‘WE CAN’T EXPECT TO BE IN TOTAL CONTROL OF OUR KIDS’
Dr Marianne Trent is a clinical psychologist and author of The Grief Collection.
How does a parent come to terms with the fact that their child is a killer? It’s something a lot of us have wondered since the heinous murder of Brianna Ghey. Although I haven’t worked on this particular case, as a clinical psychologist this question comes up a lot in my work. Dealing with something as emotionally complex as discovering your child is a murderer is a process similar to that of grief. From early stages of disbelief, yearning and bargaining, they may be asking themselves, ‘What if we could have done something differently?’ While, unlike Esther Ghey, their child is still alive, they will be grieving a different sort of loss. As parents, we will often tell our children we love them, but that doesn’t mean we like everything they’ve done. Of course, Brianna’s killers, Scarlett and Eddie, are extreme examples. It can’t be expected that their families will switch off the love they have for them, but it will likely make their feelings more complex. It may take a lot of work and time before they can access the happy memories of their children again, without feeling guilty for doing so.
When young people kill, an instant response can be to connect their behaviour with trauma in childhood. It often is the case that people who go on to harm others come from chaotic backgrounds. But Scarlett and Eddie have been widely reported to be from stable, loving families. An absence of an obvious origin can cause accusations to float that the perpetrators ‘must have been born evil’. But just because they do not fit the classic model of would-be killers doesn’t mean they don’t have complex trauma. Describing Scarlett and Eddie as evil is