SHE MADE ME DO IT

It's considered the ultimate act of domestic violence, but the horrific crime of "spouse revenge filicide" - where a parent kills their own children to get back at their former partner - is on the rise in Australia

When Ingrid Poulson ended her marriage to her abusive husband, Phitak Kongsom, in 2003, he left a menacing note on her car threatening to kill himself and take her with him. When it became clear she would not be returning to their home in Sydney, he sent her a letter warning he was going to cause her "big hurt".

In the end, he inflicted a punishment more shocking than her murder or his own death. He killed their two children instead.

"Nothing tops the crime of retaliatory filicide," says Melbourne criminologist Judy Wright. "For the surviving parent, living with the guilt that her children were killed to pay her back for ending a relationship... is the most agonising punishment a man can possibly inflict on a woman."

Tragically, while overall homicides in Australia appear to be on the decline, filicides are not. In 2019, a study of 238 child murders in Australia from 2000-2012 showed that when children died in domestic murders, 18 per cent were killed by a biological parent or step-parent - and the perpetrators were generally men. Less than a third of revenge killers were the children's biological mothers.

According to the study by the Monash-Deakin Universities' Filicide Research Hub, while domestic murders had declined in Australia, the filicide rate remained higher than in the UK and Canada. And where a motive had been established for the crime, a major contributing factor was a recent marital breakdown.

An inquest into the 2020 deaths of newly separated Hannah Clarke and her three children backed this up, reinforcing the study's findings that it's not only women who are in danger when domestic violence turns deadly.