishima
attempted to kill his son, Kazuya Mishima, several times by
throwing him off a mountain cliff at the age of five, and throwing
him into a volcano years later. Heihachi also attempted to kill the
protagonist, his grandson Jin Kazama, by shooting him, although he
survived the gunshot.
Related
terms
And as for non-familial killing terms from the same root:
- Regicide is the
killing of a king or ruler.
- Tyrannicide is
the killing of a tyrant.
- Homicide is the
killing of a human.
- Genocide is the
killing of an ethnic, religious or national group.
- Suicide is the killing
of oneself.
- Deicide is the killing
of a god.
- Uxoricide is the
killing of one's wife.
Also consider filial cruelty (cruelty toward one's own
child), child cruelty (cruelty toward an unrelated
child), and child
murder (the murder of a child in general).
See also
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