In Russia, dozens of women are tried every year for killing their own children. Mothers with several children as well as successful managers are among the accused. And it’s not just Russia. Psychiatrists in the USA have calculated that one in four mothers has thought of killing her child at least once in her life. Why do mothers kill their children and how do they live afterwards? Names in the text have been changed to protect the rights and legitimate interests of minors involved in illegal activities.
When Petr Krotenko came home from work, his apartment in southwest Moscow was dark and quiet. He turned on the bathroom light and saw his seven-month-old son. He was underwater in the bathtub. “It was immediately clear that he was dead,” Krotenko recalls. His wife, Alena, was not at home. The next day, passersby found her on the shore of a suburban lake. When questioned, Alena said that she had killed her son and was going to kill herself. She drank a bottle of vodka on the shore, walked toward the water, and lost consciousness. Two days before her son’s death, she asked her husband to take her to the hospital. “I didn’t really pay attention – she was taking pills, I thought everything would be fine,” Peter recalls. During questioning, the woman said, “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to take care of the child. It was better to end it so that no one would suffer. According to Alena’s testimony, she fed her son, “talked to him about what would be better for him – to live or to die,” filled the bathtub and submerged him five times, looking into his eyes. “All of this could have been avoided if someone had said a few words to her about the possibility of depression,” her husband says. “Future motherhood classes should include at least one class on this topic!” In May, Alena was diagnosed with “polymorphic personality disorder” and ordered to undergo compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital.
We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what will happen next. Episodes The end of history: Podcast Advertising Alena, an economist, met Petr, a chemist, at a lecture in Gorky Park. They dated for three years, got married and had a baby boy. The pregnancy was wanted: the couple bought a dozen pajamas, a crib and a baby carriage in advance. The birth took place in the paid department of the Perinatal Medical Center, headed by the renowned obstetrician Mark Kurzer. The cost of a pregnancy management contract starts at 200 thousand rubles. While on maternity leave, Alena took classes for pregnant women. “In five or six classes, they taught her how to feed and swaddle and talked about childhood diseases and care. And they said that childbirth is magical, that everything will be wonderful, and that motherhood is a gift. They didn’t even discuss the possibility of mental or psychological problems,” Krotenko recalls. Peter didn’t know that his wife had seen a psychiatrist in the past: “She had a psychopathic episode in the past when she heard voices, saw some demons, but I only found out after the birth. She recovered, and now we know that the childbirth triggered stress and a relapse. After the birth, the boy came down with pneumonia and was admitted to the intensive care unit. He recovered, but Alena was losing sleep. “She said she couldn’t handle the child. Later we went to a psychiatrist. She basically understood what was going on and prescribed medication for my wife, but it seemed to me that she didn’t warn us very well about the possible dangerous consequences, that we had to be careful not to leave the mother alone with the child,” says Petr. Her son was a month and a half old at the time. The pills improved the situation, but not for long. It was obvious that the woman was very tired, he continues. “We went to doctors for several months,” Peter says. “No one warned us about anything.” Alena’s case was heard in one of the Moscow courts this spring. Peter attended every hearing. He stood by the “aquarium” where his wife was, asking if the T-shirts fit her, if she felt hot in the remand center. His mother-in-law came too – in the hallway she talked about her growing granddaughter, Alena’s brother’s daughter. She was already crawling in her crib, reaching for the phone and calling her mother. “There was no malicious intent, just a mental breakdown,” says Peter. “If she had met the right doctors, if I had taken her to the hospital as she requested, this would not have happened.”
Peter’s confusion is understandable: he and his wife encountered one of the main problems of infanticide, not only in Russia. According to American criminologist Philip Resnik, 40% of women visited a psychiatrist or other doctor shortly before the crime, which, in his words, “discourages” him. Russian criminologists, on the other hand, say that 80% of women with various complaints – headaches, insomnia, menstrual cycle disorders – visited a doctor before committing the crime. Alena herself did not want to communicate with the BBC correspondents. “I do not want to describe my situation and give my point of view, because it is too personal for me and the memories are too painful. Besides, my case is quite specific and not widely known, so the information about it will not be of much help to the general cause,” she wrote from the pre-trial detention center during the trial.
