The trial and subsequent conviction of Kathleen Folbigg for the murder of her three infant children and manslaughter of a fourth child have been proved to be a dire miscarriage of justice, with Folbigg pardoned after spending two decades in prison.
A mother killing her children plays into the worst fears of society. An unimaginable horror, it captures the fascination of the public and media. Sally Clark, Angela Cannings, Donna Anthony and Trupti Patel — all were sentenced to life in prison over the deaths of their children and were later exonerated.
One thing that stands out in all these cases is not whether a woman is capable of killing her own children but that mothers are set up to fail, and are then promptly judged and punished when they show signs of falling from the high standards set for them.
In Folbigg’s case, we see how availability heuristics, confirmation bias and hindsight bias played roles. The fact that four children had died in quick succession and that the mother had found them soon after was evaluated by the infrequency of such occurrences. This made it easier for experts to fall back on confirmation bias, stereotypes and shortcut thinking.
Medical as well as legal judgment is also subject to bias and error, and this case shows how unrelated circumstantial evidence was deployed as a marker of guilt.
In 1999, British paediatrician Roy Meadow — infamous for facilitating several wrongful convictions of mothers for murdering their babies — proposed that “unless proven otherwise, one cot death is tragic, two is suspicious and three is murder”. This came to be known as Meadow’s Law, which was used in many cases to convict women for the murders of their children. His word was taken as law. In 2002, it was shown these statistics were flawed, based on 81 court cases, and misrepresented by Meadows.
In Folbigg’s case, careful consideration of court documents shows many expert opinions were swayed by coincidence rather than evidence. The “horn effect” bias played a significant role, where Folbigg was judged to be a “bad mother” because she did not conform to the archetype maternal type. She was seen to be emotionally detached, whereas our stereotypes of mothers are grounded in assumptions that women are naturally maternal and desire children.
Motherhood is surrounded by ungrounded scientific myths around the “maternal bond” — that all mothers form an instant attachment to their children soon after birth, and that all “good” mothers would sacrifice everything for their children. Ambivalence in women about motherhood, in mothers about their children, is not something our society acknowledges or talks about honestly. Thus Folbigg’s apparent detachment from her children counted against her.
The emotional, physical and mental loads that mothers carry, especially in the early years of motherhood, take a severe toll. It is understood that Folbigg had to give up her job to look after the children, and was their sole carer, day and night, while her husband worked and slept. The children suffered from paternal sleep apnoea.
A lack of sleep and persistent exhaustion, compounded by isolation, can skew a mother’s emotional expression. But rather than examining the reasons why a mother might be suffering from mental health problems, these qualities are often counted against them in such trials.
Mad, bad and wicked — these are the labels we are very quick to assign to women in our society. Motherhood is idealised, but women are quickly punished if they happen to fall from their pedestal.
We need to examine the support available for women, as well as the errors and biases that permeate our judicial system — the ways these societal biases and stereotypes sway medical and legal opinions and decision-making. In my Fulbright fellowship to the US next year, I aim to do exactly that.
We might think the judiciary and medical domains are objective and free of biases, but it is clear they are not. It is time we consider as a society the high expectations placed on mothers, the “do-it-all” philosophy sold to them as achievable, and reflect on what society does for mothers in return.
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