Are bad parents criminals?

In 2005 my seventh novel, about an unloving mother tortured by whether her son’s high-school mass murder was all her fault, designated me the go-to girl for commentary about school shootings. Consequently, the overweight, tremulous, flush-faced Jennifer Crumbley belongs to me. Known for arguably overloaded character names, I couldn’t have invented a better surname for an iconic Bad Mother. Hitting harmonics with ‘crummy’ (lousy) and ‘crumby’ (untidy), ‘Crumbley’ also suggests unsoundness, dereliction and collapse.

In 2021, Jennifer’s son Ethan, then 15, killed four of his classmates and injured seven others at his Michigan high school with a handgun his father had bought him for Christmas. After pleading guilty to 24 charges, Ethan was sentenced to life without parole. Last week, his mother was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for her son’s four murders. Jennifer could face up to 60 years in prison without having pulled a trigger.

Nearly all 50 US states have parental liability laws, but these are civic. Victims of minors who commit crimes can sue the children’s parents for financial redress, though most such laws put a hard numerical limit on the damages. So if your kid vandalises your neighbour’s garden gnomes or gets in an accident driving your car, you may have to pay up. What makes the Crumbley case extraordinary is that the prosecution is holding the parents, who are being tried separately, criminally responsible for their son’s rampage. It’s one thing to be out of pocket, quite another to spend many years in prison when a jury decides you’ve been a crummy parent.

Most Britons doubtless find it appalling that any parent would give a child access to a firearm, even for use at a shooting range, but the father’s purchase was legal, whether or not you think Americans have their heads up their backsides on this point.