ABSTRACT
The situation in our own society provides an interesting counterpoint to the anthropological materials reviewed in the last chapter. The ethnographies present us with many typological descriptions of the circumstances that legitimize infanticide in one society or another, but there are seldom any quantitative data on the actual frequency of the act or its correlates. (Bugos and McCarthy’s Ayoreo study described in the last chapter is the outstanding exception.) Ironically, it is from societies in which infanticide is criminalized—modern western nations—that the greatest body of quantitative data is forthcoming. Despite the law’s threats, some people kill children anyway, and when they do, the feature of our society that endears it to social scientists comes into play: the passion for record-keeping. Coroners investigate suspicious deaths and file their reports, police of course do likewise, and whole departments of civil servants exist to collect and collate the information. In consequence, we can lay hands on large files of data on homicide, including infanticide, and these data permit altogether different sorts of analyses from what we were able to do with the terse and often idealized descriptions in the Human Relations Area Files.
