Despite High Profile Stories Of Moms Killing Kids, Dads Are More Deadly

By Christy Strawser

DETROIT (CBS Detroit) Sadly, the killing of small children by moms, dads, babysitters, other relatives and love interests is all too common in and around Detroit.

The most notorious case locally has to be the case of "freezer mom," who killed two of her children years apart and hid them both in a freezer in the living room. Unrepentant, she later said in a TV interview she would do it all over again.

There's also the Wyandotte woman who gave birth and put her infant in a tote at her desk, where he died before a co-worker noticed something was awry and called police. There was the 24-year-old mother in Eastpointe who left her baby to die alone in a garage, and just yesterday, a Farmington Hills mother shot and killed her son. She says it was self-defense.

That's why this new Canadian study is so interesting: Despite all the headline stories about moms killing children, in fact, dads are more likely to kill a child than a mother is.

Myrna Dawson, a University of Guelph sociology professor, published a report in the Child Abuse and Neglect journal that found 57 percent of the Canadian parents accused of killing a child between 1961 and 2011 were men.

Is it because men are more violent than women as an aggregate? Dawson has another explanation.

"It is believed that fathers spend more time with children than in the past, arguably increasing their time at risk," Dawson said in a report in The Canadian Press.

She added that people who kill a child tend to be "struggling with very real life events."

If men are the ones killing children more often, why do news reports focus so often on deadly mothers?

"Even research has focused more on female accused," Dawson explained. "It may be that there is more horror if a mother kills a child than a father, because we don't expect violence as much from women."

Dawson added more experts need to pay attention to potential family violence and there needs to be more social support systems in place to alleviate the stress on parents.

"We've learned that domestic homicides are actually probably one of the most preventable types of homicide," Dawson said.