Karen Franklin, Ph.D.
Selected Topics:
The Causes of Violence
Students often ask me about the causes of violent crime and murder. What is inside "the criminal mind"? What makes a “serial killer”? Are some people just "bad seeds"?
There are many theories about why people kill. Researchers differ as to whether violence is caused by neurochemical abnormalities, by a violent gene, by socioeconomic factors, by cultural influences, or by an array of other factors.
Neurologist Jonathan Pincus,
a professor
at Georgetown University School of Medicine and a widely renowned
expert
on the causes of violence, likens some researchers with the “blind men
who each examined a different part of the elephant and who accurately
described
one part of the beast, [while] the concept of the whole animal eludes
them."
In other words, many researchers focus on the one thing they are
interested
in, while ignoring the evidence of other factors.
One cause that has received
growing
attention and acknowledgment in recent years is severe child abuse.
Most
children who grow up to be violent are abused as children. Sometimes,
the
history of abuse is not readily apparent. Families will deny abuse, and
the adult victim – now the criminal offender – will collude in this
denial.
The denial may be intentional or, oftentimes, people genuinely do not
perceive
the violence, degradation, and neglect that they experienced at the
hands
of parental figures as abusive.
But child abuse alone is usually not sufficient to create a violent person.
Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a psychiatrist and internationally recognized expert on violence, has identified a "triad" of symptoms that is prevalent among violent people. She and her colleague, Jonathan Pincus, MD, have found this triad to be present in the broad majority of adult murderers on death row whom they have studied, as well in juveniles who kill.
In addition to child abuse, the triad includes two other elements – brain damage and paranoid thoughts.
Pincus’s recent book, "Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill," is a detailed exploration of how child abuse, brain damage, and psychiatric illness, when mixed together, serve as the primary ingredients of violence.
It is not hard to understand why. As Pincus explains it, abuse creates the simmering rage that sparks the violent urge. Then, neurologic and psychiatric diseases make the individual act impulsively, by interfering with good judgment and impairing the normal capacity to inhibit one's aggressive impulses.
Once, the mother of a young
man
on trial for capital murder explained to me that her son's
behavior
was due to "bad blood" received during a blood transfusion in early
childhood.
However, in my many years of experience as a crime reporter, a criminal
investigator, and a forensic psychologist, involved with thousands of
cases
of violence and murder, I have never encountered a case of bad blood,
nor
have I encountered a violent criminal who was born evil.
The causes of violence are
always more
logically explainable, if one has the time, inclination, and skills to
dig deeply into both the background of the individual and the
circumstances
of their violence.
For more information:
"Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill," by Jonathan Pincus, MD, 2001.
“Guilty by Reason of
Insanity,”
by Dorothy Otnow Lewis, MD, 1998.
