In the wake of a double homicide, knee-jerk opinion blames mothers and completely erases fathers.
It is, in journalistic terms, a good story. Lucia and Leo Krim, ages six and two, stabbed to death, possibly by their nanny, their bodies discovered by their horrified, grief-stricken mother Marina. In human terms, it’s a horrible tragedy, but that’s a different metric. In journalistic terms, you’ve got a rich New York setting, the bloody stabbing deaths of two innocent children, and the prime suspect is their nanny, who appears to have tried to stab herself to death as well. That’s a Law & Order episode waiting to happen, it’s that juicy a story. It’s the kind of story that turns the real deaths of two real kids into a symbolic passion play that lets everyone act out their worst instincts.
There’s something about the deaths of children that turns people into jerks. Probably because it’s the worst tragedy a parent can imagine, so when they hear about it, the Just World fallacy goes into overdrive. Nobody wants to believe that pointless, arbitrary tragedy can just hit them for no reason, so when we hear of just such a tragedy, we start inventing reasons why that couldn’t happen to us, reasons that usually involve the victim of the tragedy somehow deserving it. There is no upper limit on how cruel these rationalizations can become; the more unpredictable the tragedy, the more appalling the reason must be why the victim had it coming. Thus we have SF Gate writer Amy Graff having to actually ask her readership not to do that:
Moms are often quick to judge one another and comments criticizing Krim’s decision to hire a nanny are already popping up in the online world. We all often want to think that we’re giving our kids the best situation and others aren’t making equally good decisions. “I found the best nanny after interviewing 20!” “I would never use a nanny and would only ever watch my children myself!” “I only allow my mom to watch my children!”
That’s bad enough, but of course we can count on Fox News to make it even worse:
The murder of two young children, allegedly at the hands of their beloved nanny, has sent a chill through working mothers already conflicted over the often agonizing decision to leave their children in the care of others while they work to put food on the family table.
In keeping with Fox’s hard-right social agenda, this piece pushes the idea of working mothers as somehow abdicating their natural role as full-time caregivers, and heavily implies that there may be dire consequences for this dereliction of duty, sidling up to the edge of saying that Marina Krim kinda sorta deserved to have her children brutally murdered.
Anyone notice what’s missing from all this hand-wringing and tongue-clucking so far? Kevin Krim. Yes, the two kids had a father, not that anyone seems to care. And somehow he’s not getting any shit for being away on a business trip when his children were murdered. Nobody’s writing concern-troll articles about the terrible choices of fathers who choose to work outside the home rather than spending all their time with their kids. Nobody’s asking about the wider implications of this story for working fathers, because “working father” isn’t even a phrase in public discourse. All the ugly, horrible, victim-blaming just-world bullshit going around is aimed squarely at Marina Krim, because the kind of lizard-brain thinking that justifies that behavior also doesn’t even consider fathers to be real parents.
Kevin and Marina Krim are going to have to rebuild their lives together, along with their surviving child. They’re going to have to find a way to cope with this tragedy, this inexcusable loss, and his pain and grief will be no less than hers. Let us, for our part, participate neither in the heartless cruelty of criticizing supposedly inadequate motherhood, nor the thoughtless and widespread cruelty of utterly devaluing fatherhood.
Photo—Kathy Willens/AP
About the Editors
Such a random act of violence is simply that, random. As a parent, one can’t help empathize with the agony the Krims must be facing. What’s true is parents do not all walk the same path. Our economic situations, career ambitions, proximity to family, and circle of friends all factor into the ability of parents to provide daily childcare. There’s no template for the perfect parenting scenario. Such is life. We do our best, given our own circumstances, nothing more. Our hearts go out to the Krims and to our own children.
Vincent | CuteMonster.com
Not a lot of sympathy directed towards the dad either……imagine getting treated as a non-person in the aftermath of your beloved children’s deaths. A dad’s grief over this is just as great as a mom’s yet is almost always treated as less than.
Psychosis is not diagnosed by Mothers, but Psychologists. There are millions of violent incidents globally, daily, due to mental breakdown. Hindsight is 50-50. In grief, people can say and do the wrong thing. This story is beyond human understanding. Pray for the family to heal. Please send good thoughts to the Krim Family.
Not that the criticism of the mother is valid, but I think that partly comes from her actually having one child with her when the crime was discovered. It would have been different if it was the 6 year old. People would assume that she picked the child up from school after work. It doesn’t make sense to put one child in day care and not the 2 year old. If you have a nanny, why would you consider day care? People subconsciously put this together and assume she was out shopping. People also assume that the father is making tons of money so there was no reason for her to work.
Why do women complain about fathers not paying child support, but live on government assistance? They don’t financially provide for their children either. I’ve never seen in any support order a requirement for the mother to provide a certain level of financial support independent of the father for the child. This is because society still views a father’s role as primarily providing financial support and a mother’s of providing nurturing. The father was satisfying his role as society sees it in stellar fashion so he gets a pass.
You’ll also never see stories of how this is a gendered crime unlike mass shootings. That is because society has decided that women as a class are not the violent sex. You’ll never hear anyone suggest that if they hired a male nanny, this would have never happened. If the nanny who killed them were male, I fairly certain someone would bring up that they should have never trusted their children to a man.
I don’t know what the families’ situation was or what was agreed to by the parents. I am pretty certain that they’re both in pain right now and don’t need people second guessing them. They’re probably second guessing themselves right now and I hope the mom was working because she’d probably feel terrible if she was out shopping or getting a manicure like some commenters had suggested. At this point, prayers and words of condolence would probably serve better than unsolicited advice.
Please knock it off. You don’t need to bring any of this crap up. No one needs to be singled out. Not the people who are having their stupid opinions about it, not Fox News, not Kevin Krim. Just knock it off and pray for this family. Your article is only adding to the nonsensical drama that surrounds this unendurable tragedy.