Driven too far
Queensland police have revealed that a man who killed his wife and three children by dousing them with petrol and setting them alight had a history of domestic violence and was known to them.
Not just murder but murder by extreme agony.
But in comments that have shocked domestic violence campaigners, the force says they are keeping an “open mind” about suggestions the 42-year-old Rowan Baxter had been “driven too far” and are appealing to people who knew the couple to come forward to understand his motives.
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On Thursday, Det Insp Mark Thompson confirmed domestic and family violence orders had been granted against Baxter, saying there had been “a number of engagements of police” between the couple.
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“When it comes to Hannah we have dealt with her on a number of occasions and worked with the Brisbane Domestic Violence Centre in supporting Hannah throughout her family issues. And we’ve also referred Rowan Baxter to support services as well.”
But in comments that drew an immediate and angry response from domestic violence advocates, Thompson also said police would keep an “open mind” about Baxter’s motives and wanted to speak to people who knew both families.
His motives for setting a woman and three children ON FIRE???
“We need to look at every piece of information and to put it bluntly there are probably people out there in the community that are deciding which side, so to speak, to take in this investigation,” he said.
“Is this an issue of a woman suffering significant domestic violence and her and her children perishing at the hands of the husband, or is it an instance of a husband being driven too far by issues he’s suffered by certain circumstances into committing acts of this form?”
Probably the latter. Definitely probably. The children probably got too loud sometimes. Won’t somebody please think of the men who set people on fire when they get frustrated?
Yes. Next question?
And funny what it usually means by being “pushed too far”. Woman not sufficiently subservient or stood up for herself is often enough. Yes, in some cases, woman is difficult and demanding. So? Divorce, not combustion, is the proper response.
And then, when women actually defend themselves against domestic violence by killing the husband, there is always a reason why it is not self-defense. I’m not saying I approve of things like the burning bed (I do not), but a woman taking violent action at the time of abuse to protect herself and/or her children should be a classic self-defense.
No, self defense often accrues to a man who has a wife that is insufficiently willing to make him sandwiches whenever he wants them. Or is genuinely difficult, but not dangerous. She pushed him too far.
Pushed too far. So maybe this was a case of justifiable burning your family alive? Or maybe he burned his family alive in self-defense.
I know from personal observation (as a young child in a poor area) that “domestic situations” are often complicated, and aren’t always one-sided (and, rarely, one-sided with female perpetrators); before I left the broken class and community into which I was born, I witnessed more than one woman who gave as good as she got in an abusive relationship, and a few who would injure themselves and blame their husbands, even to the point of calling the police and incarcerating them. Sometimes there were good (or at least understandable) reasons for this, and sometimes it was obvious that everyone involved was ignorant, desperate, broke, and broken—and their situations were always made exponentially worse by the presence of children.
So let’s say this man was in the worst of these situations; let’s say that he was the direct victim of abuse, and that his wife, if she were taken as a victim, had inflicted her injuries on herself. In this situation, given every assumption in the man’s favour, we can ask ourselves what the ideal response would be, what a reasonable response would be, and how his actual response compares to both of these. This forms a basis for adequately judging a person’s actions.
Given these givens and no others, I believe the ideal response from the man would be to first remove himself and then (or simultaneously) remove his children from the home, take out a restraining order, and begin divorce proceedings in order to protect himself and his children from his wife. A reasonable response (though probably less ideal) would be to temporarily separate himself from his wife and his children, seek personal and family counseling, and mediation in order to attempt to repair the relationship in some way. In other words, a reasonable person would look out first for themselves and de-escalate the situation, whereas an ideal person would do that as well as doing everything in their power to protect their children.
The man’s actual decision was to end their lives. He stole any chance any of them would ever have to learn, to grow, to experience anything different from the hell they’d been living through. Even if that hell was of the woman’s making, he had no right to do this, and certainly no reason to. There were better, safer, and kinder ways to end the relationship than burning his family to death, and the fact that he did not pursue these is at once a tragedy and an indictment of his character and culpability.
Of course, in the real world, the balance of probabilities is steeply skewed the other way; very likely he was a domineering husk of a man who held his family in both jealousy and contempt, who expressed his displeasure through violence, and who could not countenance the world he’d built crumbling around him. It is quite plausible that his wife had suffered years of abuse at his hands, and was attempting to break away, with herself and her children; in short, she could well have been attempting to follow the ideal path, and he may have killed her and her children in response.
