How does it happen that the most intense, loving bond between mother and child ends in murder?
The most uncommon form of family violence is this – when a mother is murdered by her own child. We call that murder parricide, when a child, now an adult, murders a parent.
Once, that number was utterly horribly reliable. Awful but reliable. Maybe 12 or so a year. But in the past three years, there has been a sudden surge. First 14, then 18 and, in 2025, 20, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology’s research manager Samantha Bricknell. That figure of 20 represents an increase of just under 70 per cent from the normal, the regular, although there should be nothing normal or regular about murder. And in some of those cases, both parents would have been killed.
This is not an increase because of population. It’s an increase because of pressure.
Last weekend in NSW alone, a 90-year-old woman was allegedly stabbed by her 47-year-old grandson in a Bondi Beach unit. Four hours later, police were called to an incident in northern NSW where they found the decapitated body of a 70-year-old woman. The woman’s son has now been charged with murder.
Researchers tell me they aren’t sure if these figures are just a blip. What they also can’t give me, with any degree of certainty, is the motive for these murders.
How does that glorious, nurturing relationship break down? I can give you a million reasons why men murder their partners and former partners. But when men and women murder their parents, the reasons aren’t about control. I fear it’s because life has spun out of control. It happens in every state and territory in Australia. NSW is the worst but it happens across the nation.
And as children now live with their parents for longer and longer, and as financial pressures grow across the country, we are already seeing a surge in what’s commonly called elder abuse. Yes, adult children are pressuring their parents for money, for property, in a community where it’s just not always possible to do that for yourself. Those adult children are hurting those who nurtured them. Could it be that the surge in elder abuse, now at a rate of one in six in the community, is ending in a surge of elder murder?
Yumi Lee, CEO of the Older Women’s Network, sees this result as an accumulation of all the system failures. We aren’t seeing enough prevention, early intervention or mental health supports.
“Everything has been cut to the bone, all our support systems are crumbling,” she said.
And one of those systems, how we relate to each other, the ordinary personal relationships we have, is also breaking down. Senior research manager at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, Rachel Carson, describes it as a fracturing of family and the idea that we have responsibility towards older people, the surprising ageism in every aspect of our culture.
Carson reminds me of the government’s national plan to end elder abuse, to ensure that older people are safe and valued, heard and respected, to live, in the words of the plan itself “free from abuse and mistreatment”. The plan itself recognises it’s aspirational. But the journey to this pain and chaos doesn’t start when someone turns 60. Every single system in this country aids the journey to a country where so little honours age and experience – while at the same time urgently needing the labour of women and men in their 60s, 70s and 80s, so long as nobody has to pay for it. This week’s Intergenerational Report showed us just how much Australia relies on unpaid labour to keep the wheels turning.
Meanwhile, our gears grind, our ability to get along, to compromise, to listen, diminish daily. Our anguish, our frustration, grows daily.
Bricknell says the data from the last three years shows a spike in parricide. She’s not sure if it’s actually a trend and like all careful researchers wants to wait until there is more data. But she also acknowledges that UK research revealed that in some cases of parricide, parents were just not able to get the kind of health support they urgently needed for their adult children.
The researcher says that the longer we live in a society where adult children are forced to live with their parents because of increased intergenerational wealth inequality, the more likely we are to see increased parricide – there are, Bricknell says, financial motivations around some of the murders.
“A lot of these individuals are living with their parents because they can’t live independently,” she says.
It’s not just money, it’s about mental health. Plus, Australia is getting older, much older. That means fewer younger people to share the care of an increasingly needy population.
“There’s a risk that parricide is going to increase. The mental health system is already under immense stress,” she says.
Parents are living with children who can’t find their way in life. It’s a structural unfairness that can only hurt us into the future – not just the abuse, not just the murder, but the effect that has on the perpetrators for a lifetime.
Among the murders, among the thousands of incidents of elder abuse, this reaches into every single part of our lives. We must demand more of the health system and we must demand governments fix it, fix it and fund it.
Jenna Price is a regular columnist.
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