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Infanticide noun the murder of an infant born alive; the murder or killing of a newly born or young child; child murder Infanticide noun one who commits the crime of infanticide; one who kills an infant Origin: Infanticide Infanticide is the intentional killing of infants. Chambers 20th Century Dictionary 0. National Library of Medicine 1. Infanticide The killing of infants at birth or soon after. Examples of infanticide in a Sentence Rebecca West: Popularity rank by frequency of use infanticide The awkward case of 'his or her'.
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Infanticida (Spanish Edition) [Joaquín Dicenta] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This is a pre historical reproduction that was curated. Infanticida (Spanish Edition) [Joaquín Dicenta] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Infanticida, de Joaquín Dicenta. Joaquín Dicenta fue un.
Secrets of Atlantis, mysteries of space and parade of horrors coming up in AfterShock Comics," 2 May Terrestrial species like primates and rodents have been known to commit infanticide , and the behavior has been infrequently observed among dolphins. First Known Use of infanticide , in the meaning defined at sense 1. Learn More about infanticide.
Resources for infanticide Time Traveler! Explore the year a word first appeared. Dictionary Entries near infanticide infanta infante infanthood infanticide infantile infantile paralysis infantilism.
Statistics for infanticide Look-up Popularity. Time Traveler for infanticide The first known use of infanticide was in See more words from the same year. With this change in motivation, infanticide simply becomes a female and maternal crime. To confirm that earlier light penalties were not intended to favor women, we can observe that sentences have now increased somewhat for the mother from 4 to 12 years and instead decreased for accomplices. What types of abandonment can diminish her guilt, assuming that she is mentally sane?
The only motive for abandonment acknowledged by law as an attenuating factor for killing her own newborn while the killing of his or her own child is still considered aggravated homicide is the lack of health assistance at the moment of birth.
Moral abandonment may be added to material abandonment, but — here the legislator is very clear — only as a consequence. The main three are the following:. In fact, whenever a mother prefers not to go to the hospital she cannot legally be considered abandoned and therefore justified if she kills her baby, as sentenced by the Italian Supreme Court in This explains why criminologists call it a crime in extinction, while the public perceives it to be on the increase.
Even during judicial enquiries, the use of psychiatric examination — an increasingly frequent means of appraisal in general — has become constant, in the attempt to explain a crime which appears to be socially inconceivable and which is beyond the imagination even of the closest family members of the perpetrator.
The systematic resort to psychiatric expertise to establish the mental insanity of the women under investigation is moreover used to avert the most serious charge of child murder otherwise required by the tight requirements of the law on infanticide. But even in the very limited cases which allow the application of the law of , the advisability of keeping it has been questioned. On the one hand, this law refuses preliminarily to take into account any psychological conditions attached to maternity; on the other, it only recognizes serious psychiatric pathology, which, as a result, excludes legal responsibility, as in the case of any crime committed in conditions of mental insanity.
We all know that juridical definitions are oriented by certain conceptions regarding gender. The latter measures were approved via referendum by the Italian people, a majority of whom are nominally Catholic, but who do not follow the dictates of the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, the most recent law on infanticide incorporates an almost 19 th C. She committed the act not because she gave birth without any help, but because she was desperate enough to have a child without a father, and thus risked losing not only her highly acclaimed honor but any means of sustenance, male family protection if she had one , and above all the main possibility for a woman which was a matrimony.
She was guilty of only a minor crime because she was entitled to recognition as a victim, not of the natural event of childbirth, but of a cultural mentality which discriminated against her and ruined her life. When exactly does the act itself take place?
In the present version, the timing involved indicates a strict and explicit reference to a traumatic event, female by nature especially if there is no medical assistance. Interestingly enough, the same timing was applied before to male perpetrators of infanticide as well, who certainly did not give birth.
