Homicides of Children by Relatives in the United States in the Nineteenth Century

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on Victimization

Abstract

I am completing a book on homicides of children in the United States from colonial times to the present—a companion volume to American Homicide, my history of homicides among adults. I have gathered data from 42 counties and three cities from the nineteenth century by working through legal records, coroner’s inquests, newspapers, and vital records, and I have used capture-recapture mathematics to estimate the number of probable homicides that did not appear in the surviving records. Homicides of children by relatives increased in the North and the Southeast through the 1870s, following the inverse of the birth rate and the ratio of children to women of childbearing age—the most reliable measures of the degree to which the world was welcoming to young parents and children. The inverse relationship, however, which had prevailed since early modern times in Europe and in colonial and revolutionary America, disappeared in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when use of contraception became so widespread that homicides by relatives finally fell in parallel with the birth rate.
As time allows, I will discuss regional differences and changes in the motives and circumstances of the homicides that occurred in the nineteenth century.

Author

• Randolph Roth, Ohio State University