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Former partners or estranged spouses account for 15 percent of other murders of women. Fifty-five percent of all murdered women are killed by a spouse or intimate partner. Yet according to the Centers for Disease Control, one in three women will be a victim of domestic violence at some point in her lifetime. No one, not even close family friends interviewed by the media, imagined the family was anything other than the joyful, close-knit clan that Shannan posted online.ĭomestic violence remains a covert and largely unreported or under-reported crime. The family’s quiet Colorado neighborhood was shaken. It took a week for police to discover the bodies. The little girls had been put in oil tanks where Watts had once worked and his wife was buried in a shallow grave on the grounds.ĭomestic homicides and family annihilation are the most extreme form of domestic violence and one of the most common types of homicide. But when Chris Watts reported his family missing, they were already dead.
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The picture America saw for a week was of an attractive, happy family and the search for the missing mother and children was extensive. When Chris reported her and their children missing, national news media was flooded with photos and videos from her Facebook and Instagram accounts. Shannan was a young mother with a large social-media presence. Shannan was pregnant with her third child, a boy, Nico, when her husband, Chris, murdered all of them. One such case was the August 13 murder of Shannan Watts and her daughters Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3. The cases that do make headlines, shocking as they might be, are only in the news fleetingly. News media most often use the term murder-suicide, but experts refer to men who kill in this way as “family annihilators” and the act itself, “familicide.” Ninety-four percent of the victims of familicide are female.Įven though October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, familicide has yet to make headlines beyond individual cases. Yet lurking in the wings, awaiting its own spotlight is the most common crime against women, domestic violence, which often includes sexual violence and sometimes murder.įamilicide-defined as “a dramatic, violent event in which a person commits a murder or murders, and then shortly after commits suicide,” according to American Roulette: Murder-Suicide in the United States, released in June 2018-is the most extreme form of domestic violence. The #MeToo movement has shone a klieg light on sexual violence against women. So common, that every week in America men are killing their wives, children, possibly other family members, almost always in mass shootings. Yet familicide, and the perpetrators of it, are becoming increasingly common in America. An act of retribution from another time before our own where the family is killed by the patriarch.