Criminologists identify four types of men who murder their families

After analyzing newspaper accounts concerning "family annihilator" events that occurred between 1980 and 2012, British criminologists have categorized the men who murder their own families into four distinct types.
 
The types are self-righteous, anomic, disappointed, and paranoid, according to BBC, io9, and Wired. The identification of these four helps to dispel the popular myth that revenge or altruism are the motivations behind most family murders are.
 
Although each type has a somewhat different trigger that prompts these individuals to murder their own, the most common motivation behind these heinous acts is the break-up of the family, with financial problems and honor killings counting as second and third reasons, respectively.
 
It was observed that many of these individuals also have a history of domestic abuse. In four out of five cases, the killers then went on to commit suicide, or at least made an attempt to do so.
 
August was revealed to be the month most of these crimes—about 20 percent of the cases—were perpetrated. Because of school holidays, this was the month when fathers and their children were likely to be spending time together.
 
The four types
 
Self-righteous

This type of killer, who believes the mother as ultimately responsible for the breakdown of the family, consequently blames her for his crimes. For these individuals, their status as breadwinner is paramount to their notion of the ideal family. One example of such a type is Brian Philcox, who is thought to have gassed himself and his children to death one Father’s Day.
 
Anomic

The anomic sees his family as a direct outcome of his economic success. As such, the family for him is a means to display his achievements. When he experiences economic failure, however, the family ceases to serve this function. The failed businessman Chris Foster, who shot and killed his wife and daughter, is of this type.
 
Disappointed

This killer blames his family for undermining or destroying what he believes should be the ideal family life. For instance, he may believe that his wife or children let him down for not observing the strict religious or cultural traditions he was brought up to follow. An example of this type is Mohammed Riaz, who was responsible for the harassment, torture, and murder of his wife’s family.
 
Paranoid

The paranoid believes his family is being threatened by an external source. He murders his family in a twisted effort to protect them from these "threats," examples of which are the legal system or social services, which he believes will take his children away from him. Graham Anderson, who murdered his two young boys, belongs to this type.
 
More frequent cases in recent years
 
These crimes have become more common since the dawn of the new millennium. In fact, the 1980s only saw six of these crimes, whereas more than half of the reported crimes occurred after the year 2000.
 
Co-author of the research, David Wilson of Birmingham City University, UK, stated a possible reason for the rise in this type of crime could be "men feeling they need to exercise power and control" over their families.
 
Frequently, the perpetrators turn out to be the individuals who invested "too heavily in a very stereotypical conception of what it means to be a husband and a father within an institution called a family," said Wilson.
 
"Their view of the family is very black and white, and doesn't reflect the increasingly dynamic role that women can play in the economy and in the institution of the family itself."
 
He said in addition: "The thing that struck me was the kind of extraordinary ways that men thought up to kill their children. They jumped from bridges with children in their arms; they drove into canals with children in the backseats. These were extraordinary histrionic, controlling ways of committing murder.
 
"This was a group of men who were not in any way previously known to the criminal justice system. This is a very different profile of male murderers than we normally find in criminological research."
 
When privacy spells danger
 
The new study is markedly different from previous ones, which have come to assume revenge or altruism as the major reasons behind these disturbing murders. Wilson and his team, however, pointed out that none of the cases they reviewed reflected either of these two explanations.
 
Wilson explained that the extreme privacy exercised by some families could give false appearances. Families could seem happy and peaceful; men in particular could give off the air of being loving and dutiful husbands and fathers, when the truth is much darker and more sinister.
 
"Family annihilators were overwhelmingly not known to criminal justice or mental health services," said Wilson. "For all intents and purposes these were loving husbands and good fathers, often holding down high profile jobs and seen publicly as being very, very successful. They were simply not on the radar."
 
Because of this stark discrepancy between appearances and actual behavior, Wilson is encouraging "more people to become aware of other people’s lives," and to take domestic violence more seriously.
 
Criticisms
 
Kent University's professor of criminology, Keith Hayward, was not involved in Wilson's research. According to him, the field of study involving family murder should be one subjected to closer examination by future researchers. He also believes developing "typologies" from second-hand media reports was not without its problems.
 
"There are a number of ungrounded assumptions going on about 'motivations,'" he said. "This is reflected in the four categories, which overlap and thus don't seem that rigorous to me."
 
Without detailed analyses into the individual life histories of these killers, all information garnered from news reports are "all inference," he claimed.
 
The researchers admitted there were certain disadvantages of relying predominantly on the media's accounts of the crimes. He did, however, argue that the interviews with the surviving members of the family "lifted a lid on the reality of life behind closed doors," which in turn led to the identification of the possible motives.
 
55 percent of the 71 reviewed cases of the family annihilator were in their thirties at the time of the crime.
 
Of the 71, only 12 were female. Wilson admitted further research is necessary to identify the motivations that pushed these women to murder members of their own family.

"We don’t simply want to fit the women into the four categories we've identified for men," he said. "We want to see what differences there are, rather than just simply go, 'oh look, this women fits that pattern,' and so forth." — VC, GMA News