Krotenko is not right. This becomes clear when the defendants in the corridors of the courts in Vladimir, Nizhny Novgorod, Kemerovo or in the Kaluga colonies hear from us about the investigation of similar cases. Families who have suffered the death of a child and the trial of its mother are relieved to hear that they are not alone. This understudied and taboo crime is called phililicide. It is the killing of a child by its mother. There are subtypes. Neonaticide – when a mother kills a newborn. Infanticide – when the victim is less than one year old. According to Resnik, the risk of becoming a homicide victim is particularly high in the first five years of life. Parents most often kill children under the age of two, and most often in the winter – around four o’clock in the morning. More than 20 countries, including Brazil, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, and Turkey, have special infanticide laws. They mitigate the punishment for mothers whose victims are children under the age of one because, since the beginning of the 20th century, a mother’s mental equilibrium has been considered disturbed after childbirth or breastfeeding. In Russia there is a separate article for filicide – Article 106 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (murder of a newborn by a mother). However, it applies only to infants younger than one month, not one year. The maximum penalty is five years’ imprisonment. All other child murderers are prosecuted under section “b” of part two of Article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (murder of a minor) – up to 20 years in prison. There are no exact statistics for Russia as a whole. The Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of Russia reports that in 2018, 33 such cases were brought to court. Employees of the Department of Criminalistics of the Kuban State University believe that the number of undisclosed episodes is eight times higher than the number of criminal cases.
“All my friends have been asking me lately, ‘Have these cases become more common? I say no. This has always been the case,” says a forensic psychiatrist, the leading researcher at the Margarita Kachaeva Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry. “Every month, three or four of the 20 beds in our women’s ward are occupied by child murderers. The figures are different in other hospitals and regions.” Accountant from Vladimir. Teacher from Nizhny Novgorod. Prosecutor from Belgorod. Unemployed person from Volgograd. Consultant on social issues from Bratsk City Hall. Waitress from Ryazan. Graduate of the Institute of Open Design from Moscow. Mother of many children and housewife from Derbent. Saleswoman from Tomsk. In over thirty stories we have worked on, all the heroines are different. Despite the stereotype of the half-homeless, perpetually drunk, drug-addicted mother, many child murderers have husbands, homes, jobs – and no addictions. According to research conducted by the Kuban State University in Russia, women at the peak of their fertility, aged 30-40, are the ones who kill children. More than 74% of them have never been registered in a neuropsychiatric clinic, and half of them were married with children and experienced postnatal mental disorders. Doctors know that it is often after childbirth that a latent mental illness, of which the mother was not even aware, is aggravated. This means that a woman could be living with a chronic disorder that does not manifest itself in normal life. Pregnancy, childbirth, or menopause are the three major stresses on a woman’s body that can awaken her.
– Emergency medical assistance. Hello Emergency, my child has died. What did you do? – “He died.” – How is that? Well, that’s the way it is. – Where is this? Kukushkina, only one house. And was he sick with you or what? – Chest, just arrived. – Last name, first name, patronymic. – Frolova Anna Nikolaevna. “We recently took you to give birth.” Yes, yes, yes… – And how did she die, did she just die? Did she eat or sleep? Well, actually, it’s all my fault. How does it work? – Well, there you have it. “You will be imprisoned. No, I’m not scary, I sympathize with you very much”. Anna Frolova, 38, called the emergency services of the city of Vladimir on the morning of July 7, 2018. In the fall, the transcript of her conversation with the paramedic became one of the pages in a criminal case initiated under Article 106 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
Frolova, an educator by profession, gave birth to a daughter in June 2018. This was her third child. Frolova’s sons, aged 18 and 10, referred to their sister as a wanted baby during the interview. However, as the due date approached, Anna’s condition deteriorated: her gastritis worsened and she was put on bed rest due to the risk of miscarriage. The delivery began earlier than expected. The girl was born prematurely, and Frolova became very ill. “The pain was constant, unbearable. I didn’t feel anything else. I completely shut myself off from that pain, because I have an endless, unbearable pain in my stomach,” she says. “The C-section scar quickly became infected. I was in a stupor in the maternity ward: I can’t do this, I can’t do this.” Anna was called to see a psychologist. He advised her to relax, to imagine that she was at the seaside, and when she returned home, to see a psychiatrist. “And I say: I have unbearable pain, I can’t do it! I could climb the wall from the pain!” – She says. What happened next might have alarmed not only Frolova’s husband, children and friends, but also the neighbors and the police. First, Anna ran away from the maternity hospital without the baby and called a taxi. She returned with her husband to pick up her daughter. The