Richard Rhodes 609 Summer Hill Road Madison CT 06443 USA (203) 421-5882 (203) 421-5469 Fax rhodesr@pantheon.yale.

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Why They Kill

Most of us have undergone a profoundly transformative experience at least once in our lives. All of us have witnessed others undergoing such dramatic self-change as a result of overwhelming, typically traumatic social experiences. The transformation is often so extensive that the person we knew seems to have been replaced by a stranger we hardly recognize. Dramatic self-change is a universal human experience. It often follows the death of a loved one, chronic illness, physical disfigurement, a natural disaster, divorce, prolonged unemployment, substance abuse or withdrawal from substance abuse even, paradoxically, sudden fame and fortune. It has formal and institutional counterparts, including religious conversion, military training, twelve-step programs and longterm psychotherapy. The sociologist Lonnie Athens, whose pioneering investigations of social experience I describe in my new book, divides dramatic self-change into a characteristic dynamic of five sequential stages.

Stage one is fragmentation. To build a new self, the old self has to break apart. This stage is usually an excruciating experience. Our self fragments when it encounters experiences so foreign that they contradict assumptions about the world we have previously taken for granted. Were flooded instead with

conflicting thoughts and emotions, divided against ourselves and left confused. That change is painful is one important reason why people dont like to change. So developing a new self isnt something that were likely to undertake until were forced to do so by the partial destruction of our existing self. But if our former self has fragmented, if we find ourself foundering in personal crisis, at least weve been released from the more insidious restraint of the assumptions we formerly took for granted of our formerly overly narrow view of the world. Thus released, we can now compare our former assumptions critically against the evidence of the new, foreign social experience that forced them to light. Through repeated audits through intense, repetitive introspection we begin to realize that our previous assumptions about the world were inadequate to comprehend our new reality. This realization is the first step in the second stage of dramatic selfchange which Athens identifies, which he calls provisional unity. To develop a new, provisional self, we must not only recognize the inadequacy of our previous assumptions but also must replace those inadequate assumptions with new ones. Doing so can be an equally agonizing ordeal. New social experiences continue to bombard us while we pursue our remodeling. If we feel liberated by the splintering of our former unitary self, we probably also feel burdened and frightened by our loss of familiar certitudes.

So, Athens observes, we turn for help and solace to authorities whom we know or believe to have walked this new ground before us. Our authority may be only memories advice whispered by a parent or mentor long before the present crisis that only now makes sense. Or we may desperately search out people with experience from whom to seek counsel. Whatever the source of the advice, we never accept it as is. We filter it through our own perceptions and conceptions until it reemerges with the shock and power of personal revelation. Anything less intense isnt likely to inspire enough confidence to support testing it in the real world. By the end of this provisional stage, we tentatively conclude that our new perspective comprehends the traumatic social experience that seemed incomprehensible before. Our self feels whole again, but only provisionally. Stage three for Athens is praxis, a term he borrows from Piaget. Praxis emerges in response to our haunting provisional question, When Im confronted again with a social experience like the one that shattered me before, will I now be able to deal with it? In praxis, we put our new provisional self to the crucial test of experience. If we pass the test and find our way through, we gain confidence that our new self is a successful reorganization. Repeated successes build further confidence. Achieving successful praxis by passing the crucial test of experience, finding to our great amazement and relief that we have successfully navigated a social experience like the one which shattered us before, our new self bursts forth before our eyes and, more significantly, before the

eyes of other people. This fourth stage of dramatic self-change Athens calls consolidation. Our new self, though still provisional, is evidently competent. But permanence depends crucially on how others respond. No matter how personally amazed, pleased and relieved we may be with our success, only others can impress upon us the full significance of having succeeded. People must not only recognize our actions, but also reflect that recognition by behaving differently toward us than they did before we began to change. At this stage of consolidation, we still have to ask ourself if we want to embrace our new persona. We still, that is, have freedom to choose. We almost always do accept our new self. Weve been through hell; if we now reject the person were on the verge of becoming, not only would we be wasting that full measure of suffering, but we would also have to go through the whole process all over again, or collapse into permanent psychological disorganization. With our final decision to embrace our new self, a dramatic transformation takes place. Our awareness of the contingency of our new attitudes and assumptions fades. What was provisional becomes certain. We again take for granted the viewpoint with which we approach the world, just as we did before starting the process of dramatic self-change. We may have trouble even remembering the person we were before. Our new self is almost fully consolidated.

There remains only stage five, social segregation, when we move out of the social groups where were no longer comfortable because weve changed, and into groups where our new self feels at home.