The reasoning behind this can be understood by examining the previous law of , which was extremely precise so much so that it was cut: Those few who knew of it, beside the mother, could certainly be counted on to keep the double secret: Finally that question which remains unsolved by the thesis of the female nature of this crime has an answer: This is a long-lasting risk, in my opinion, which we usually attribute to the 19th century positivistic idea of woman but is still evident in science, law, and historical research as well. In Italian law, the woman perpetrator of infanticide is, on the one hand, seen sociologically as living on the fringe of society so much so that she does not even have access to free health care, normally available to everyone , and, on the other hand, as a physical body with neither will nor emotions.
Strangely enough, some female members in the Italian Parliament from the Communist and Catholic parties were the ones who requested, in the late Seventies, that the new law ignore psychological and subjective conditions of the mother who committed infanticide, reasoning that these considerations diminished the dignity of a woman and were a by-product of male chauvinism! Emotions are normally attributed to women, while men are usually recognized as exercising a rational control over their emotions But here again the tables are turned: This is the last aspect to which I would like to draw some attention, aware of having had to neglect many others.
When from our sources we are able to uncover not only an isolated woman but a whole network of individuals surrounding her, we are in a better position to understand not only what and how those men and women felt, but how people thought about how to feel and express their feelings We can perceive shared social values — honor, the legitimacy of birth and maternity, life itself — together with a variety of different individual gender-oriented expectations, emotions and choices.
The law of has finally affirmed that honor, as an excuse for infanticide, no longer represents a value in Italian society; but on the other hand it brought forward a naturalized and a-historical idea of maternity.
In this respect too, it seems that a legislation which should have been modernizing was not aware of historical transformation and of the possibilities for the present times that knowledge of the past might have suggested. Ottavia was not his lover — he had gone to her a few times, paying her as a prostitute, and other men went too. Who were these other men, the judge asked.
Arnot and Cornelie Usborne, of Gender and crime in modern Europe What made the difference between the two were not the physical conditions of the mother, including puerperal fever, but rather her psychological state. We will examine these shortly. Literally How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. European Spanish Mexican Spanish trabajo infantil. Instead, the most recent law on infanticide incorporates an almost 19 th C.
Raffaello gave the name of the local carpenter and a few others, but they all denied any involvement when interrogated. She was a good woman, people said; he had been her only lover for a year, and everybody knew it. Ottavia said that Raffaello was with her when the baby was born; as soon as it came out he had let it fall and crushed it in his hands. After this he disappeared for a number of days. When he came back, she wanted to leave him but he convinced her to spend one more night together. When they saw each other again a week later, she was by then even more determined to interrupt the relationship.
But when she told him so, he struck her, tried to rape her and threatened to disinter the corpse, and tell everyone that the baby was dead. Ottavia responded that he was the one who had killed it. But she had been concerned about the baby and had even called the midwife to her home more than once, as the midwife herself later confirmed. On the other hand, her lover had reassured her that he would take care of everything, even the midwife, and would have paid her to take the baby to the Spedale degli Innocenti, the well known foundling hospital in Florence Ottavia was certainly not mad -the question of her insanity did not arise 26 —, nor was she foolish — she had already had two children before her husband died.
Nor was she the typical seduced and abandoned woman.
We are not interested at this point in concluding that she was innocent, that she did not murder her child. The issue is that her story makes us think that the stereotype that infanticide was a typically female and thus minor crime does not hold, because too limiting and often misleading. I began by saying that Ottavia had been accused of having committed an infanticide, while Raffaello was accused of homicide. This difference can be ascribed to the fact that their trial occurred in Florence, just a few months before the promulgation of the first Penal Code of the unified Kingdom of Italy by Zanardelli.
The two lovers were thus not judged according to the Italian laws, whose change I have here analysed; rather, they were judged according to the more advanced Tuscan Penal Code of Already at that time, this Penal Code considered infanticide as a mother-related crime as the Italian laws acknowledged only in , when this was committed against a child born out of wedlock.