This site was originally born as a single survivor’s account of filicide survival, a distinct trauma category that has never been studied. Since the establishment of the site and publication of The Research Gap - Filicide Survivors with the CPTSD Foundation on January 21, 2026, by this site’s founder, Victoria Balcom, connections have been made with several survivors who have goals in alignment with the intentions of the work.

We deserve community. We deserve better mental healthcare. We deserve life-saving police intervention. We deserve to be listened to and believed. We deserve to be seen. We deserve understanding. We deserved to be saved as children. Children now and in the future deserve to be saved. We deserve to heal.

With those priorities in mind, we’ve formed the beginnings of this long overdue and crucial community. We began with discussing the expansion of the definition for Filicide Survivor to focus on the child’s experience and the consequences of existential threat for their nervous system and developing brain. Chronic anticipation and expectation of filicide accounts for much of the CPTSD among survivors. This chronic anticipation and expectation can be accompanied by the experience of one or more actual near-miss filicidal events. Most (although not all) instances of filicide survival occur in the context of (and constitute a subset of) chronic abuse by a parent or primary caregivers.

Below, we would like to share with you the definition we have created through survivor collaboration, and our mission and vision, along with brief bios of our founding community members. Please join us if you are seeking community, would like to tell your story, or want to contribute to research. Let’s close the research gap, together.

Our Definition:

A Filicide Survivor is an individual who has developed chronic survival-based hyper-vigilance as a result of experiencing the potential for death during childhood that could reasonably be interpreted as either desirable or acceptable to a parent or other primary caregiver. Such childhood experiences include cases of attempted murder, assault(s) with a deadly weapon, explicit or implied threat(s) resulting in reasonable fear of intentional killing, abuse or neglect of such severity that it could result in the child’s death, and suggestion or facilitation by the parent/caregiver of potentially fatal self-destructive behaviors by the child. While perpetrators’ behaviors may differ widely, the defining feature is the child’s nervous system developing under the chronic reality of existential threat from a primary attachment figure, and the experience of betrayal that defines these actions.

The term Filicide Survivor may also be applied to surviving non-perpetrating nuclear family members of a filicide fatality, regardless of whether they directly experienced the existential developmental impact, and who may have symptomatology differing from that of children who directly experienced filicidal threat.

Our Mission:

We are a survivor led initiative aiming to connect silent Filicide Survivors into a growing community, enhance education and raise societal awareness, improve survivor treatment outcomes and reduce stigma, identify at-risk youth, and facilitate research into this under-recognized form of developmental trauma.

Our Vision:

No more lives lost to what society chose not to see.

Victoria Balcom’s sister, Rose Balcom, was 42 years old on December 14th 2023 when she assigned this description to her personal experience: “Right now it feels like trying to climb up a wall made out of ice blindfolded cuz I don’t know where the end or top of the wall is.” Rose Balcom died on January 8th 2025 at 43 years of age.

Content Warning:

This site contains descriptions of severe parental abuse, psychological trauma, and death. Some content may be triggering. Please prioritize your safety and mental health. If you are able to relate to this content, please consider processing this information alongside a qualified mental health professional.

Please note this site is honored to share the story of Elisabeth Corey, MSW, a survivor of family-controlled child sex trafficking and filicidal abuse as a resource. The overlap with child sexual abuse and filicide survivorship is expected to be significant. Elisabeth provides important insight to this work with her voice for dual survivorship. The website she founded to advocate and support survivors is available in this site’s resource section. Elisabeth utilizes her lived experience and professional credentials to enhance therapist training and works to raise awareness through legislative advocacy, news interviews, conference presentations, and published writings. She has consulted with several federal government agencies as a survivor expert on trauma and trafficking, including the Department of Justice. Elisabeth has been featured on PBS, The Huffington Post, and Psych Central. She writes about breaking the cycle of abuse through conscious parenting, navigating intimate relationships as a survivor, balancing the memory recovery process with daily life, coping with self-doubt, and overcoming the physical symptoms of a traumatic childhood.

