Our culture is teaching distressed women to avoid suffering at any cost—and children are increasingly being handed the bill.
A two-year-old boy was recently killed by his mother.
If you followed the news this summer, you may assume I am referring to one of Lindsay Clancy’s three children. I am not.
I mean Barrett Walsh, the Illinois toddler prosecutors say was hanged from his basement rafters. His mother, Corie Walsh, faces three first-degree murder charges. Authorities say she called him the devil and Antichrist. Her attorney says she was psychotic.
In the hours before Barrett’s death, Walsh had been following the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who strangled her three children in 2023. Clancy pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; her trial ended with an 11–1 deadlock.
Prosecutors say Walsh was “very invested” in the Clancy case and discussed it with friends until about 12:30 p.m. Barrett was discovered less than four hours later.
We cannot prove the Clancy spectacle caused Walsh’s act. But we should not pretend the sequence is meaningless. What happens when women don’t just view, but ruminate on maternal violence and the attention and absolution that follow it? They may replicate it.
Human beings are mimetic. We become what we behold, especially when imitation appears to offer attention, sympathy, community, or release from responsibility. The public response to Clancy supplied all of those things.
Clancy’s medical history is complicated; I am not retrying her criminal responsibility. I am concerned with the response. Hundreds gathered outside the courthouse, with some shouting that the district attorney was “corrupt” after he named her children Cora, Dawson, and Callan as victims.
Again and again, the mother who killed her children became the central victim. The murdered children receded into the background.
