I am staring at the faces of women on my screen, transfixed by emotions too complex to disentangle; discernible, though, are grief, rage… and fear.
For the women pictured are some of the more than 170 who have been killed by their sons in the UK in the past 15 years. Their appalling tragedy – being killed by the person to whom they gave life – has a chilling resonance. Like many of those whose deaths have been highlighted in the 2,000 Women report by the Femicide Census, I am a professional with adored adult children and a close circle of friends. I am also frightened of my son.
The women’s backstories are all too familiar – that is, an adult son with mental health and social problems, drug misuse, neurological diagnoses and a history of controlling and violent behaviour. Invariably, the perpetrators have fallen through every net designed to safeguard them. Often such a net never existed.
It is a peculiar place to inhabit, to be simultaneously scared of your son while desperately wanting to hold and support him. It is hard enough to walk away from an abusive partner, let alone your child, whose vulnerabilities and misery claw at the heart. My son lives in a state of deep unhappiness, prey to stimuli he can’t filter, fraught social encounters, chronic anxiety and physical discomfort. Life is bewildering, painful, hard.
At 24, he is a young man with learning disabilities and no hope of any of the aspirations of neurotypical peers: no career ladder, no partner, no festivals or functional friendships. Life is something to be battled and endured. I would not spend a minute in his shoes. He needs me for support, advocacy and protection. He still sleeps with his security blanket. I can’t and won’t walk away.
But I often wish I could. On my phone is a recent text, the words “fucking cunt” written repeatedly. It was sent because I had blocked his calls after being asked the same question for 20 minutes. I was at work. He rang a further 76 times. Such messages are common, as is driving somewhere while he violently elbows the seat close to me – the list of challenging behaviours is exhaustive and exhausting. It is not just autistic meltdowns caused by an inability to regulate emotions but an expression of deep-seated mental health problems.
In the photographs, I see resilient, smart, smiling women – doing their best to live normally against a backdrop of abnormality few can relate to. I am paralysed with sorrow for them, as I am for the mainly young men who killed the one person who loved and supported them the most.
In many instances the women sought help. The inquest into the death of Sally Poynton, 44, stabbed repeatedly by her 22-year-old son Jacob Poynton-Whiting during a severe psychotic episode in June 2021, found that her death could have been avoided if her son’s mental health condition had been diagnosed sooner. She had tried more than 20 times to get help for him.
That matricide is largely linked to mental health is borne out by research that is soon to be published. It was reported last week that academics Prof Rachel Condry and Dr Caroline Miles, from the universities of Oxford and Manchester, in collaboration with the Femicide Census, have found that in cases of women being killed by their sons and grandsons from 2009-2021, 70% involved perpetrators with mental health problems.
Yet help is too often either not forthcoming or ineffectual because, in the words of the British Medical Association, our mental health and social care systems are “broken”.
In its Mental Health Report 2024, the BMA pointed to key areas it said needed “urgent action” including underfunding; lack of trained staff in health and social care; and support systems operating in silos.
In our case, my son does not merit a dedicated social worker because he isn’t perceived to be in crisis. That he isn’t thriving physically or emotionally is not reason enough to intervene. The social care system is reactively predicated – action happens when a crisis presents, not when it might have been prevented. As for mental health, like many adults on the autistic spectrum, he falls through the gaps. There have been no mental health interventions since he turned 18 and ceased to be eligible for the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service.
Yet my son desperately needs therapeutic input to help manage his anxiety, depression and emotions, alongside medications prescribed by an expert in his diagnoses, which include autism, pathological demand avoidance, ADHD and OCD. Medication is managed by a GP who, while competent, is not trained specifically in mental health and neurodivergent conditions.
Crucially, he needs help navigating his complex feelings towards me. A misfiring mother-son relationship isn’t, of course, confined to the neurodivergent, nor is it new. The Orestes complex, in which a son harbours the unconscious desire to kill his mother, is a parable dating back to ancient Greece. Friends complain of walking on eggshells around sullen adult neurotypical sons. But during flashpoints, their sons roll their eyes or behave peevishly. With a son who is hostage to unregulated emotions, flashpoints can be tragically fatal.
This is where societal structures should save lives. Mental health support that offers tools to manage emotions, joined up with a social care system that enables those with behavioural and social challenges to thrive. And residential and supported living that offers community, activities and cohesion, rather than simply warehousing vulnerable people.
Yet such a picture seems depressingly far off, and I fear this year won’t have been the last International Women’s Day marked by reports of failings that led to deaths and shattered families. It is inevitably parents, particularly mothers, who bear the brunt of systemic failures and step in to support volatile, troubled sons. That they may be in danger is often overlooked; Condry points to a case where a man’s medical notes said he shouldn’t be left alone with female staff, “but nobody had questioned whether he should live on his own with his mother”.
My son was removed from the house in 2018, not because he was attacking me but because there were minors present. I remain very involved in his care, but at times I feel unsafe. Sitting in the quiet of my house, it seems dramatic to write these next words, but had he remained living with me, I believe my picture could have been among those women. I can’t say it never will be.
