Prevent filicide: Intervention with potential perpetrators

Prevent filicide: Intervention with potential perpetrators Thea Brown, Professor Emeritus at Monash University, investigates the flaws in service interventions related to filicide cases and highlights methods to bolster early interventions to prevent potential perpetrators. Research on filicide has been slow to produce strategies for intervention with potential perpetrators. Instead, it has explored the factors and the circumstances associated with actual perpetrators and their actions. To the limited extent of research on intervention, researchers have identified services as the key to intervention. Services are the way that potential perpetrators can be stopped from transitioning to becoming actual perpetrators. This view is supported by research showing perpetrators are in contact with services, often with many services, in the period prior to the child’s death. This knowledge of contact implies some windows of opportunity for intervention. However, how best to use these windows of opportunity is not clear. The windows are cloudy, and we have not yet been able to see through them to propose reliable, successful interventions.