Infanticide and the Figure of Disordered Mothers: How Forensic Psychiatric Nurses Construct Their Patients'...

Infanticide is defined as the killing of a child under 1 year of age by their mother. In Canada and many other jurisdictions, infanticide is a legal offense that can be committed only by women. Although it is a rare and complex phenomenon, social and legal attitudes toward women convicted of infanticide are strongly gendered. This gendered legal construction has generated considerable debate regarding whether such laws acknowledge or obscure the complex social realities of motherhood; whether they privilege or disadvantage women within the criminal justice system; and whether they facilitate access to appropriate mental health care for women experiencing psychological distress. In this study, a qualitative critical discourse analysis (CDA), informed by feminist and poststructuralist theory, was conducted to examine nurses' social representations of women convicted of infanticide. More specifically, this empirical investigation explored the social factors shaping forensic psychiatric nursing practices toward mothers convicted of infanticide. Five forensic psychiatric nurses who had provided care to women convicted of infanticide were interviewed as part of this qualitative research. We organized our analysis of the interviews into three key findings: (1) Participants constructed specific, medicalized discourses of pathology and responsibility around the women in their care; (2) Threaded into these discourses of willfulness was a stigmatizing figuration of women convicted of infanticide as "the disordered mother"; and (3) Participants worked to manage the stigma and abjection they felt toward their patients through two particular orientations to care: objectivity and context-sensitivity. The findings highlight the need, across legal, media, public, and medical domains, for narratives that enable women to reclaim agency from the gendered, classed, and medicalized stories that often define them. A context-sensitive orientation to care may represent one possible avenue for challenging and dismantling the construction of the "disordered infanticidal mother" within forensic psychiatric institutions.