husband soon left for Moscow – he got a job with a rotating schedule. Anna washed her apartment several times with “Belizna” – “for disinfection, I infected you all with the mess from the suture”. And she spent the night with a baby at her friend’s house – complaining that she couldn’t be alone at home. The next day she left her children with her friend, saying she was going to buy a crib, but in fact she went to the cemetery to visit her mother’s grave. On the morning of the third day, she walked barefoot out of the house with the baby in her arms – and couldn’t explain where she was going to the police who arrested her. “Maybe I sought help then, even though I don’t remember anything. I was left alone with this pain, so I went for help,” Anna recalls. Her mother-in-law picked her up from the police station and brought her home. They put two-week-old Vika in a stroller, fed her, and Anna’s mother-in-law turned on the television. As Frolova’s mother-in-law later told investigators, Anna approached the stroller several times during this time, worried about whether her daughter was breathing, and after an hour “stood next to the stroller with a white pillow and put it there. The mother-in-law decided she was making the child more comfortable and continued to watch television. Around 10 a.m., Anna received a phone call from her cousin asking when she should come to congratulate her on the birth of her daughter. “Don’t you know?” her cousin replied. “We are having a funeral. I am pushing the dead body of my child in a baby carriage. I am rotting and I have given him a festering infection. That’s why he died,” investigators quoted Frolova as saying in the case materials. At 11 a.m. Anna began to call the ambulance. As stated in the case, she met the doctor at the entrance with the words: “Look, it looks like I killed him.” In court, the doctor said that the child was not breathing, that there was a pillow on top of him, and that there were dark blue-purple spots on his body due to lack of oxygen. After determining “clinical death,” the doctor administered an injection of adrenaline, performed indirect heart massage, and administered artificial respiration. The infant vomited and began to breathe. With a preliminary diagnosis of “strangulation? Post resuscitation illness”, he was taken to the hospital. On August 1, Vika was released. Her mother, accused of attempted murder of her own child, was sent to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. She spent three months there. “When the doctor prescribed the pills – amitriptyline, zolastu, elzepam – I felt much better. Injections, vitamins. The experts recognized me as mentally unstable. Their questions were aimed at finding out if I had postpartum stress and psychosis. And they found out. If they had found out earlier, there might not have been anything. I have said this many times – I need professional help, I am in a strange state,” Frolova said. Anna does not admit guilt – she says she did not try to strangle her daughter, there was no pillow in the stroller, and she called an ambulance because she was afraid for the baby’s breathing. According to her, the doctor from the ambulance is lying, the spots on the baby appeared after the injection.
Anna’s mother-in-law refused to testify in court – she said she did not see a pillow. He was diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia in Frolova Hospital. “It should be understood that this is not necessarily complete insanity. When society speaks of “mental disorder,” they immediately think of conversations with demons and straitjackets. This is a mistake. Child murderers with mental disorders before committing a crime can be socialized, never having been treated by psychiatrists and living a normal life,” says Professor Kachaeva of the Serbsky Center.
Second only to schizophrenia in such cases is the diagnosis of “reactive postpartum state”. These are temporary mental disorders, including severe psychotic depression and especially dangerous postpartum psychosis. It occurs in one or two women out of a thousand. Its symptoms can include sensual delusions and paranoia. Schizophrenia, psychosis, reactive states – all these diagnoses exclude the sanity of the criminals. Such women are exempted from criminal punishment and sent for compulsory treatment. The same is demanded by the prosecutor in Frolova’s case.
At one of the recent court hearings, Anna came with her one-year-old daughter Vika – there was no one to leave her with. They sat side by side in the courtroom. The child who stopped breathing for two minutes a year ago. His mother, who investigators say tried to strangle him. And the doctor who gave him artificial respiration. “How dare you? Why do you lie? The boomerang will come back to you! You won’t have any children of your own!” – Anna shouted at the doctor. The trial of her case continues.
Serious mental illness develops against the background of depression, which is diagnosed in the majority of such mothers. Depression begins as neurotic (everything is out of control, weakness), and when the crime is committed, it takes on the character of psychosis. “It is a melancholy that reaches a psychotic level. Ideas of worthlessness and the meaninglessness of existence appear,” Kachaeva explains.
On the morning of February 17, 2019, 21-year-old resident of Ufa, Arina Rafina, pulled her daughter, who was having breakfast with macaroni and meat, away from the table and went with her to the balcony of the ninth floor. An hour later, the woman was supposed to go with her mother to see a psychiatrist, she requested the appointment herself. However, instead of waiting for her relatives, she decided to end her life together with her daughter.
