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The Modern Debate: Getting Away With Murder?

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A History of Infanticide in Britain c. 1600 to the Present

Abstract

In this final chapter, we will trace the history of infanticide since 1900. This was an era of both continuity and change in relation to new-born child murder. Even in the present day, various ‘historical’ aspects of infanticide have endured. Instances of child murder still persist in modern Britain and across the world,2 and it remains a crime strongly associated with mothers. It is still notoriously difficult to provide proof of an act of infanticide, despite advances in modern forensic science and pathology. Likewise, public reactions to new-born child murder continue to be unpredictable, as attitudes towards perpetrators flit between sympathy and condemnation.3

Scores of women who have really wilfully killed their offspring at birth every year are acquitted… The crime of infanticide still goes on, and receives little or no check by punishment… I don’t think that the law as it stands can be said to act much as a deterrent to women, who, of course, will continue to have illegitimate children and get rid of them somehow.1

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Notes

  1. F.G. Frayling (1908) ‘Infanticide: Its Law and Punishment, With Suggested Alternations or Amendments of the Law’, Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society, 81, pp. 87–9.

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  1. Oxford Brookes University, UK

    Anne-Marie Kilday (Professor of Criminal History and Pro Vice-Chancellor & Dean)

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Kilday, AM. (2013). The Modern Debate: Getting Away With Murder?. In: A History of Infanticide in Britain c. 1600 to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349125_7

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