A mother is the female parent of a child. Mothers are women who inhabit or perform the role of bearing some relation to their children, who may or may not be their biological offspring. Thus, dependent on the context, women can be considered mothers by virtue of having given birth, by raising their child(ren), supplying their ovum for fertilisation, or some combination thereof. Such conditions provide a way of delineating the concept of motherhood, or the state of being a mother. Women who meet the third and first categories usually fall under the terms 'birth mother' or 'biological mother', regardless of whether the individual in question goes on to parent their child. Accordingly, a woman who meets only the second condition may be considered an adoptive mother, and those who meet only the first or only the third a surrogacy mother.
Frederick Walter Stephen West was an English serial killer who committed at least 12 murders between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire, the majority with his second wife, Rosemary West.
Rosemary Pauline "Rose" West is a British serial killer, now an inmate at HMP Low Newton, Brasside, Durham, England, after being convicted in 1995 of ten murders. Her husband, Fred, who committed suicide in prison while awaiting trial, is believed to have collaborated with her in the torture and murder of at least nine young women between 1973 and 1987, whereas Rose was judged to have murdered her 8-year-old stepdaughter, Charmaine, in 1971. The majority of these murders were committed at the couple's home, 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester.
Columba Bush is a Mexican-American philanthropist. Bush served as First Lady of Florida from 1999 to 2007 and is the wife of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
King of the Hill is an American animated sitcom created by Mike Judge and Greg Daniels for the Fox Broadcasting Company that ran from January 12, 1997, to May 6, 2010. It centers on the Hills, a middle-class American family in the fictional city of Arlen, Texas. Patriarch and main character Hank Hill, who works as assistant manager at Strickland Propane, is the everyman and general protagonist of the series. His modest conservative views and biases often clash with that of his wife, Peggy; his son, Bobby; his father, Cotton; his niece, Luanne; his boss, Buck Strickland; and his neighbor, Kahn. Hank is friends with other residents on his block, especially Bill Dauterive, Dale Gribble, and Jeff Boomhauer, all of whom he has known since elementary school. It attempts to maintain a realistic approach, seeking humor in the conventional and mundane aspects of everyday life.
Day-care sex-abuse hysteria was a moral panic that occurred primarily in the 1980s and early 1990s featuring charges against day-care providers of several forms of child abuse, including Satanic ritual abuse. A prominent case in Kern County, California first brought the issue of day-care sexual abuse to the forefront of the public awareness, and the issue figured prominently in news coverage for almost a decade. The Kern County case was followed by cases elsewhere in the United States as well as Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, and various European countries.
Elisa Izquierdo was a six-year-old Puerto Rican–Cuban-American girl who died from a brain hemorrhage inflicted by her mother, Awilda Lopez, in a culmination of a prolonged, focused, and increasing campaign of physical, mental, and emotional child abuse conducted between 1994 and 1995.
Beulah George "Georgia" Tann was an American child trafficker who operated the Tennessee Children's Home Society, an adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee. Tann used the unlicensed home as a front for her black market baby adoption scheme from the 1920s until a state investigation into numerous instances of adoption fraud being perpetrated by her closed the institution in 1950. Tann died of cancer before the investigation made its findings public.
The YFZ Ranch, or Yearning for Zion Ranch, was a 1,700-acre (7 km2) Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) community of as many as 700 people, located near Eldorado in Schleicher County, Texas, United States. As of April 2014, the State of Texas took physical and legal possession of the property.
Sarah Monahan is an Australian former child actress. Best known for her role as Jenny Kelly on Hey Dad..!, she also appeared in Sons and Daughters and Home and Away.
The Orkney child abuse scandal began on 27 February 1991 when social workers and police removed some children from their homes on the island South Ronaldsay, in Orkney, Scotland, because of allegations of child abuse. The children denied that any abuse had occurred, and medical examinations did not reveal any evidence of abuse.
The Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning short novel by Eudora Welty. It was first published as a long story in the New Yorker in March 1969 and was subsequently revised and published in book form in 1972. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina. Judge McKelva fails to recover from this surgery and as he dies slowly in the hospital, Laurel visits and reads to him from Dickens. Her father's second wife, Fay, who is younger than Laurel, is a shrewish outsider from Texas. Her shrill response to the Judge's illness appears to accelerate his demise. Laurel and Fay are thrown together when they return the Judge to his home town of Mount Salus, Mississippi, where he will be buried. There, Laurel is immersed in the good neighborliness of the friends and family she knew before marrying and moving away to Chicago. Fay, though, has always been unwelcome and leaves for a long weekend, leaving Laurel in the big house full of memories. Laurel encounters her mother's memory, her father's life after he lost his first wife, and the complex emotions surrounding her loss, and the wave of memories in which she swims. She comes to a place of understanding that Fay can never share, and she leaves small town Mississippi with the memories she can carry with her.
A familicide is a type of murder or murder-suicide in which a perpetrator kills multiple close family members in quick succession, most often children, relatives, spouse, siblings, or parents. In half the cases, the killer then kills themselves in a murder-suicide. If only the parents are killed, the case may also be referred to as a parricide. Where all members of a family are killed, the crime may be referred to as family annihilation.
David Koresh was the American leader of the Branch Davidians sect, believing himself to be its final prophet.
Judi Jane Conway Patton is an American activist who focuses on women's safety and child abuse prevention. She served as the First Lady of Kentucky from December 12, 1995, until December 9, 2003, during the tenure of her husband, former Governor Paul E. Patton.
Pamela T. Greenwood is the former presiding judge of the Utah Court of Appeals and was a pioneer woman lawyer in the state of Utah.
In May 2014, Isidro Medrano Garcia, who had been living under the name Tomas Medrano or Tomas Madrano, was arrested and accused by police of kidnapping a 15-year-old girl in 2004 and repeatedly raping her and continuing to hold her captive until 2014. Garcia was accused of forcing the alleged victim to marry him in 2007. As time moved on, the woman had a child with Garcia on October 27, 2010, or in 2012, and they continued to live openly together as a family in Bell Gardens, California, until the woman contacted her sister through Facebook and met with her mother in April 2014. She filed a domestic violence complaint with Bell Gardens police on May 19, 2014. As a married couple, Garcia and the woman had an apparently active social life in the community, including hosting large parties and the woman spending time and running errands by herself, having her own car, and working outside the home. However, police said the woman had tried to escape twice and been severely beaten. Through his attorney, Garcia claimed that the woman made up the story of abuse because the couple was breaking up.
Erika Antoinette Hill was an American 15-year-old girl who was murdered in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, in February 2007. Hill's damaged body was found in Gary, Indiana on February 26, and her identity was not discovered until 2015. Taylin Hill, her adoptive mother, was charged with reckless homicide after Hill's identification, and later pleaded guilty to reduced charges for which she was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.
