We need an urgent review of men's mental health services
He was not mentally ill, goes the argument. He was just a man. A man displaying the controlling behaviour typical of many abusive men.
He killed his wife Clodagh, 39, and his eldest son Liam, 14, before killing Niall, 11, and Ryan, 6, because they were the most likely to resist. He slit Liam’s throat so he could not cry out, the same son he had that evening brought to a basketball match.
His wife was thinking of leaving him. He couldn’t bear to be challenged. He had to control everything.
“#HerNameWasClodagh” rang out the hashtag last year, as commentators rushed to slam the media focus on the murderer.
“People speak out it (familicide) as being a crime of passion, despair or even love,” said Margaret Martin of Women’s Aid. “That minimises and miscategorises the horror of the crime perpetrated against women and children. It can blur and remove victims from the picture and excuse the perpetrator.”
Well I think different. I think Alan Hawe’s hideous act was an act of love committed by a depressive man having a psychotic episode.
Most suicides think they’re doing their families a favour by killing themselves. I have known several loving fathers who, by taking their own lives, have threatened to destroy the lives of their families, something they obviously couldn’t understand at the time.
Killing your partner and kids, too, is a different level of psychosis but it does occur with alarming regularity. One of my friends — a gorgeous, gentle woman — told me she was seeking help because she had begun to fantasise about “going and taking the kids with me”.
She didn’t think they could cope with her suicide.
If she hadn’t sought help and had done what she imagined herself doing, I don’t believe the court of public opinion would have found her guilty of savagery. A woman with nothing incriminating on her record, they would probably have classed her insane.
The American poet Sylvia Plath has a beautiful and terrifying poem, ‘Edge’, which describes a mother who has killed herself and her children: “She has folded/Them back into her body as petals/Of a rose close when the garden/Stiffens and odors bleed/From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.”
In the end, Plath killed herself, not her kids. But the woman who was living with Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, later brought their daughter with her when she killed herself.
What am I saying, “brought with her”? It’s euphemistic language for murder. Yet I believe it does explain the screwed-up thinking behind these murder-suicides, including that of Alan Hawe. One of his notes is reported to explain that he could not leave his kids coping with his suicide. It’s a vile, self-centred thing to say but people who are mentally ill sometimes say and do vile, self-centred things.
Alan Hawe’s murder-suicide follows a pattern which is familiar. The famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim, to whom I was referred to by Dr Google, describes four types of suicide including so-called “anomic suicide”. This is suicide caused by disillusionment, disappointment and radical disruption of the suicide’s world.
Those anomic suicides who take their partners and children with them are typically “over-enmeshed”, seeing no boundaries between their identity and that of their partners and children. They do not want to leave the pain behind.
There are clearly differences between male and female murder-suicides. The main difference is that though women may suffer from this ideation, they rarely carry it out: in the US men account for 93.4% of these acts in the US as against 88.3% of plain murders.
There seems to be little doubt but that patriarchal attitudes influence male familicides, but the perpetrator is also a victim of those attitudes. One expert describes the act as “the extreme end product of ‘failed manhood’ at work, school or within the family milieu”.
Alan Hawe, an assistant school principal in the small town of Castlerahan, Co Cavan, was facing going back to a work-place in which he felt inadequate. He would have feared that resigning would plunge his family into poverty. Suffering from depression for the past decade, he must have felt totally inadequate as a husband and father.
Poor Clodagh Hawe would have needed the support of a strong partner as she tried to cope with her beloved brother’s suicide in 2010. Suicide is indeed “gendered” and this confirms, as the US National Institute of Justice Journal says, “mens’ emotional illiteracy.”
While the red-tops roar about Alan Hawe as a “twisted Dad”, a more fitting tribute to the memory of his wife and kids would be a massive review of services for men’s mental health. That’s what’s been called for by Una Butler, the widow of John Butler who killed himself and their two daughters Zoe, 6, and Ella, 3, in Ballycotton, Co Cork, in 2010.
“He had never been physically abusive to me or Zoe or Ella,” she said. “He was a good father. He was a very hard worker.”
The same could have been said, and was said, of Alan Hawe. Despite the understandable rupture which has caused his remains to be removed from the family grave, Clodagh Hawe’s mother described Alan as “like a son to me. If you asked him to do something, he would.”
Some men need to learn to say: “No, I can’t.” They need to learn to say: “I’m depressed. I can’t do my job anymore. I need a break.” Or even, “I need to resign, can we sell the house, can you do more hours?”
We constructed for men a prison in which they are still incarcerated by the message that they must be strong, they must provide, the buck stops with them. We knocked down the walls which at least kept them safe in there: Union and State support for a “man’s wage” and respect for the main breadwinner. But the message hasn’t really changed.
I know I would buckle under that strain. I don’t want my sons to buckle under it.
If so-called “anomic” suicide and murder-suicide occur when there is a radical disruption in a man’s life, then this period of changing gender roles and poor employment security, coupled with sky-high expectations of what men should provide, could be described as the perfect growing environment for these appalling acts. Una Butler has catalogued 11 partners and 32 children so killed in Ireland since 2000.
We need a national mens’ health initiative to interrogate men’s gender roles and buttress their mental health and if it takes a National Men’s Council to achieve it, so be it.
If the horrible deaths of Clodagh, Liam, Niall and Ryan Hawe prove anything, it’s that there’s no way of insulating the rest of us from the mental suffering of men.
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