Attempted and Completed Parricides in South Africa, 1990–2019

• Date: 01 July 2021
• Published date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0306624X20928023
• Author: Phillip Shon,Melanie Moen
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Attempted and

Completed Parricides in

South Africa, 1990–2019

Melanie Moen

1,2

and Phillip Shon

2

Abstract

Previous studies of parricide have been carried out predominantly in a Western

context, in North America, Australia, and Western Europe. To date, only a handful

of studies in parricide have been conducted in continental Africa. Previous studies in

Ghana and Zimbabwe note that there may be culture-specific ways in which parri-

cides may be shaped by the norms and cultural beliefs systems within those respec-

tive countries. Missing from the literature is an examination of parricides in South

Africa. Using newspapers and court records, this article examines the offense and

offender characteristics of parricides in South Africa. Our findings suggest that res-

idential patterns of families may shape the offense characteristics found in South

African parricides.

Keywords

Parricide, South African parricide, violence against parents, African homicide, familial

homicide

Introduction

Although the term “parricide” has been used in previous research to refer to the

killing of one’s parents, it was once used to refer to men who assumed full-

1

University of Pretoria, South Africa

2

University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Melanie Moen, Faculty of Education, University of Pretoria, Cnr of George Storrar and Leyds Streets,

Hatfield, Pretoria 0028, South Africa.

Email: melanie.moen@up.ac.za

International Journal of

Offender Therapy and

Comparative Criminology

2021, Vol. 65(9) 1097–1117

!The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0306624X20928023

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f‌ledged status as legal subjects when they established their own households

(Biscotti, 2018). The use of parricide to refer to children who kill their parents

emerged only later. Under South African law, parricide is def‌ined as the killing

of a near blood relative (Bell et al., 1951). This expansive def‌inition of parricide

is consistent with the practices of Asian and eastern and southern European

countries that include extended family members in their def‌initions, as well as

previous studies that have included them in the def‌inition of parricides in inter-

national settings (Gabbiani, 2013; Muravyeva, 2016). Consequently, this study

also uses the term “parricide” to refer to the killing of mothers, fathers, or

superordinate elders such as uncles, aunts, grandparents, and in-laws by subor-

dinate family members such as children, nephews, nieces, grandchildren, and

sons/daughters-in-law.

In previous works, child abuse and mental illness have been proffered as

causal factors in parricides, even in an African context. For example,

Menezes (2010) primarily explained parricides in Zimbabwe to the living

arrangements and the presence of psychosis in offenders. Similarly, one previous

study of parricide offenders in South Africa found that they had been exposed to

inconsistent discipline from their parents and other dysfunctional family envi-

ronments (Moen, 2017). Thus, when parricides are examined in African con-

texts, explanations continue to be framed primarily from Western templates of

judgment, imbued with psychiatric discourses rather than socio-cultural factors

that might be pertinent to their understanding. It is important to move beyond

mental illness and child abuse as implicative factors in parricide incidents.

While ethnicity and race of victims and offenders in parricide incidents have

been meaningful in countries where national databases provide reliable and

consistent indicators, such as the Supplementary Homicide Reports in the

United States (Heide, 2014) and Home Off‌ice in the United Kingdom (Holt,

2017), such measures have been overlooked in convenience sample studies.

Ethnicity and race are particularly important in a South African context due

to its multiethnic character. While Black Africans make up the majority of the

population, the presence of other ethnic and racial groups in the country war-

rant an examination of how ethnicity and race may conf‌igure into parricides in a

South African context.

The handful of works that exist on parricides in continental Africa continue

to frame the offense from a clinical framework. To our knowledge, no one has

examined the offense characteristics of parricides in South Africa. To overcome

such shortcomings in the literature, this study attempts to answer to the follow-

ing research questions:

Research Question 1: What are the general offense characteristics of attempted

and completed family parricides in South Africa?

Research Question 2: What are the weapons that are used to kill parents and

superordinate relatives in South Africa?

1098 International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 65(9)