Why kids kill

I wrote an article some time ago on why kids kill. The possible psychology behind why young people can become mass killers.

On FaceBook Lesley made the comment

Some very interesting points there Tony. The only thing, and I hope you don't mind me adding my 5 cents worth, with regard to teens acting like a small child having a temper tantrum when they kill. Temper tantrums are not planned. They seem very spontaneous and it would appear that the massacres that teens carry out are planned over a long time. I do agree about the uncontrolled anger all the same.

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I take your point Lesley that temper tantrums of a two year old are not planned. And the psychology of a 2 year old and 20 year old are obviously different. The point I was trying to make was that in some way kids who kill like this, display some qualities of a temper tantrum and that of course is going to be different to a 2 year old temper tantrum

Even in murderous acts there will still be a quality of childlike innocence.

In both the cases of Martin Bryant and the Adam Lanza they began with what seemed like premeditated and planned murders. Bryant killed those two people in their house he had a grudge against and Adam Lanza began with killing his mother.

Matricide! Now there is about four blog posts worth of material. Matricide is probably one of the most abnormal behaviors humans can display. For children mother is the most important person in the world by far. Mother is the key to a child’s psychological and physical survival (even if she abuses the child). I think it is safe to say that the offspring of any mother take this psychological position. Whether that be a human offspring or the offspring of a seagull.

The death of mother is the one thing a child fears most. Even when the child is in adulthood it seems safe to say that mother still occupies a unique and very special position in their core of their psyche. To kill mother is an act so against the very biological programming in us humans, one could argue. Hence the view that it is a very abnormal piece of human behaviour. It is so completely against nature and millions of years of evolution. 

For a child to kill a mother is completely antithetical to human evolution

Clearly the first killings were not of a temper tantrum style. It seems after the initial event then there was more of an indiscriminate temper tantrum display of anger. One could say both young men switched ego states in some way from the 20 year old planning style to a kind of 2 year old emotional state of mind in the expression of their anger. One can say that the will display a combination of 20year old and 2 year old behaviour mixed in together.

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The act of dying

This also illustrates another point that one hears mentioned from time to time by suicidal individuals. Some people are just too scared or simply can not ever imagine themselves going through with the actual act of killing self. They do not see it as a thing they could ever do whilst at the same time having quite strong self destructive urges.

However the self destructive urges will continue to demand to be expressed regardless, so one has to find another way of expressing them. One way is to have an 'accident' or alternatively to have someone else kill you which is sometimes colloquially referred to as 'death by cop'. This phenomena has been discussed many times in forensic and police journals (see Jenet and Segal (1985)). That is, one behaves in a way such that the police will kill you. Some murders in domestic violence could also be this kind of suicidal act.

There is a insightful article By K. van Wormer and C, Odiah (1999). These writers describe a phenomenon called “Suicide-murder” (not the usual “murder-suicide”), because in this instance suicide is not viewed as a consequence of murder but as its cause. They cite research evidence based on case studies done in prisons with males who committed murders in states where the death penalty existed for such crimes.

They suggest that in some instances part of the motivation to commit the crime was so the state will kill them by execution. They were motivated at least in part by suicidal urges but felt they could never actually go through with the suicidal act so they behaved in such a way that the state would kill them. Many of the men presented in the case studies were clearly suicidal and some demonstrated they had clearly plotted their deaths long before arriving on death row.

In addition they discuss what they term voluntary executions. In the United States there were two hundred and twenty three executions between 1976 and 1993. Twenty nine of those were consensual or at the inmates request. In another study they report sixteen examples of men on death row who volunteered for the death penalty, usually by refusing to fight appeals of their cases. Indeed another two of individuals who had requested an execution were subsequently found innocent and released!

Each of these men chose death as a solution to their problems. They did not die by their own hand but chose to die by having the state kill them. Clearly these cases involved a conscious decision to die that persisted over a significant length of time and was carried out. This is a strong indicator that these men had made the suicidal decision early in their lives and it remained in their psyche until circumstances they created resulted in them enacting that solution to solve their problems.

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