Mental Illness In The Case Of Luke Batty: Relation To Risk Factors?

The notion of the mentally ill being more likely to commit crime is a topic that is highly controversial and sparks much debate. However, I do believe that it is evident that mental illness can cause irrational and sometimes dangerous behavior, which not only do I find threatening, but more so sad. In the case of Luke Batty’s murder by his biological father Greg Anderson, not only do I feel extreme sorrow towards the victim, but I also empathise with the perpetrator, due to the fact that mental illness is clearly mishandled and overlooked in our justice system.

Although I do not condone Greg Anderson’s actions on any level, I do believe that mental illness is something of a capacity to take over a person’s entire being. In my own experiences,

In the ‘Four Corners’ ABC program, home videos of Luke are shown after he had witnessed his father beating his wife (Thompson & McGregor 2014). It saddened me to see that his mother encouraging Luke to go and stay at his fathers house and justify his actions of beating Rosie Batty as a ‘silly thing Daddy does’ (Thompson & McGregor 2014). I feel extreme sadness and anguish towards this situation, as I believe it is clear Rosie Batty was trying to do the best for her son and she wanted him to have a father figure. This is especially difficult when in situations of broken homes and the known likelihood that crime has a higher chance of occurring, nothing was done to stop this (Bartol & Bartol 2014). I then came to question whether this is to do with our culture. Is the reason why Rosie Batty kept Greg Anderson involved as Luke’s father due to the fact that she succumbed to the expectations of society and their views on broken

This is in regard to whether they should inform potential third parties of possible harmful behaviour (Bartol & Bartol 2014, Merkel 1993). This has also been evident in the past, through the Tarasoff Case where it was eventually concluded that the therapist does have some duty to take steps to protect potential individuals from harm (Bartol & Bartol 2014). As Rosie Batty had said in her statement the day after her son had been murdered, there is only so much victims can do to protect themselves, ‘an intervention order doesn’t do anything to stop something like this happening ’ (Thompson & McGregor 2014). In order to protect Rosie and Luke in this situation, I believe it would have been appropriate to inform her of the numerous death threats Anderson made, and the number of charges & arrests made against him (including child pornography). For me this did raise the yet to be solved dilemma of what duty these individuals owe in their line of work. Although a particular case was solved, Tarasoff v. Regents 1974, this answer does not apply to all. However, in saying this, I do believe this heavily disadvantaged the Batty’s as victims, as they had very little awareness of what danger they were to be exposed to. As someone who is very close to their siblings, it sickens me to think that they may be oblivious to the harm