Sources of Conflict Between Parents and Their Offspring in Nineteenth-Century American Parricides: An Archival Exploration

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Parricide research in the twentieth century has been overwhelmingly framed as an adolescent phenomenon, the killing of a parent often explained as a function of severe child abuse. Using archival data from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, 1851–1899, this article examines the actual sources of conflict between parents and their offspring in nineteenth-century America. Results suggest that four common sources of conflict between parents and their offspring culminated in parricides in nineteenth-century America. The implications of a context-based classification of parricide for criminological theory and parricide research are discussed.