In either case, this was a despicable crime, and there was no reason for it. In a just world, it would never have happened.
Seth, your assessment is solid. I come from an abusive childhood, and most of the abuse was my mother and an older sister, with an older brother dealing out a fair share of violence on his own. I don’t think my father ever hit any of us, but was notable in not doing anything to help, either.
In spite of all of it, none of us – father down to youngest child – ever did anything like set Mom on fire or shoot her or any other act of violence. My experiences have led me to the conclusion that the acts of violence like this are usually not perpetrated by a man who is so close to the edge from being abused that there is no other way out, but usually is the one perpetrating the lion’s share of the abuse.
My experiences are far from universal, being caught in my own space and time as they are, but I have been through enough with families other than my own, as well, that it seems when the man is abused, he doesn’t usually take this sort of action. It is the abusive men that usually seem to do this. The wife, as I said, might have been difficult and even destructively so, but as your cogent analysis suggested, that is no reason for such an action.
The nature of the crime suggests to me that he is likely an abusive male who wanted full control of everything. It doesn’t seem like an act of self defense at all.
Iknklast, I am truly sorry that you had to grow up in that situation, and I wish that we could build a world in which no child is born who is not utterly wanted and unconditionally loved (which is to say a world in which women are empowered to only have children when they are ready and able to be mothers, and where men take responsibility and do everything in their power to prevent conception until they are ready and able to be fathers). It seems to me that such a world is not only possible, but infinitely preferable to the one until which the both of us were born. My own childhood was much more passively neglectful than directly abusive in that way, but needless to say, in such a better world, neither you nor I would have been conceived.
Parenthood is not an achievement, or a birthright, or an obligation. It is a lifelong commitment in which you take on the burden of responsibility for other human beings, for the better part of your life–people who perforce had no say in the matter. Parenthood is not all and everything a parent is, of course, but if one is not prepared to spend their life in service to providing their children with a solid, loving home and an excellent foundation for their own lives, then one has no business having children in the first place. People who have children as reflections of their own vanity are the worst sorts of parents, and often turn out to be the worst sorts of partners as well. And, quite often, they wind up terrorising and victimising their families because those families end up providing an inadequate reflection of them, sometimes to the point of violence, and occasionally (though not as rarely as we’d like to believe) to the point of murder.
This is s tragedy, and one which we can make sure never happens only by giving women the ability to choose when to vee mothers, and men the responsibility to choose when to be fathers.
The police blather here is putting my back up even more than usual. A close friend of mine just dropped a #MeToo post on Facebook about an assault at a historical re-enactment camp. She herself had been black-out drunk, with no knowledge of the assault, and only learned of it when the cretin contacted her over a year later to tell her what had happened, apparently seeking some sort of redemption.
She took all the steps needed for her own peace of mind, first (including the battery of tests the situation called for–thankfully, they all came back negative). Then she contacted one of the organizers of the event.
He told her that they could only act if an official police report was filed. Despite the outrageous nature of that demand, she jumped through the hoops. Of course, after all the questioning you’d expect (why did it take so long, why were you in that situation, etc), AND despite the fact that she was able to provide the police with the messages where the shithead confessed, the cops promptly dropped the whole thing down the memory hole.
And then the event organizer reneged, saying they wouldn’t do anything even with the police report on file, and when she made it clear to him that she was not going to just let it go, he pulled out the oh-so-fucking-familiar canard about how she was going to damage all the work good people did on the event. Apparently the notion that the rapist was the one responsible for that wasn’t on his radar–she was supposed to set aside her feelings of violation and betrayal for the good of the group.
So she’s posted about it publicly to explain to people why she’s withdrawing from an event she’d been attending for over a decade, and the only thing she didn’t do was name names, because she’s not sure of the possible legal ramifications there. (Seriously, if anyone has good intel on free legal advice in the Chicago NW suburban area, let me know.)
Fortunately, her friends and family are pouring in with support and succor. And she, herself, has a spirit of pure steel, so I know she’ll pull through it intact. But it’s still rage-inducing, particularly the official non-response.
Gee, if only he’d posted on Twitter resisting trans-babble. THAT might have got some proactive police attention.