I always am left feeling helpless when I hear of things like this. Trying to enact change in he court, in the punishments and other 2ndary things seems so hard to attain.
I end up reminding myself, that, as with everything, it has to start with yourself.
1. Choose your partner carefully. He/she is the father/mother of your children and will be forever in your life. If it takes you 5 years to ensure they are likely to be a safe partner before you have children, then so be it.
2. Educate yourself and your kids about the psychology of mankind, what they can do, what they are capable of, and how best to protect yourself by interacting with potential offenders in ways that enhance the safety of both yourself and your children yet still show basic respect. Ie, "manipulate" them in positive ways that generate the least amount of negative behaviour from them.
3. Use the courts to your best advantage but realise the limitations.
But before everything else, make sure point 1 is the top of your list. It was at the top of mine.
Not to say you can't still be unlucky, but these points may reduce your chances of a tragedy. And they are things within your power.
Thank you Thank you for this excellent post.... I wanted to comment on why I think we are seeing a huge increase in these types of crimes in the past decade (at least) and you put it so much more eloquently than I would...
I have been on here for a couple of years now, and so many times I have read cases of children killed and/or abused by mums boyfriend, step dad, mum getting rid of the kids because boyfriend doesn't like them, mum not looking after kids properly because she is too caught up in her own love tangles etc etc etc.
And please before you jump on me, I am not saying that it is the case here..
Just merely agreeing that point no 1 above is so so so important and unfortunately it seems to not be important so often these days by women, especially by a lot of women who already have children.
It seems it is so easy and acceptable these days for people to jump from relationship to relationship, and personally I think this is causing so many problems within society. Please do not attack me for saying this as it is my opinion and observation only.
Many of societies problems can be traced back to unsettled childhoods where the children did not feel secure for whatever reason.
My own situation includes a step daughter that hadn't seen her dad until she was 11 (my husband) as her mum moved from man to man dragging the kids along with her........putting restraining orders on all the fathers (only 1 was actually truthful)....she had 4 kids to 4 different dads along with a number of boyfriends in between.....she met a man she wanted, he didn't want to play dad to her tribe, so she killed herself.............her 4 children are totally messed up......
My stepdaughter is now 20.....out of 10 of her good schoolfriends 7, yes 7!! are now mothers.........6 are single mothers, one got married....one of those girls is about to have her 3rd child to 3 different men, another has a baby to a man (well boy really, 19) who also has a baby to another girl and there is 7 months difference in the babies ages!!!!
This breakdown has to stop, it really is not good for society.
Sorry to have gone off topic..........
and RIP poor baby girls............and how sorry I feel for their poor mum...you don't recover from something like this........what a a hole of a man....