A struggling single mother was sentenced to death for the murder of her children and attempted suicide on Wednesday last week.
The 30-year-old woman surnamed Wu (吳) had divorced her husband seven years ago, and was raising her two young children alone. She moved in with her brother and his wife last year after losing her job, the latest in a series of challenges she had holding down steady work.
On Feb. 13, after an argument with her brother and sister-in-law, she took her daughter and son to a motel in New Taipei City’s Wugu District (五股), where she tried to suffocate them with pillows, but failed. Two days later, she gave them sleeping pills before strangling them with a rope.
She texted her ex-husband that she was “going to be with the kids or they will feel lonely,” before taking a combination of sleeping pills, antidepressants and alcohol in an attempt to take her own life. Her ex-husband found her in time to rush her to a hospital, but the children were already dead.
Wu in court said that she had been “looked down on, left to face the pressure of public opinion and all sorts of dirty looks.”
“It has only been me caring for them 24 hours a day, without any kind of freedom for myself,” she said.
The New Taipei City District Court seemed not to consider any of these extenuating circumstances, instead calling Wu “cold-blooded” and “extremely arrogant, selfish and ignorant.” To justify the death penalty, it pointed to her apparent lack of remorse, and said that she would be “hard to rehabilitate.”
In a stroke of irony, it also cited the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, saying that it has a responsibility to uphold every child’s “inherent right to life,” seemingly disregarding that the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights condemns the death penalty “in light of the fundamental nature of the right to life.”
It is troubling to hear such dismissive language from the court in a case that clearly touches upon deeply ingrained social traumas.
As the Awakening Foundation said in a statement about the ruling, single mothers face intense social judgement, as well as discrimination in the rental and labor markets. Without support from family or friends, it is “not difficult to imagine the desperation borne of repeatedly hitting up against a wall,” it said.
Figures back up this trend. Research published in July on the Institute for Family Studies Web site found that single-mother families in Taiwan are the most likely of any family type to be impoverished, with about 17 percent living in poverty in 2018, compared with about 9 percent among families overall.
Instead of considering these extreme challenges, the court merely served as an extension of the same moralistic judgement that drove Wu to the ultimate act of desperation. It suggested that the ruling would help deter others, but considering the crime, it is highly unlikely that fear of legal punishment factored into Wu’s calculations. The ruling therefore acts only to diminish her plight and embolden her detractors, sending a dangerous message.
What would be a truly effective deterrent is not punishment, but ensuring that people do not sink to such a state in the first place. Welfare services are already stretched to the limit, with policymakers preferring to place the burden of care on families instead of providing sufficient and universal coverage.
If authorities continue to moralize in lieu of offering real solutions, this tragedy will not be the last.
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