Thus Dr. Athenss model of the universal human experience of dramatic selfchange. To develop it, Athens drew in part on other sociological and psychological studies, on published autobiographies and on personal experience. But fundamentally he drew on his primary research: detailed and thorough interviews with several hundred incarcerated violent criminals men and women of various ages, economic and social backgrounds and ethnicities to my knowledge, the most extensive record of uncoerced testimony to the thoughts, feelings, past experiences and intentions of violent individuals ever collected. I came here this morning to offer an evidence-based answer to the perplexing and frustrating question, Why do some men, women and even children assault, batter, rape, mutilate and murder? And its of the utmost significance to Athenss answer that he arrived at his understanding of the universal human experience of dramatic self-change through his primary research. Because what Athens found when he studied his interview notes was a pattern of traumatic social experience common to every one of the violent criminals he interviewed, a pattern that was incomplete or missing from the experiences of nonviolent battered women and of criminals with no record of serious violence whom he interviewed as controls. He concluded

that people become dangerously violent in response to specific trauma by a voluntary progression through a specialized form of dramatic self-change. To name this specialized set of transforming experiences he combined the words violent and socialization. He called the process violentization.

Many factors correlate to some degree with one aspect or another of the development of violent behavior, but only violentization, Athens found, is both necessary and sufficient to the creation of a dangerously violent person. Based on his evidence, not genetic inheritance, or gender, or psychopathology, or brain damage, or poverty, or subculture, or attachment problems, or testosterone, or exposure to violent media but violentization is the cause of violent criminality. Most people who are dangerously violent underwent violentization in childhood and early adolescence. The men Athens interviewed had usually completed violentization by fourteen, the women some years later. But as with any other form of dramatic self-change, violentization can occur in adulthood as it sometimes does for soldiers in war.

The creation of a dangerously violent person begins with brutalization. Brutalization, a three-part experience, is the initiating trauma, which is in no sense voluntary. All three parts are necessary. All three must be fully experienced before the novice is prepared to move on to the next stage.

The first part of brutalization is violent subjugation: a violent authority figure who is a member of the novices primary group his close circle of family and friends uses physical and/or psychological intimidation to force the novice to submit to his authority. Some of you may remember the case of Alex Kelly, the handsome, athletically gifted son of prosperous Joe and Melanie Kelly of Darien, Connecticut, who was convicted of rape in 1997 after spending ten years as a fugitive from justice on the ski slopes of Europe with his parents collusion and support. In Alex Kellys case, the violent authority figure appears to have been his father, Joe Kelly, whom several eyewitnesses report regularly dominated his sons with physical beatings. In the case of Cheryl Crane, movie actress Lana Turners teenage daughter, who stabbed to death Turners violent lover Johnny Stompanato in a notorious Hollywood scandal in 1958, the violent authority figure appears to have been Turners actor husband Lex Barker, a wealthy Princeton graduate best known for succeeding Johnny Weissmuller in the role of Tarzan. Between Cranes tenth and thirteen birthdays, Barker brutally raped his stepdaughter at least a dozen times. Based on the statements the two Littleton killers videotaped, Eric Harris hinted that he was brutalized by peers on the military bases where his family lived before moving to Littleton; Dylan Klebold implicated his athlete older brother and his older brothers friends. The second necessary part of the brutalization experience Athens calls personal horrification: The novice witnesses the violent subjugation of people close to him typically his mother and his siblings. The perpetrator

may or may not be the same person who is violently dominating him; the witnessing may or may not occur during the same period of time. In Alex Kellys case, there is testimony that Joe battered his wife as well as his sons. Alex also frequently witnessed his father beating his older brother Chris. Johnny Stompanato threatened and sometimes battered Lana Turner; and one of Turners previous husbands, a wealthy businessman, had also been abusive to Turner and perhaps to Crane as well. The third necessary component of brutalization is violent coaching. Using a variety of techniques from storytelling to minimizing to threatening to haranguing, one or more authentically violent authority figures coaches the novice that it is his inescapable personal responsibility to use violence to settle disputes. These three conjoined, significant social experiences of brutalization violent subjugation, personal horrification and violent coaching may or may not qualify as child abuse, depending on the law and on personal and community values. Many parents believe that severe discipline, as they call it, is necessary to prevent children from growing up wild. Go back a few hundred years in the literature of childrearing and you will find explicit direction that children are born evil and must be beaten into submission. Spare the rod and spoil the child is an article of faith among many religious conservatives today. Many violent felons and many upright citizens will tell you they were bad kids who deserved what they got. Brutalization, Athens found, is fundamental to violent criminality, but it is not sufficient in