Closed and quiet since childhood, Rafina got married at 19. She gave birth while her husband was serving in the army and lived with her parents for the first year. After giving birth, the neurologist ordered her to undergo additional tests, but Rafina never made it to the doctor’s office. According to the mother-in-law, when the son-in-law returned from the army, he treated her daughter badly. “He often insulted her. Humiliate her. You’re ugly, you’re an idiot, look at you, you’re like an old woman. He forbade us to communicate with her when she tried to come back and live with us – he would come and take the child,” Irina said.
Her son-in-law, a professional children’s masseur, told the court that he had only raised his hand against Rafina once – slapping her and dragging her face across the floor where there were children’s excrements that she hadn’t had time to wipe up. He refused to speak to the BBC. Mother said to Arina: either get a divorce or stop complaining about him, bear with him and get along with him, after all, you chose him. Now she regrets those words: “Well, in the old days we were taught to endure.” She came to the court after the funeral of her unborn grandson – her second daughter’s pregnancy was terminated in the eighth month. In Irina’s hands is Valocordin and a phone with a photo of her granddaughter, whom her daughter tried to kill. Arina and her daughter survived – there was a big snowdrift under the window of the 9th floor. As passersby dug them out of the snow, Rafina muttered that voices told her to do this. The mother was taken from the hospital to a detention center, and the child was given to the father.
The number of offers should remain: The day before her suicide attempt, Arina called the police to her house, saying that her husband was sharpening knives to kill her (he was actually sharpening keys for the front door), and then she didn’t sleep for two days, walking around the apartment in a jacket. She barely made it a few hours before she had to go to the doctor. Psychiatrists have diagnosed Rafina with schizophrenia. And women with schizophrenia and women in deep depression often talk about the reasons for killing a child like this: “I make it better for him”, “I am too bad a mother for him”, “This world is so monstrous that it is better for the child not to live in it”. Psychiatrists and criminologists have a term – “mercy killing”. The same phenomenon is called “extended suicide” – when a mother decides to end her own life and takes her children with her. “She looks at the child, two or three children, and thinks: why should they suffer in such a world?” says Kachaeva of the Serbsky Center. “After the crime, it never gets easier for them. Then they end their lives by suicide – if not at the first attempt, then at the second or third.”
“We mostly deal with cases where someone was able to stop a woman from doing something,” says the expert. “For example, there was a woman recently who was chasing after her three- and five-year-old children with sleeping pills, trying to poison them. Her husband walked in and saw a package of some pills that were being sold to her without a prescription. He stopped her and prevented the crime. Although he was partly to blame – he cheated and disappeared. “Relatives said she had delusional ideas about aliens – something everyone suddenly remembered as soon as the criminal case appeared. Before that, few people were concerned about her condition,” Kachaeva recalls. “She began to recover quickly in the hospital. If treatment is started on time, antipsychotics work well. Those sent for compulsory treatment are examined every six months by a committee of doctors. Then a district judge comes to the hospital to review these cases. “Six months is more than enough, even for the most severe cases. Young women who have not been treated before respond particularly well. They visibly improve, regain their health, and begin to say: oh my God, doctors, what have I done, how am I supposed to live now,” Kachaeva explains.
With the permission of doctors and a judge, the woman can return home. According to the law, she must register at a psychiatric clinic and undergo outpatient treatment. Medication is free. After two years, if the patient responds well to treatment, she will be removed from the registry, says the psychiatrist.
About 15% of mothers who kill their children do not have a clear mental disorder, according to doctors. In these cases, specialists write in their conclusions about “emotional stress from a psychologically traumatic life situation”. “During the assessment, you’re sometimes amazed at how one person can have all these problems at once,” says Kachaeva. “Complications from the flu during pregnancy, the mother died, the husband left before the birth, she lost her job, and they’re being evicted from the rented apartment because there’s no way to pay for it.” This social maladjustment leads to mental instability. And when a third element appears – the so-called trigger factor – then a crime occurs. “The trigger for women is most often a personal situation related to a partner,” Kachaeva continues. “Insult, humiliation, abandonment, infidelity. Not showing up for New Year’s, not wishing you a happy birthday. In general, women are very sensitive to this kind of relationship with a partner.
In the winter of 2018, the brigadier of a poultry farm, Yelizaveta Zharova, left the court of the city of Chebarkul, near Chelyabinsk. The 30-year-old mother of three became pregnant with her fourth child in the spring of 2017 – but she had nothing to raise him with. According to her lawyer, Zharova planned to have an abortion, missed the deadline, gave birth at home in the village in the fall, and threw the newborn into a cesspool. The child suffocated. The neighbor reported Zharkova’s actions to the police.
