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8/3/2019 ATTACH Keynote
1/21
Richard Rhodes
609 Summer Hill Road
Madison CT 06443 USA
(203) 421-5882
(203) 421-5469 Fax
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knew seems to have been replaced by a stranger we hardly recognize.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.
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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
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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 self-
change 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.
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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
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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 self-
change. 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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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, medium-
risk 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.
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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.
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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
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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.