Motivation and emotion/Book/2020/Child killer motivation

Child killer motivation:
What motivates a child to kill?

Overview

Any time a murder is committed it’s a heinous crime, but when a child kills someone it’s even more shocking and monstrous. How does the most innocent member of society have the capability and motivation to take a life?

Murder is defined as the ‘the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought’ in America (6). The exact definition changes from country to country and state to state. The punishment for murder is also dependent on where it took place, for example Capital Punishment still occurs in some states in America while it has been abolished in Australia. Like adults there are many types of homicides that have been committed by children; famously the school shootings, gang-related offences, cult or religious murders, apparent random acts of violence and with one of the most common types being the killing of a family member. Killing one's mother (matricide), father (patricide) or siblings (siblicide) is one of the most prevalent types of homicide a child killer commits (Allely, Minnis, Thompson, Wilson & Gillberg, 2014).

A child is classified as a person under the age of 18 and considered a minor by the law, though it varies from country to country . Under the ‘minor’ classification, there are two generally accepted sub categories; pre-teens (0-14) and juveniles (14-17) (Richards, 2011). In Australia, children aged under 10 are deemed incapable of committing a crime and therefore can't be charged. Typically, child killers are charged as minors, though in some situations due to the severity of the crime or lack of remorse, offenders have been charged as adults (see Case Study 1) or those under the age of 10 face charges.

Child killer cases are famously followed by the media such as the Venables and Thompson case in England, where two ten-year-old boys committed an incredibly brutal murder to a two-year-old boy (see Figure 1 & Myall, 2019). Unfortunately, while child killer cases are incredibly popular in the media, there hasn’t been a large scientific focus on the motivation behind child killers.

This chapter utilises previous research and psychological theories to provide further insight into the question of 'how do the most innocent member of society have the motivation to take a life?'.

Focus questions:

What motivates a child to kill?
What impact does gender and age have for child killers?
What psychological theories can help explain why children murder?

Age and gender differences in child killers

It’s important to acknowledge that in academic literature, child killers are often broken down into two sub categories; 0-12 years old (pre-teen, preadolescents) and 13-17 years old (juveniles, teenagers or adolescents). These are the generally accepted categories as this is the typical age at which puberty begins[factual?]. The age in these two categories does sometimes change depending on which resources are being used, causing confusion when comparing statistics or past research. For example, in America the FBI produces two reports; Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the annual Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) that use different age categories for statistics on child killers (Heckel & Shumaker, 2001). SHR always uses ages 10-17 while UCR switches, sometimes presenting data that covers both preteens and juveniles.

Case study 1

Alyssa Bustamante

In 2009 Alyssa Bustamante, a 15 year old girl murdered her 9 year old female neighbour, by luring her into the woods where she was strangled. Before burying her in a small grave, Bustamante slit the girl's throat and wrists. Bustante used her hands and a knife to kill her victim, which are the most common weapons that female child killers use[factual?]. Female child killers generally target other women and victims that are younger than them. After writing ‘I just f***ing killed someone. I strangled them and slit their throat and stabbed them now they're dead ... It was ahmazing’(5) in her journal, she was tried as an adult and received a life sentence without parole.

Source: [1]

Gender plays an enormous part in being able to predict the offender’s gender and victim age, victim-offender relationship, gender of the victim, murder weapon and homicide circumstance. It’s important to address these differences, as males and females can often have different motivations when committing murder. Females are significantly more likely to kill younger children than males, particularly victims under the age of 5. Boys on the other hand are more likely to kill victims aged 14 to 34 years old. Elderly individuals (65+) are uncommon victims for both girls and boys, though males are more likely to kill an elderly person than girls. Girls are also more likely to have female victims and kill family members, whereas boys kill family members and friends (includes acquaintance/other known) at a nearly equal rate. They also do kill strangers which is very unusual for females and boys also target male victims more often.[factual?]

Girls also are more likely to use knives, personal weapons (hands, feet etc) and asphyxiation to kill the victim (See Case Study 1 & Table 1). Males use guns at a much higher rate and are more involved in crime-related homicides whereas girls are involved in more conflict-related murders than boys There are more male child killers then girls, thus boys are more likely to commit murder than girls.[factual?]