and of itself to determine that outcome. Which is why many people who were brutalized in childhood, myself included, do not become violent adults. The worst part ofthese odious experiences, Athens writes of brutalization, is the twisted feelings and thoughts [which result and] which can linger on in a disordered state long after the immediate experiences which generated them cease. Children who are violently subjugated and personally horrified feel anger as well as terror, feel rage, fantasize elaborate revenge and then face the bitter truth, which they find shameful and humiliating, that they are afraid to retaliate to protect themselves and the people they love. Eventually, however, having fully experienced brutalization, the dejected, fragmented novice, filled with emotional turmoil, begins to take stock, much as people do when they experience divorce, or the death of someone close to them, or a serious illness or accident. Athens calls this second stage of violentization belligerency. It corresponds to the provisional unity stage of dramatic self-change. In belligerency, the brutalized novice examines his situation and asks himself questions. The first question he asks himself is, Why havent I done anything to put a stop to all this domination? Eventually the question changes and becomes more specific. The belligerent novice asks himself, What can I do to make sure other people dont violently dominate me and my loved ones for the rest of my life? And now for the first time, with the force of sudden revelation, the novice realizes that the violent coaching he has had drummed into his head applies to him: that the

answer to his question is to heed his violent coaching and begin taking violent action himself against other people who provoke him. The belligerency stage ends, Athens writes, with the [novice] firmly resolving to resort to violence in his future relations with people. This violent resolution is still strongly qualified, however. Given the risk and the uncertainty of outcome, the novice is prepared to resort to serious violence only if he is seriously provoked and only if he thinks he has a chance of success. Violent men in the United States typically entered belligerency and made their first violent resolution between the ages of 9 and 12, women somewhat later. The third stage of violentization that Athens found common to every one of the violent criminals he studied he calls violent performances which corresponds to praxis. The converted novice tests his resolve by responding to serious provocation with serious physical violence, with the intention of dominating whoever provoked him even if it means inflicting (and risking) grave injury or death. Many people make threats when theyre angry or afraid. We generally understand such threats to be verbal gestures and posturing. The fact is, most people in civil societies arent prepared to follow up such threats with serious violence, because really to attack someone with the intention of seriously harming or killing them risks the attackers safety and freedom as well.

So an initial violent performance is a deeply serious undertaking. And it has profound consequences. If it results in a major defeat, the violent actor may decide against a commitment to violence and find some less dangerous strategy for survival. Or, rather than question his resolution, he may decide to use more violence next time and use it sooner he may move, for example, from using his fists to using a gun. But if one or more violent performances results in a clear-cut victory, the violent novice experiences a remarkable transformation in his social circumstances. Peoples opinion of him suddenly and drastically changes. From seeing him as unthreatening, as not violent or only possibly capable of violence, people close to him now acknowledge him to be an authentically violent individual. They treat him as if he were dangerous. They show him respect and fear and try not to offend or provoke him. These experiences of violent notoriety and social trepidation carry the violent performer to a crossroad. [He] must now decide, Athens writes, whether to embrace or reject this personal achievement of sorts. Although the advantages may not be well recognized, being known as dangerous does have its advantages. The subject is afforded greater power over his immediate social environment. Since other people begin to think twice before provoking him, the subject can freely interact with other people without worrying as much about provoking them, so that for the first time he may feel liberated from the violent oppression of others. Moreover [Athens continues], painful memories of feeling powerless and inadequate, originally

aroused during his brutalization and later his belligerency experiences, still linger in the back of the subjects mind. This cannot help but make his newly discovered sense of power almost irresistible. So the subject usually decides to accept his violent notoriety and the social trepidation that comes with it. With that decision, the violent novice undergoes a further transformation. He may have had low self-esteem before. Now, in Athenss words, he becomes overly impressed with his violent performance and ultimately with himself in general. Filled with feelings of exultancy, he concludes that since he performed this violent feat, there is no reason why he cannot perform even more impressive violent feats in the future. The subject [Athens concludes] much too hastily draws the conclusion that he is now invincible. Such self-congratulatory overestimation is evident in the seemingly counterproductive bragging in which many violent criminals indulge after theyve committed a crime and which often leads to their arrest and in the secret smiles of satisfaction we notice on the faces of murderers during their perp walks. Successful violent performances, the violent notoriety and social trepidation they bring and the resulting exaggerated sense of invincibility and omnipotence complete the violent actors passage through the violent performances stage. He now enters the fourth and final stage of violentization: virulency, which corresponds to the consolidation stage of dramatic self-change. The violent subject makes a new and more fundamental violent resolution. In Athenss words, He now firmly resolves to

