Who counts? The invisibility of mothers as victims of femicide

Abstract

This article focuses on the important and persistent phenomenon of women killed by their sons. We argue that parricide (the killing of parents) is a gendered form of violence, given that women are disproportionately represented as victims compared to other forms of violence (aside from domestic homicide by current or ex partners) and that son-mother killings are a form of femicide that is often hidden. Not only do they fall under literal definitions of femicide in that they involve women being killed by men, but they also, we contend, fall under motivation-driven definitions as the killing of women by men because they are women and an institutional state failure to protect them as women. Drawing upon analysis of Homicide Index data and 57 case studies of parricide in the United Kingdom, we show that in many cases women are killed by their adult-aged mentally ill sons, within a broader context of ‘parental proximity’, maternal caregiving and intersectional invisibility, which ultimately renders them vulnerable to fatal violence.