When your daddy kills your mummy | Roberta Attard

Dr Roberta Attard, Department of Counselling

I sit, bathed in the cold flickering light of the neon tube overhead, waiting for six-year-old Susan. Despite the flurry of activity taking place outside the glass panelled door, the room is eerily silent. The only sound to be heard is the whirring of the drinks and snacks machines in the ward corridor. The seconds tick past slowly, as if held back by some invisible hand, in this suffocating space, buried as it is deep under the emergency wards.

As I think of what I am about to do I feel a rising sense of nausea and a heaviness in my chest, and it takes all my years of training and supervision not to get up and run. I am about to tell Susan that the mother who helped her dress that morning, who made her lunch and dropped her off at school with a kiss and a “See you later” will not be seeing her later, or ever. I must tell her that her mother is dead.

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Later, much later, she will have to learn that her mother died, alone and unaided, after having bled to death from the knife wounds inflicted on her by the man who she calls daddy. The look of shock and incomprehension on Susan’s face, and her screams when the message my words carry finally penetrate her consciousness, still haunt me to this day, as does the sight of her little shuddering body as she is carried away to a life without mummy.

A press release by United Nations (UN) Women in November 2022, based on their newly minted UN Office on Drugs and Crime and UN Women reports that “women and girls are more at risk to be killed at home”, and reveals that an average of five were killed by their male family members every hour of 2021. Conservatively speaking, these being only legally verified cases, 45,000 women and girls, were murdered by a husband, partner or male relative in that year. And, despite all the efforts to the contrary, the same report notes that over the past ten years the numbers have remained largely unchanged.

Since the turn of the Millenium, in Malta, 29 women were killed by their male partners. What the reports allude to but don’t usually say is that many of these women were murdered by the father of one or more of their children. In one such case, that of Margaret Mifsud, strangled by her husband in 2012, in video testimony two years later her nine-year-old daughter said that her father was the “worst dad in the world”.

But this is a very rare glimpse of the children behind these mothers’ sudden, violent and preventable deaths. In another femicide, the three children of Catherine Agius, stabbed to death at a bus stop by her husband, told Times of Malta (as reported 2/12/2022) that although he was jailed for 31 years after he admitted to the crime, life imprisonment was what he deserved, and that for them he “stopped existing when he killed our mother”.

From a psychological perspective, to understand what happens to children when their father kills their mother, we need to heed the growing body of evidence on the effects of continually witnessing violence in one’s own home, taking into account factors such as age, gender, social support system, and the length of time the violence was witnessed, amongst others. In the local context, colleagues from the Faculty for Social Wellbeing have recently engaged in such research, with all-important findings that need to be taken heed of. I have noticed that children from homes in which violence is a regular occurrence are less likely to assert themselves at home, perhaps in an act of self-preservation, but engage in extremes of behaviour in other situations, like at school, either behaving very aggressively or totally passively.

And although education would be the way out of the life they are living, from the stories these children tell me, they often end up dropping out or being excluded. Although post-traumatic stress disorder, most especially if the killing is seen as having been done with intent rather than an accident, is a common fall-out, some children appear to be largely unaffected by the experience, only to decompensate as an adult in the face of what ordinarily would be considered a much lesser event. What is certain is that the somatic fear and emotional dysregulation associated with witnessing, vicariously or otherwise, violent death, even the threat of one, remains deep within one’s body and psyche long after the event or threat has passed.

My own doctoral research into the experience of children who endure the death of a parent, also by femicide, evidences a bottomless, massive rage at having been deprived of that person you consider as yours by birth and by right. But other children express feelings of confusion and shame, with ambivalent feelings towards both their mother and their father.

Whatever you may feel, your life as you know it and with it, whatever sense of peace of mind and stability you may have, is lost and instead is a great big monster of pain, fear and anger, always lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce. In the words of one of my young clients “My mama was died and I think I am died too”.

Perhaps the biggest insult and injury to a child’s rights is indeed this.