attack people physically with the serious intention of gravely harming or even killing them for the slightest or no provocation whatsoever. In making this later violent resolution, the subject has completely switched his stance from a more or less defensive to a decidedly offensive one. From a hapless victim of brutalization, the violent subject has now come full circle and transformed himself into the same kind of brutalizer he had earlier despised. In every one of the recent school shootings, the boys involved had previously demonstrated belligerency and defensive violent performances and been rewarded with social trepidation and violent notoriety before they escalated to unprovoked violent attacks. Harris and Klebold had begun having fistfights with the jocks who had previously bullied them at school, had made death threats, had waved weapons around to dominate confrontations, had smashed a neighbor boys car windshield and of course had begun planning their mass murder. Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old schoolboy in Paducah, Kentucky, who shot into a prayer group at his school, killing three students and wounding four, had been a victim of teasing and bullying. His initial violent performance seems to have been stabbing a student with an ink pen during a fight. He had taken handguns to school at least twice in the months before the shooting and shown them to other students and had ridiculed and threatened the prayer group. The other schoolboy killers showed a similar progression through violentization.

A final social consequence that follows completing violentization is social segregation. The violent subjects previous close family and friends are now afraid of him and start avoiding him. This phenomenon of social segregation is the basis in fact for the mythical violent loner of novels and film. But sooner or later the subject usually finds a new group to join where a violent reputation is a social requirement. Its crucially important to recognize that all the later stages of violentization, from belligerency to violent performances to virulency, follow from choices the novice makes. Each passage beyond brutalization requires a decision. Athenss model maps a process, not a deterministic mechanism. Obviously, children dont choose to be brutalized, and to the extent that we as a society tolerate the brutalization of children, we are responsible for setting them on the road to violent criminality. But beyond brutalization, violentization is essentially voluntary. Were not used to thinking of nine- and ten-year-olds making serious choices, because we tend to infantilize our children in modern America, but confronted with the trauma of brutalization, children do choose, just as children make choices in war zones. Even after theyve been fully violentized and have begun using serious violence, Athens found in his interviews, violent criminals continue to make choices about when and where to use violence. They do not merely snap. They do not act on impulse, whatever that means. Their acts are not senseless not from their point of view, at least, however senseless they may seem to the rest of us. They analyze the situations in which they find

themselves much as the rest of us do, but if they determine that someone is threatening them, frustrating them, making them angry or demonstrating malice, they may conclude that serious violence is an appropriate response. The violent criminals Athens interviewed told him they changed their minds about using violence decided not to far more often than they followed through, usually because the situation changed which is conclusive evidence that their violence isnt impulsive. And because violent criminals choose, we can properly hold them accountable for their acts. But Dr. Athenss pioneering and authoritative work supports a much more positive program than punishment. It demonstrates with scientific evidence that violent criminality is preventable. To become criminally violent, Athens found, a novice must fully experience and complete all four stages of violentization. Which means that intervention at any point along the way has the potential to block that socially destructive outcome. The best place to intervene would be to prevent the brutalization of children, because without brutalization, a child has no reason to make the further choices that lead to violence. But family violence still conceals itself within a protected zone of legal privacy. Child abuse in the United States is a scandal and a shame. The number of children killed by abuse has increased fifty percent in the past decade. A 1998 Gallup poll found that almost five percent of U.S. parents report punishing their children by punching, kicking, throwing them down or hitting them with a belt, hairbrush, stick or some

other hard object elsewhere than on the buttocks a percentage that corresponds to some three million children. Although brutalization and child abuse are not synonymous, serious child abuse is always potentially brutalizing. Thus, social-welfare policies that make keeping families together their first priority are likely to promote rather than prevent violentization. Athenss studies verify that caretakers who deliberately injure children to the point of requiring medical attention have undergone violentization themselves, believe in using violence to maintain dominance and settle disputes and will almost certainly cause further injury to, or even kill, children left in their care. Giving such violent caretakers second chances, as social workers and judges frequently do with the best of intentions, cannot reverse their violentization. On the other hand, programs designed to support at-risk families, particularly single-parent families, with home visits by experienced mothers or nurses have documented success at reducing injuries from abuse. So has the remarkable development of family community centers such as the Boulder Community Parenting Center. These community centers which involve family members, human service providers, business, educational, law-enforcement and religious leaders and local government officials are open to all families and are designed to support healthy childrearing by reducing isolation and offering training, education and recreation. One pioneering program began in Vermont voluntarily two decades ago and proved itself and gained private and state support. Teenage pregnancy rates

in one Vermont county serviced by a pilot family center fell from 70 per 1,000 to 45 per 1,000 in the first seven years of the centers operation. Infant mortality was reduced across the same period by 50 percent. Incidents of child abuse declined from 21 percent to 2 percent. Vermont pediatrician Robert W. Chamberlin, who founded this center, explains the rationale of his program:

