Dusting off child murder history

Media Release
9 April, 2009

Dusting off child murder history

New Zealand’s history of infanticide and child homicide is being scrutinised by Waikato University PhD student Debra Powell. She says the moral panic we’re currently experiencing over child deaths is nothing new. The same debate was going on in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Powell has been awarded a $96,000 TEC top achiever doctoral scholarship to study the history of child deaths in New Zealand between 1870 and 1910.

“This was a time before abortion was readily available and keeping an illegitimate child was not an option, when pregnant and lactating women were seen as mentally disordered and were sent to ‘lunatic asylums’ rather than to gaol for killing their babies. There was baby farming, babies were frequently abandoned and suspicious child deaths were often kept well hidden,” says Powell. “But the newspapers from that time show that there was similar moral concerns to those we’re having now.”

Powell says violent deaths were often registered as natural deaths. “In one example I found, a child died while punishment was being administered by his father, yet his death was recorded as natural. Illegitimate babies were three times more likely to die of ‘dubious’ things like decline, overlaying [suffocation], or failure to thrive.”

For her Masters thesis Powell studied death and grief amongst Scottish settlers, part of a larger Marsden funded study into early settlement, and she says it was during that study that she discovered discrepancies in child and baby deaths, court records and convictions, which has led to her doctoral study.

“Death study is under researched in New Zealand but it’s a big topic overseas,” she says. “The subject may sound grim, but history is far from dusty, it can be cutting edge, it can get the heart racing, and this subject is one that’s been waiting to be deconstructed. Infanticide has been there in one form or another throughout New Zealand’s history.”

Powell’s study straddles history and criminal law and part of her scholarship money will be used to travel to Wellington and Auckland where most of the archives she needs to research are housed. She will also study records from former lunatic asylums including Dunedin’s Seacliff Mental Hospital.

ENDS

© Scoop Media