This week, an Eastern Cape woman, Veziwe Ntsizela, 41, murdered her children by poison and then also took her life.
Ntsizela poisoned four-year-old Iyapha Ntsizela, Phila, eight, and Inga, 12, all girls. Ntsizela was found 100m from her children’s lifeless bodies. Her 14-year-old resisted and managed to run away. Ntsizela is the second woman in as many months to take her own children’s lives before committing suicide.
Last month, another woman killed her three daughters and herself, allegedly because poverty meant she could not care for them.
TimesLIVE Premium spoke to children’s rights activist Petros Majola, who explained that depression, the reason some mothers turned into murderers, is unknown in rural areas and that there is little help when it came to mental health.
“The word depression is not in the vocabulary of African people. We don’t go for therapeutic services, counselling and debriefing ... Some light up candles and pray when we have levels of depression and anxiety and we don’t seek professional help,” he said.
Majola confirmed poverty also led desperate women to murder.
He based this on allegations of some family members and those who know the deceased mother, saying she would often go into debt to make ends meet and then use the children’s social grants to pay off these loans.
These two recent cases have brought the “rare phenomenon” of maternal filicide into focus — defined as “the deliberate act of a mother killing their child/children”.
Another expert, academic and clinical head of department at Wits University and Sterkfontein Hospital, Prof Ugash Subramaney said: “As forensic psychiatrists, we would usually see a woman like this for a forensic psychiatric observation. However, when there is concurrent suicide, one can only speculate as to what really transpired from reports [which is] a form of a psychological autopsy.
“Filicide is a rare phenomenon, and when committed by a mother, it raises many issues, as women are historically and traditionally seen as nurturing and protective,” she said.
But there are instances where anger plays a role, such as women who use their children to spite their children’s father, Majola said.
In 2021, a 24-year-old mother was arrested for killing her three-month-old daughter on a farm at Avontuur in Mpumalanga.
The mother apparently visited the child’s father at his workplace, but when she knocked, he refused to open the door. The mother apparently threatened to kill the child and threw the infant onto the ground, killing the baby.
“When the mother is no more, we normally don’t have the answers and live on assumptions based on her history from the family and community. But even if it’s poverty, the mother should leave her children behind. A mother should perhaps give away the child as opposed to killing the child. When you take the child’s life, it’s against their right to life,” he said.
On the possible help available for mothers on the brink of committing filicide, Majola stressed the need for anger management and mental health programmes.
“We talk in fancy boardrooms and go to conferences, but we don’t go to the villages, and even when we do, the affected people are not represented. Rural areas is where we find those people who seek and need the help most.”
Subramaney said the emergence of filicide has been classified as ranging from being related to motive, for example, spousal revenge, to “altruistic filicide”, where a parent kills their child or children because it is perceived to be in the interests of the child.
This was seen when South African expat Lauren Dickason murdered her three children several weeks after moving to New Zealand in September 2021. During her trial, she had hoped to persuade the court in Christchurch that she was not guilty of murder due to insanity and infanticide.
The court convicted her of murder.
“Regarding research on older children that are killed, there might be issues of altruism,” Subramaney said.
“No mother in a normal situation would conceive and carry an unborn child and go through painful labour, then decide to kill the child. We need to apply our minds and check what is going on. It is something deeper,” Majola said.
Subramaney touched on the trauma these events have on the mother’s surviving children, as in the Ntsizela case from earlier this week. She said that witnessing such a horrific incident had a traumatic effect on the surviving child that “cannot be emphasised”.
“Also, even without this, the loss of the main attachment figure is dire and can have an impact on the development of the child going forth, in various ways. Safety issues, trauma counselling and attendance to basic needs are needed here.
“A proper evaluation with a view to assessing the impact of the trauma, and a need for ongoing support in terms of physical, emotional and educational needs, are vital,” she said
Subramaney cited an upcoming study she’s part of “in which it’s clear that a greater emphasis on gender-sensitive psychosocial interventions is required, not only when a woman is referred for observation, but in the run-up to it, to prevent tragedies like this”.
“Suffice to say that destigmatising mental illness is a very important aspect of mental health — the recognition of poverty, dire circumstances, lack of support and if there is a mental health issue, the availability of access to services are vital factors,” she said.
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