A WOMAN is released from a psychiatric hospital. She takes her daughter to a bus station and drowns her in a toilet. The story is one of more than 240 child killings over eight years in a US state with a population the same as the Irish Republic.
The rate has risen in Oklahoma from 13 deaths in 1981 to 34 last year, according Ms Barbara Bonner, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Oklahoma.
She presented figures yesterday on the cases between 1987 and 1995. Some of them never reached the courts. "We wanted to see are the children all born to teenage mothers? Is it the 19 year old boyfriends who are killing these children. Because that's the picture you get."
The study found that 37 per cent of child deaths happened to children under the age of one, with the next largest portion, 35 per cent, in the two to three age group. Only 6 per cent of the children had been known to the child care services when they died. A quarter of the children had come to their attention but the cases had been closed.
They found the average age of mothers to be 22 and fathers 26. The highest number of children was killed by their biological mother. Fifteen children were listed under the category of intentional gunshot, "where a parent took a gun and shot their child".
Mr Ferry Grunseit, a child lawyer from New South Wales told the seminar that the Australian government had set up a team to register child deaths, following the setting up of an independent child death review and the deaths of 19 children whose cases had been in the hands of the authorities.
He said the group would test the hypothesis that by keeping statistics on the number of deaths, future deaths and serious