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26 J. Fam. Violence 1 (2011)

handle is hein.journals/jfamv26 and id is 1 raw text is: J Fam Viol (2011) 26:1-7 DOI 10.1007/s10896-010-9336-2 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Medico-Legal Evaluation of Adolescent Parricide Offenders: Thirty Nine Cases from Turkey Yalcin Buyuk - Gulay Kurnaz - S. Murat Eke- Handan C. Ankarali - Gokhan Oral Published online: 22 October 2010 C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract Parricide which is defined as the murder of one's parents is a rare event. We describe a consecutive series of adolescent parricide offenders referred to the Council of Forensic Medicine for medico-legal evaluation. Majority of the adolescent parricide offenders were male with a frequency of 79.5%. Age of the offenders ranged from 12 to 18 years old with a median age of 15.13. The majority of the victims were the fathers of the offenders (27; 69.2%). Firearms and cutting devices were the most frequently used weapons. The history of abuse in the family as a motive for the murder was detected in 51.2% of the offenders. The major abuse type was physical abuse. There was no history of psychiatric disorders in the majority of the offenders (37; 94.9%). After the medico-legal evaluation of the adolescent parricide offenders in the Council of Forensic Medicine, psychiatric disorder was diagnosed only in 4 offenders. Schizophrenia was the final diagnosis in 3 cases and paranoid disorder (otherwise unclassified) in only 1 offender. Our study confirmed the frequency of mental Y. Buyuk (W) - G. Kurnaz Council of Forensic Medicine, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: doctorbuyuk@gmail.com S. M. Eke Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Kirikkale, Medical Faculty, Kirikkale, Turkey H. C. Ankarali Department of Medical Statistics, University of Duzce, Duzce, Turkey G. Oral Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Istanbul, Cerrahpasa School of Medicine, Istanbul, Turkey illness among adolescent parricide offenders to be very low when compared to adult offenders. Adolescent parricide offenders differ from the other perpetrators particularly in terms of motives of the murder and psychiatric illnesses. Abuse in the family seems to play an important role in these murders. Therefore, it is extremely important that individ- uals in the legal, criminal justice, social work, psychology, educational and other professional communities be more conscious and informed of child maltreatment and family violence and more research is essential in understanding and preventing adolescent parricide offenders. Keywords Forensic psychiatry Parricide - Adolescent Homicide - Penal responsibility Child abuse The term parricide refers to the murder of one's parents including stepparents. Parricide can include matricide, which is the murder of one's mother; patricide, which is the murder of one's father; or double parricide, which is the murder of both parents (Hilbrand et al. 1999; Shon and Targonski 2003). Parricide is a rare event and in general, North American and European statistics indicate that parricide accounts for less than 4% of all resolved homicides. In Canada, parricide represented 3.7% of all homicides during the period ranging from 1991 to 1997. Parricide is reported to form 20-30% of homicides committed by psychotic subjects (Marleau et al. 2003). Although the number of annual incidents is not high, parricide is an offense similar to child- parent violence in which knowledge, explanation and understanding are impeded by lack of consensus about incident precursors or victim, offender, and incident characteristics (Walsh and Krienert 2009). Walsh et al. (2008) studying 27 years of parricide cases with an offender t_ Springer

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