ABSTRACT
Historically, child killing has by no means always been a crime, and has been practised as child sacrifice, a method of population control or as a social and economic necessity since the dawn of humanity.1-4 The cultural and socioeconomic setting is still relevant today and reverberates through phenomena such as son-preference and sex-selective abortions, particularly in South Asian countries (Box 20.1).5,6
It is difficult to get a reliable picture of the true incidence of child homicide worldwide and many are generally believed to remain undetected or become wrongly categorized.7 There are few recent surveys and to make it more complicated, the terminology and definitions used in various jurisdictions are not uniform. For
example, neonaticide is usually defined in the literature as the homicide of a child within the first 24 hours of life, whereas in the USA, because of the Federal Bureau of Investigations-Uniform Crime Reporting System (FBIUCR) rules, it is defined as the homicide of a person aged 1 week or less. Using these criteria the average annual neonaticide rate in the period 1976 to 1979 in the USA was 1.3 per 100,000 live births and the rate for infanticide (>1 week-<1 year) 4.3 per 100,000 infants.8 Another study based on World Health Organization (WHO) data compared death rates (1974) between 23 developed countries, reporting a mean death rate of 2.3 ± 2.6 per 100,000 live births for children less than 1 year of age.9 A more recent study from the USA comprising 34 deaths of newborns (up to 4 days of age), covering the 16-year period 1985-2000 in North Carolina, gave a rate of 2.1 per 100,000.10
A total of 292 child homicides (<14 years) were reported during the 25-year period, 1970-1994 in Finland. Excluding 57 cases that even after a more detailed study had remained undetermined, that left 235 cases and gave an annual rate of 1.9 (per million total population). Fifty-six of the children were neonaticides.11 Another study assessing 47 suspected neonaticides in Finland between 1980 and 2000 reported a rate of 0.07-0.18 per 100,000 live births per year.12 A comparison of all filicides registered in Austria and Finland between 1995 and 2005 found 86 victims in Austria and 66 in Finland equalling 5.2 and 5.9 per 100,000 inhabitants respectively.13
