Child murder
- Note: for practices of systematically killing very young children, see infanticide. For the killing of one's own children, see filicide.
A great many murderers of children are relatives or caretakers.
In ancient times, a possible successor of a king or his supporters may try to eliminate other potential challengers or a coup d'etat to overthrow a child king would both result in child murders.
In modern times, the killing of children often follows on from child abuse which started as attempts at discipline through corporal punishment: as, for example, in the Victoria Climbié case which occurred in London.
Some murderers of children are pedophiles who commit lust murder or commit murder to cover up their other crimes. These latter cases are more notorious, although killings by family members are more common.
There have been a number of moral panics related to child murder, of which the most notable is the satanic ritual abuse phenomenon, where reports of organized killings of large numbers of children by satanic gangs have failed to be corroborated in spite of decades of investigation.
These moral panics have tended to obscure those rare cases where actual pedophile gangs have acted to prey upon children.
Several cases of exorcism carried out by family members or religious groups have resulted in the murders of children.
In most countries, there are very few cases where children are killed by other young children. One was the killing on November 24, 1993 of the almost three-year-old boy Jamie Bulger by two ten-year-old boys in Liverpool, England, UK. He was beaten and stoned to death and his body left on the train tracks to make it appear that he had died by being hit by a train. Also there is the Mary Bell case in the UK, although the verdict was manslaughter not murder. These cases were regarded with national shock and revulsion, fed by the taboid press.
Although the United States certainly has an unusually high number of killings of children by other children, it is most often the case that the perpetrators and victims are teenagers, not children. In many such cases, the youthful perpetrator is tried as an adult for their crime.
In 1993, after the fatal shooting of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis as he left the Cabrini-Green public housing project for school, the Chicago Tribune put every child murder on the front page (generally no murders were front page news). 62 child murders were reported that year.
Multipe deaths in one incident, such as the 1999 Columbine High School massacre or the 1996 Dunblane massacre tend to gather the most media attention.
It is often claimed that due to media bias in the United States, a relatively small number of child killings in white, upper-class suburbia are given an inordinately large amount of attention, while the majority of victims that are minorities, urban-dwelling, and socioeconomically disadvantaged receive little or no media attention.
Muti is a murderous practice of human sacrifice and mutilation associated with some traditional cultural practices, such as Sangoma, in South Africa. Victims of muti killings are often children. An unknown child (referred to as Adam), whose decapitated torso was found in the River Thames in London in 2001 is believed to have been the victim of a muti killing. [1]Killing by family members vs. killing by strangers
Killing of children by other children
Genocide and child soldiers
Muti killings