Maternal in the East, Paternal in the West? Event Type, Culture, and the Gendered Patterning of Filicide–Suicide: A Scoping Review

Filicide–suicide—a parent killing a child and then dying by suicide—is a form of fatal child maltreatment often obscured by naming conventions (Korean, dongban jasal; Japanese, shinjū) that recast it as shared family suicide. The act has long been read as “maternal” in East Asia and “paternal” in the West, but this contrast had not been tested with event type held constant. This scoping review, reported following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) and informed by the JBI protocol, mapped perpetrator gender distribution, risk pathways, and meta-limitations of case definition and surveillance, treating event type and culture as interacting explanations. Five databases (PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science, CINAHL, and the Korea Citation Index), supplemented by Google Scholar, gray literature, and backward reference screening, yielded 1,503 records; after de-duplication and screening, 241 studies met the two-tier inclusion criteria (studies of filicide–suicide directly, or of filicide, familicide, or homicide–suicide reporting perpetrator gender or cross-national data), of which 84 were charted in the synthesis (single reviewer; SWiM narrative synthesis; proportional analysis restricted to both-sex samples). Gender tracked event type more than culture. Familicide was overwhelmingly paternal in the West (72%–95% male), whereas child-only killings were maternally predominant in East Asia (Korea, 55.4%; Japan, 54.8%; and Hong Kong, 66.7%) and mixed in the West. In two datasets disaggregating victim relationship within one source (Korea, n = 82; U.S. NVDRS, n = 33), homicide–suicides were male overall, yet the child-victim subset alone was majority-female. Culture acted as a moderator.