Table 1.

Type of weapon by offender Gender in Sellers and Heides 2012 Study

Type of Weapon	Male (%)	Female (%)
Gun	54.4%	16.7%
Knife	9.8%	20.8%
Personal Weapons (hand, feet etc.)	11.9%	41.7%
Other (poison, drugs, drown etc.)	4.%	4.2%
Blunt object	9.3%	8.3%
Fire	7.8%	0%
Asphyxiation	2.6%	8.3%

Psychopathology of child killers

People often think of the famous serial killers the world has seen, who are sociopaths and psychopaths, and then believe that everyone who commits murder has to fall into one of these definitions. Psychopathology is the scientific study of mental disorders (Psychopathology, 2019).

In the early academic literature a major commonality was the opinion that the " typology of youthful offender [was someone] who lacks a sense of empathy... does not suffer from obvious psychotic symptomatology, and may have a biological (syndromal) predisposition to exhibit aggressive and/or violent behavior— all characteristics commonly associated with psychopathic individuals” (Heckel & Shumaker, 2001).

In actuality there are few instances where child killers have been found to be psychotic or otherwise seriously mentally ill, with overall research not finding a high correlation between mental illness and child killers (Ewing, 1990). There are certain psychopathic tendencies that are still believed to present themselves in child killers such as a lack of empathy, high levels of narcissism and self-grandiose and poor behavioural control (impulsivity)[factual?]. It’s important to acknowledge the correlations that have been found and to interpret how previous and current mental health might affect a child's motivation and thus their actions. Some of the most prevalent mental illnesses found in child killers are discussed below.

Chilling quotes from child killers:

" [i like] hurting little things that can’t ﬁght back.’’ - Mary Bell, after killing a 4 year old boy when she was 10
" Today, Cindy and I ran away and killed an old lady. It was lots of fun" - Shirely Wolf
"hopefully this goes smoothly and we can get our first kill done and then keep going" - unnamed

Anti-social personality disorder

Antisocial personality disorder is actually the true definition of a psychopath in psychiatry, a mental disorder where the individual has patterns of manipulation and violation of others, consistently disregards right and wrong and ignores the feelings of other people (Legg, 2019). They often show no guilt or remorse for their behaviour, which tends to be antagonistic, manipulative and callous treatment of people (Mayo Clinic, 2020 & Legg, 2019). In the US National Centre for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice, they found that up to four per cent of child killers had a long history of anti-social behaviour (Brook, 2016). There are multiple cases where child killers have shown little to no remorse for their actions, not caring or comprehending why what they’ve done is wrong. Risk factors for this disorder include; family history of mental health disorders, subjected to abuse or neglect during childhood and unstable, violent or chaotic family life during childhood. Some of these factors are key motivators of child killers.

Impulse control

Shumaker and McKee’s research found that a large portion of child killers suffered from low self control, particularly impulse-control, which we can see in Duncans and Duncan's seven risk factors for child killers (See Table 3). Stephen Baron's study in 2003 found that “low self-control appears to predict violent offending better than other types of crime” (Baron, 2003). Child Killer crimes are often the result of conflict or occur during when another crime is taking place. It’s known that children have a lower maturity rate than adults and often can’t understand the consequences of murder as those who are older can (Sweten, Piquero & Steinberg, 2013).

What motivates a child to kill?

Understanding a child killer's motivation allows us to comprehend why they commit the terrible crimes they do and if there are any risk factors or information that could help future diagnosis. Academics use previous cases of child killers to try and gain this insight.