Elizaveta’s husband was identified as the victim. However, he told the court that he had forgiven his wife, had no claims against her, and asked that the case be dropped. The court granted the request. Elizaveta was released from the courtroom. There was hysteria in the area: local media published columns calling for a 15-year sentence, neighbors were outraged, saying the murderer was walking free. “The trial exhausted me,” her lawyer recalls. “Zhurova herself is a difficult and complex person with a very rational approach. She went on the NTV show to talk about this case.” Elisabeth’s family moved to the Tomsk region. On their page in the social network “VKontakte” there are photos of their sons: here they are sledding, here the older one is at school, and this is a family feast. At the end of the school year they learn songs and go to barbecues. Zhurov does not want to remember the trial. “I absolutely do not want to think about it. It’s been a year and I don’t need to dwell on it,” she told the BBC.
Every few years, activists in both Russia and the United States try to soften the punishment for mothers who try to take the lives of newborn babies. They advocate giving such women a second chance. Currently, however, in both Russia and the United States, that chance depends on the judge assigned to the case.
That same winter of 2018, in Kemerovo, a day’s drive from the Zharyovs’ home, 36-year-old Anastasia Krokhina was on trial. Like Zharyova, the mother of two preschoolers gave birth to another son in the summer of 2017. The family is not wealthy, but “good and tidy”, the children are “always clean”, say their acquaintances. According to them, the father of the newborn helped them, but he was married – and Anastasia suffered from her situation. Four months later, on a sleepless November night in the flu-infected heat, Krokha threw away the crying baby she couldn’t calm. The baby continued to cry. Both the mother and the baby had a temperature “below 40,” according to Krokhina’s friends. In the predawn twilight, Anastasia prepared a mixture and fed it to her son. He continued to cry, and the mother, trying to calm him, pressed her palm to his forehead. Finally, the son fell asleep. The swelling of the skull fractures increased gradually, but there was no visible fracture in the leg. Krokhina was frightened at noon – the child slept too long. She rushed to the neighbors and called an ambulance herself. Doctors confirmed the death. Krokhin was not charged with murder, but with recklessly causing the victim’s death. The examination found her sane. The case was considered in two days. The court gave Krokhin no second chance and sentenced her to seven years in prison. Her older children are being raised by a retired grandmother.
“It was a great sadness for the family. He was a cherished, beloved child, a chubby one, she adored him. She cried throughout the hearing. They even refused to appeal the verdict,” recalls the lawyer familiar with the case. According to him, such cases are rarely conducted with inpatient psychiatric expertise and are limited to outpatient settings: “They come to the clinic and sometimes spend no more than five minutes there. All requests for Nastya’s re-examination were rejected with the message: “One is enough.” Despite the enormous number of extenuating circumstances, such conditions are obtained”.
In social networks remained photos of Krokhina in a white dress in the eighth month of pregnancy, a massage scheme for children’s feet, and a recipe for chicken casserole. And many quotes from the “Children” community: “There is one little person in my life that I want to live for – it’s my child. That is happiness!” Investigators wouldn’t have found Elena Karimova if it weren’t for a fire in an abandoned vegetable warehouse in the town of Semenov, Nizhny Novgorod region. In a roll of insulation, firefighters discovered the charred remains of children – a two-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl. An investigation revealed that the children had been strangled and then burned to death. On April 27, 2018, investigators arrested Karimova and accused her of killing her children – Suleyman and Khadija.
Later, Karimova changed her story, saying she strangled the children because she feared threats from “enemies of her ex-husband”. According to her version, they got into the car with her and forced her to do everything. However, the mentioned route was not confirmed by the tracker, and on the video the woman was alone all the time – the people described by Elena were not found by the investigators.
In the outpatient examination, Karimov, like Kvashkova, was found to be mentally healthy. She was sent to prison for 19 years. Andrei Kirillov, the head of the Nizhny Novgorod Investigative Committee’s department for the investigation of particularly serious crimes, was surprised when he received the results of the examination: “It’s hard to believe that a mother of conscious children can be so cold and calculating in the relentless pursuit of a goal,” he told the BBC. The investigators did not ask for a review. Neither did the first lawyer. Only the new defense counsel requested it in the final instance at the Supreme Court of Russia. However, the court refused, and the verdict remained in force. All the participants in such criminal cases talk about the importance of repeat exams.
