Abstract
Little is known about filicide from the perspective of women convicted of the offence. The lack of research is partly attributable to the many difficulties entailed in researching socially marginalised and incarcerated people. Research on filicide engages with socially, culturally, and politically sensitive matters, including gendered social structures and behaviours, legal and ethical complexity, emotionally arousing topics, a rare phenomenon, and hard-to-reach participants. In countries where there is poor surveillance, limited local information, and few resources or experts in filicide, researchers must find innovative ways of overcoming these problems. Here we describe the particular challenges in conducting research on women convicted of filicide in Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim country, when the researchers are based at an Australian university. The persistence, resilience, and creativity required to overcome each problem were justified by the achievement of research that contributes to knowledge and has implications for change in policy and practice.
Highlights
Background to researching filicide in MalaysiaWhen parents kill their own children, it is known as filicide (Resnick 1969)
The current global discourse of filicide often emphasises women as perpetrators because there is evidence that more women than men have killed newborns and children aged less than 12 months (Friedman, Horwitz and Resnick 2005; Porter and Gavin 2010)
The first author, a Malaysian woman who is a psychiatrist, became concerned about sensational reports in the Malaysian news media of women arrested for filicide; she wanted to find out what was happening and why
Summary
When parents kill their own children, it is known as filicide (Resnick 1969). Parents are expected to love and protect their children and those who violate this expectation are judged harshly by society. The most intimate research perspective focused on women convicted of filicide with the goal of understanding what the experience and its antecedents meant to them. The first author sought and eventually achieved permission for the research from senior staff at the Prison Headquarters, responsible for the five prisons in Malaysia, and directors of the two psychiatric institutions for criminal patients. She visited (when in Malaysia) or telephoned and emailed (from Australia) the seven institutions several times to persuade senior staff of the value of the research, ask them to appoint a reliable staff member to assist with recruitment, and train recruiters in ethical practice. In this endeavour we follow others who have described the research process (see, for example, Westmarland 2011), especially when qualitative methods have been used (see for example, Bartels and Richards 2011)
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