Sons who kill their mothers: the psychology behind the statistics and the abuse nobody wants to talk about

By Dr Maria Downs, Consultant Clinical Psychologist and founder of M Downs & Associates

Last week, the Femicide Census published figures that should stop us all in our tracks. Sons were suspects in nearly one in five cases of women killed by men in the UK in the past year. Nineteen mothers. The highest rate of matricide recorded in sixteen years.

Jess Phillips read their names in parliament on Thursday, as she has done every year for eleven years and as every year, she had to ask for special dispensation to continue, because the list was too long to fit the time given to a single MP.

We should sit with that for a moment.

Then we should ask why, after a decade of this data being collected, collated, and presented to parliament, the state still has no framework for identifying, assessing, or preventing it.

As a clinical psychologist who has spent over twenty years working with domestic abuse survivors, with families in crisis, and as an expert witness in care proceedings, I want to offer something the statistics alone cannot: clinical context. Because behind every one of those nineteen deaths is a trajectory;  and that trajectory has warning signs that we have the knowledge to identify and the obligation to act on.

The abuse that hides in plain sight

In my work as a therapist and also in care proceedings, I see child-to-parent abuse and it’s devastating affects, despite it rarely being given the attention it deserves.

Young people, and predominantly, though not exclusively, adolescent boys, who have developed patterns of violence, intimidation, coercive control, and psychological abuse directed at their mothers. Mothers who sometimes, understandably, want to protect their children, leading to minimising, covering up or even blaming themselves. Families where the local authority is involved because of concerns about the children, and where the abuse of the parent is not a central safeguarding concern.

Child-to-parent abuse is one of the most under-recognised and under-responded-to forms of domestic abuse in the UK. Estimates suggest it affects around 1 in 10 families, yet it has no dedicated statutory framework, minimal specialist provision, and almost no public profile. The VAWG strategy published by the government in December was hailed as a milestone and in some respects it is. But child-to-parent abuse barely features in it.

This matters enormously in the context of matricide. The Femicide Census data consistently shows that many of the men who kill their mothers have histories of violence in intimate relationships. But how many of them had histories of violence towards their mothers that began in adolescence, went unaddressed, and continued,  escalating, into adulthood? We don't know. Because nobody is tracking it. And by the time it ends in homicide, the earlier history is rarely interrogated in a way that could inform prevention.

The pattern clinical services should be seeing and aren't

Clarrie O'Callaghan of the Femicide Census made an observation this week that every clinician working in this field will recognise: many of the men who killed their mothers had histories of abusing intimate partners, and moved in with their mothers after those relationships broke down.

I have seen this pattern. In care proceedings, in community mental health referrals, in cases where a family is finally visible to services because a child is at risk and where a mother is living with an adult son whose behaviour towards her is frightening, controlling, and dangerous, but who is not being assessed or monitored in any systematic way.

The mental health dimension cannot be overstated. The Femicide Census shows that mental ill health was a factor in 58% of matricide cases. This is not a coincidence. It reflects what clinicians in community settings have been saying for years: the collapse in community mental health provision means that the most complex and highest-risk presentations are being managed, if that is the right word, by families, not by services. By mothers. By women who love their sons, who are frightened of them, who do not know where to turn, and who are being placed in very serious danger as a direct consequence of a system that has failed to hold risk appropriately.

What I want people to understand about this work

I am a clinical psychologist who has worked with domestic abuse survivors throughout my career. I have assessed men who have perpetrated violence, and I have worked to understand, clinically, what drives it. I have given evidence in courts where children's lives hung in the balance and where every decision carried enormous weight.

I believe in naming abuse for what it is. I believe in protecting the most vulnerable. And I believe, because my clinical training and twenty years of practice have taught me this, that the best way to protect people is to engage honestly with psychological complexity, not to flatten it into simple narratives that feel satisfying but leave the hardest problems unsolved.

Domestic abuse is not always unidirectional. It does not always fit the most commonly understood patterns. It can run between parents and adult children. It can involve generations of trauma, coercive dynamics that have calcified over decades, mental illness, substance misuse, and a profound absence of the support that might have interrupted the trajectory at any one of multiple points. None of this makes the harm less real. None of this excuses what happens. All of it matters if we are serious about prevention.

The nineteen mothers whose names were read in parliament on Thursday were not random victims of random violence. They were women living with risk that, in most cases, services had the capacity to identify . Understanding why, clinically, systemically, honestly, is not a betrayal of their memory. It is the most meaningful thing we can do to honour it.