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Filicide is the lethal victimization of a child by its caretaker(s). Parental Investment Theory, authored by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers (1972), argues that sex-specific strategies of parental investment drive sexual selection, giving a theoretical framework for identifying the evolutionary origin and function of sex differences. The theory informs evolutionary psychological perspectives on a meaningful disaggregation of maternal and paternal filicides.
Filicide: Parental Investment Theory
As a heterogeneous homicide category, filicides may appear to be too varied for a single, unitary theory to give a meaningful scholarly understanding of its perpetration (Adler & Polk, 2001: 168). However, since the 1980s, evolutionary psychology has offered a comprehensive theoretical approach to studying the origin and function of our species’ evolved parental psychology and the behavioral manifestations of this psychology,...
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References
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Ottesen, V. (2023). Filicide: Parental Investment Theory. In: Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85493-5_1941-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85493-5_1941-1
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