My bias when it come to killer parents

I’ve been following the Dickason trial where she is charged with murdering her three daughters. I don’t want to comment on the specifics of this case, as it is before a jury but I wanted to share my reaction to when the news of their deaths was first reported.

When I heard they had been killed by their mother, my instinctive reaction was to almost feel sorry for her, and just conclude she must be mad, not bad. I was thinking “Oh the poor woman, she’ll have to live with this for the rest of her life”.

But I know that if I read about a father killing his three children, my instinctive reaction would be a deep deep despising of the man, and I would be concluding he is evil. I would want him strapped to Ixion’s flaming wheel as punishment.

Now sadly it is more common for a father to kill his children as some sort of revenge against an estranged partner, so that may be a logical factor as to why I instinctively react that way. But it is still strange that I have such deeply different instinctive responses to a parent who kills their child, based on the gender of the parent.