Kachaeva talks about one of the examinations in the Serbsky Center in May. The woman, accused of murdering an eight-month-old child, came to them after two examinations – in Saratov and Volgograd. One commission found her ill, the other found her sane. The Serbsky Center confirmed that the defendant is ill.
During the interrogation, Karimova said that she wanted to get rid of her children because she considered them a burden. Psychologist and criminal profiler Ekaterina Vaske, along with investigators, spoke with her. “I was struck by the level of cynicism. She spent a long time telling me all the details in the most nightmarish way. Which of her own children she killed first, how she burned her daughter and son, which child’s eyelashes burned faster – whose eyelashes, whose lips,” Vasko says. “She talked a lot about herself. She would demonstrate her ‘exceptionalism’, her ‘bright’ life, and also try to evoke pity for herself. For example, she said that she had been sexually abused by her deceased father at the age of six,” the expert said.
The following excerpt from Karimova’s outpatient examination records quotes her mother’s interrogation: “I have no knowledge that my husband raped our daughter when she was six years old. But I have no doubt that he could have done it. He had such inclinations. Later, our daughter wrote me a letter saying that her father had raped her.
According to the research of Russian forensic psychiatrists, in 80% of cases child murderers grew up in dysfunctional families – and in 85% of cases there were conflicts in their own marriages. These figures, according to researchers, are directly related: lies, arguments, fights, insults, and drunkenness become an integral part of a teenage girl’s life and are transferred by adult women to their own families. In troubled relationships with parents, aggression toward the child may take root, which child killers often mask with excessive displays of love. “Being a victim of domestic violence is a very serious factor for such crimes in the future,” confirms Professor Kachaeva. “In most cases, these women have experienced violence in their childhood, be it emotional, sexual or physical. Moreover, it is not necessarily the sexual violence that is most frightening for them. When a woman comes to us for an expert opinion, 90 percent of the time she is open to talking about this violence. Good lawyers often take advantage of that.
Lawyers and psychiatrists often refuse to work with child murderers. In the winter of 2019, in Derbent, a 21-year-old woman from Dagestan, who killed her six-month-old daughter with 31 knife blows, could not find a defense for a long time. “Even the assigned lawyers rejected her. Everyone here cursed her,” say acquaintances of the case. Psychiatrists explain that one of the most experienced specialists at the Serbsky Center, when she sees a child murderer, says: “I will not participate in this examination. “She hates them by nature,” her colleagues explain. “But this is abnormal and unprofessional.” When the woman accused of killing two newborns was arrested in the Perm region, her lawyer did not even object to her being sent to a pretrial detention center, which is against the Code of Ethics for Lawyers. “In the colonies, the administration usually hides the reasons why child murderers are imprisoned,” says actress Marina Kleshcheva, who served a sentence for another offense. “Of course, I have met such people. But if someone from their hometown doesn’t come and tell the truth, then no one knows about their case,” she explains. “They definitely don’t have friends in the colony. And they don’t get involved in conversations or scandals. Because if she says a word in an argument, they can destroy her. “I still wondered why they gave so little for a person like him. We didn’t know anything about postpartum syndrome, depression, PMS,” Klescheva adds. “Why do we have such lenient punishments for killing children? Anyone who commits murder should be sentenced to hard labor for life. “In my opinion, this is the most heinous crime, and such people should be executed, not supported by the state.” “Let this creature die in prison. Readers left these and other much sharper comments on the news of the arrest of several heroines of this text. Yakov Kochetkov, a clinical psychologist from Moscow, believes he knows the reason why people react this way. He calls it psychological defense. Women deny such thoughts in themselves and unleash their anger on others, “just to condemn someone, so that it’s not me”. “After all, if you try to understand or pity this woman, you will have to come into contact with the same feelings she experiences. And no one wants to come into contact with such feelings,” says the psychologist. Sure! Here’s how you can divide the text into paragraphs with HTML text:
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During this time she has gotten worse.
“Strong love never met me. The kind they show on Instagram.
Of course, I do everything so that the child doesn’t need anything. But I don’t dissolve into him.
And it overwhelms me that if it weren’t for the child, I would already be working and not stuck in the village.
Then you realize that he, the child, is not to blame for anything.
In June, around three o’clock at night, she sent us a text message: “I have no strength. And I don’t know where to find it. I am broken.
My sister scolds me. My mother doesn’t support me. The child is wonderful, but I am an amoeba with him.
I’m too lazy to play and talk with him. And this is also my pain.
I have assured them that everything is fine, but no, it’s not true.
Illustrations by Tatiana Ospennikova
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