An approach that responds only to the high-risk end of the [family dysfunction] continuum will not have as much long-range impact on problem reduction as a community-wide program. Primary prevention works by preventing medium-risk families or persons from becoming high-risk. This is why professionals interested in preventing cardiovascular diseases target information about healthy lifestyles to the community as a whole rather than only to those who have had a heart attack. It also explains why European countries that make preventive programs accessible to the entire population are successful in prevention. This does not mean, however, that everyone must receive the same level of services. For example, although high-risk families may benefit most from an intensive home visiting program, mediumrisk families may need access only to a parent-child center in the community. [Chamberlin RW, Pediatrics in Review 13(2) (Feb. 1992): 64-71]

The Vermont pilot center was so successful that it has been replicated in every county in the state.

But violent subjugation can be accomplished without physical assault, by threatening and intimidating, and threatening and intimidating children unfortunately isnt against the law. Because of this barrier, Athens has concluded that the best place to intervene is in school. Society cant guarantee a child a good home, he argues, but it can guarantee her a good school. Children who are being brutalized by family members, at school, in gangs or on the streets are likely to show traumatic stress disturbances anxiety, avoidance, disturbed sleep, depression, inappropriate anger if not actual physical injury. Such children need help and they need intervention. Children exposed to violent socialization also need nonviolent coaching to counter the violent coaching they receive which is to say, they need mentors, teachers, counselors and older friends, people informed about the violentization process, to offer them credible and workable alternatives such as negotiation skills and better role models. Belligerent students reveal themselves in threats, in an emerging cynicism and contempt, in bullying and minor violent performances. The usual fate of belligerent novices today is to be expelled from school, but expelling them from school simply throws them back onto the street and cuts them off from help. Alternative high schools have been successful at least in part because they offer belligerent students alternatives, but Athenss evidence that boys usually complete violentization by fourteen means such help may come too late. We need alternative middle schools as well, or at least comparable middle-school programs, perhaps in a community center setting.

Even at the violent performances stage, intervention is still possible. The violent performer still has choices to make crucially, whether he will expand the range of his violence from defensive to offensive from provoked violence to unprovoked. I suspect intervention at this crucial decision point accounts for the success of the Marine Corps in turning tough kids into responsible adults. The Marines teach recruits serious violence, but they constrain it to defensive violence within a code of honor and loyalty to the Corps. Something similar probably accounts for the success of programs that reach delinquents through training in the martial arts, which similarly invoke values of honor and defensive restraint. Athletic coaches in our public schools would benefit from incorporating these distinctive values. Once violentization is complete once someone has committed a serious unprovoked or only minimally provoked violent criminal act no one has found a reliable therapy or treatment to reverse it. But most violent crimes are committed by people between the ages of 15 and 30 new graduates of the violentization process, so to speak which implies that most violent individuals deescalate their violence as they grow older. Why and how they do so, and how they might be helped to make that choices sooner, is clearly a field ripe for further research. But all the official programs in the world cannot replace personal witness to civil values; it is by personal witness, after all, that civil communities maintain their civility and the civilizing process proceeds that has gradually reduced personal violence in Western society. Lonnie Athenss work

discredits protestations that violence persists because of the poverty, race, culture or genetic inheritance of those people over there and has nothing to do with you and me. Criminal violence emerges from social experience, most commonly brutal social experience visited upon vulnerable children, who suffer for our neglect of their welfare and return in vengeful wrath to plague us. If violence is a choice they make, and therefore their personal responsibility, as Athens demonstrates it is, our failure to protect them from having to confront such a choice is a choice we make, just as a disease epidemic would be implicitly our choice if we failed to provide vaccines and antibiotics. Such a choice to tolerate the brutalization of children as we continue to do is equally violent and equally evil, and we reap what we sow. My book Why They Kill offers more information about these ideas and findings. Its available here at the conference and in bookstores. I hope youll read it. Thank you.