Filicide Survivor Founding Community Members:

Victoria Balcom is a survivor of filicidal abuse in childhood by both parents, the defining experience that formed her nervous system and ultimately shaped this work. She also survived the death of her sister, Rose Balcom, in January 2025, following decades of long-term fatal maltreatment with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (now known as FDIA). She founded this site as a resource and community platform for survivors of life-threatening abuse perpetrated by primary caregivers, out of intense grief and rage at a system that consistently failed to see what was right there. She published The Research Gap: Filicide Survivors with the CPTSD Foundation in January of 2026, one of the first published explorations from an adult survivor of a filicidal family. Victoria has fifteen years professional experience in the financial services industry, and a research background that informs her approach to documentation and advocacy. Her story illustrates the power of privilege to shield abuse from being seen despite decades of well documented, severely abusive, and objectively absurd and delusional “parental” behavior. Victoria writes under pseudonyms for protection from retaliation, but is committed to connecting with silent survivors and documenting the truth. She has personally spent decades investing in the mental healthcare system. Now her work is driven by the knowledge that Filicide Survivors have fallen through the cracks of insufficient systems for too long and she is passionate about making sure future survivors don’t feel this alone. The founder’s blog captures the stories of Rose and Victoria Balcom.

Kelli Caldwell is an award-winning songwriter whose mixed-genre music weaves wit, warmth, and emotional truth, bridging the worlds of humor, healing, and humanity. Kelli has dedicated much of her work to shining light on and telling stories for children through song. Now, Kelli has begun to share her own story. In March of 2026, The Marshall Project published Kelli’s essay, "Mom's Last Gun," edited by Pulitzer-Prize winning reporters Leslie Eaton and Manuel Torres. In her essay, Mom’s Last Gun, Kelli documents decades of navigating a mental healthcare system and legal system that repeatedly failed to intervene as her mother cycled through psychotic episodes, accumulated firearms, and remained beyond the reach of medical intervention that was desperately needed. Kelli’s story expands the complexity of filicide survivorship to include a particular anguish when a threat comes not from cruelty, but a parent’s delusion violence will save their child (altruistically motivated filicidal threat), and the lifelong weight held by the child who survives it and spends adulthood attempting to prevent tragedy. New York Times Journalist Ellen Barry called Kelli’s essay “devastating” and noted it highlights “the crushing burden our system puts on families.” For more information on Kelli’s story, please see her interview with Dave Miller at Think Out Loud with OPB/NPR and her Armed with Reason interview with Eric Davidson, which are available in this site’s resource section.

John Woods is a health researcher who lives in Perth, Western Australia. At age fifteen, John narrowly survived being the principal target in an act of attempted filicide/mass murder perpetrated by his psychotically paranoid father, who before crescendoing into this final suicidal rampage had subjected his wife and three children to years of unremitting domestic tyranny underpinned by familicidal ideation and hidden from the wider world. John originally trained as a physician but for mental health reasons eventually abandoned medical practice. While his research work has involved studies covering diverse aspects of healthcare service quality and epidemiology, his focus has recently extended to the topic of family and domestic violence. In 2025, he presented his personal lived-experience story at the Fifth Biennial International Childhood Trauma Conference in Melbourne.  

Upon connecting, we’ve found many parallels. One stood out to us immediately. Each story presents a wildly different outcome for the filicidal parent: John’s father committed suicide long ago in an event of extreme violence that was covered in the news; Kelli’s mother is finally in a facility with the psychiatric support she desperately needed; and Victoria’s “parents” are living in luxury, thus far having faced no consequences for decades of criminal behavior. Despite these widely different perpetrator outcomes, a common theme emerged that each of us were left alone carrying excessive responsibility for one very traumatized person without support.

We know our survivor population must be vast. There are approximately 95,000 filicides in the world every year. Logically, the number of homes where the parents and primary caregivers have engaged in murderous behaviors without a completed act must also be significant. Where are our survivor stories? The cost of silence is too high. Let’s close the gap. No more lives lost to what society chose not to see.