A new article lists ten female serial killer cases which took place in Finland from 1750 through 1896.
The article, whose abstract is copied below, appears in a
special issue of the academic journal The
History of the Family, which is dedicated to exploring “patriarchal
values.” The author’s use of an obsolete definition of serial killers as being
exclusively of the male sex (which runs contrary to current U. S.
classification of serial killers, such as that used by the FBI) allows her to
develop a “non-patriarchal” term for the serial murder of newborns by a mother through the invention of an innocuous and vague new classification term “birth controller.” It might be argued that this proposal has a distinctly gynocentric quality to it.
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Abstract: This article examines multiple infanticide in
early modern Finland in which the same woman killed several newborns after
repeated hidden pregnancies and childbirths. A well-documented case in Lohja,
Nummi and Pusula Court of Assizes in 1874 is compared with nine other recurrent
infanticides in Finland in the period 1750–1896. The context of the series of
crimes and the reasons why it took so long to apprehend the murderers differed
from the majority of reported infanticides, which were quite unplanned and the
perpetrators of which were apprehended within days of the act. These offenders
were serial killers who experienced a need to kill even if they were not
literally serial killers according to modern conceptions of male-oriented
serial killing. They did not deliberately get themselves pregnant with men in
order to obtain psychological gratification from killing newborn babies.
Rather, they resorted to killing several of their illegitimate babies as a
solution of birth control because their first such crime went unreported or
unprosecuted, probably as a result of the complicity of others. Such a
perpetrator in the early modern age is labeled a ‘love-child murderess’ or a
‘burker of newborns’, depending on her relationship with the father or fathers
of the victims. Serial killings of newborn babies as a solution of birth
control continue to exist in modern times as serial neonaticide. It is
suggested that a perpetrator of this category of crime in all ages be labeled a
‘birth controller’.
[Mona Rautelin, “Female serial killers in the early modern age?Recurrent infanticide in Finland 1750–1896,” The History of the Family, Volume 18, Issue 3, 2013 (Special
issue: Domestic Disturbances, Patriarchal Values: Violence, Family and
Sexuality in Early Modern Europe)]
[792-1/10/21]
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