Self defence

Another motive for children to murder is self-defence. Self defence has four elements that must be proven to be a successful defence in court:

They were confronted with an unprovoked attack
The threat of injury or death was imminent
The degree of force used in self-defence was reasonable under the circumstance
They objectively reasonable feel they were going to injured or killed unless they used self defence

Research completed for adult killers showed that adult serial killers who

“	"You’re looking at young people [whose lives] might be dominated by family violence and drug use and you’ve got situations where kids are being abused themselves and there are strong links between psychological and sexual abuse and [then] violent behaviour from younger people ”	”
—- Matthew Willis, expert in juvenile crime at Australian institute of criminology.

had been abused as children were 3 times more likely than non-abused adults to act violently as adults (Allely, Minnis, Thompson, Wilson & Gillberg, 2014). For children who have faced constant abuse and neglect might interpret this particular situation as life threatening and might react beyond what is considered a reasonable force due to their history.

Findings suggest that children who witnessed adults modelling aggressive behaviour in front of them, are more likely to imitate the violence, with increased exposure exacerbating the child’s violence. For children who experience abuse first hand, academic research has shown repeatedly that those who commit murder are typically victims before they break the law. Robert Kinschrieff, a clinical psychologist at the US National centre for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice stated that “90 percent of culprits [child killers] were severely abused or had witnessed abuse such as between their parents” (Brook, 2016). For children who live in homes that have high levels of physical and emotional abuse, they are constantly put in conflict situations with family members and/or other adults. For both male and female child murderers’ conflict-related cases occur as a high percentage of all child murders. Girls especially have a greater representation of committing murder in conflict-related situation and also for murdering family members. Hardwick and Rowton-Lee noticed a connection between parricide offenders being more likely to have suffered severe abuse by their families as a child.

Revenge

Revenge in psychology can be an individual wanting to deliver comparative suffering to an individual/s who has caused them harm (Jaffe, 2011). A common revenge based murder for child killers is committing a school shooting.

School shootings are unfortunately becoming more prevalent in the US, with children being the individual holding the gun. There has been large amounts of research done in this area, allowing for deep insight into the motivation behind school shooters. One of the main motivators is revenge, largely due to having been bullied during school and enduring a hostile school environment.[factual?]

For those born after the 1980’s[grammar?] they are faced with new challenges; increased anxiety, cyber-bullying, depression and even narcissistic personality disorders and especially in the US who have the highest score of the worst social problems in the industrialised world[factual?]. All these aspects make it less shocking that school bullying is common in the US and that school shootings are a vicious and fatal relation of its presence (Klein, 2012). The US had 49 school shootings in 2019 only, though it’s important to note that many school shooters are not children{fact}}.

A large majority of school shooters faced severe bullying when at school and didn’t receive sufficient support from adults to be able to rationally deal with situations they are facing[factual?], see case study 2 . Those who are being bullied often feel isolated, unsupported and this can build into a drastic action taking place, whether it be suicide or committing a school shooting. Revenge appears to be a logical reaction for them to end the abuse or ‘get back’ at their abusers.

Case study 2

Charles Williams

Williams was a 15 year old student in Santana, US when he perpetrated a school shooting in 2001, killing two students and injuring 13 others. Williams faced ongoing bullying, which started as name calling and exacerbated to older kids forcing him to perform sexual acts. Leading up to the shooting Williams mentioned that he didn’t want to live any more, twice mentioned that he was going to recreate the Columbine shooting and that he had made plans of where to shoot from. All these statements were ignored by peers and adults. On the day of the shooting, a teacher humiliated him in front of his peers which he interpreted as abuse and he sought to talk to the school counsellor who refused to see him due to being busy. He was sent home and later returned with a 22 calibre revolver. After his arrest he told police that was just “tired of being bullied”.

Source: [2]

Mob mentality

Crowd psychology is the study of how individual behaviour is impacted when crowds are together whereas herd or mob mentality focuses on how groups follow people or trends who are influential. Preteens and teenagers are at a point in their life where they are trying to form an identity and are more heavily influenced by friends and role models (Sellers & Heide, 2012). This is a time in everyone’s life where they are trying to fit in with peers and test boundaries with adults, which can affect their ability to make good decisions. There are multiple cases, where during or after the crime has been committed, those who were influenced face instant regret over their actions (McMillion, 2018). Groups can come in many different forms ranging from gangs to cult or special interest areas. Gang-related murders were found to be quite prevalent with male child killers, especially for those aged over 10 (Gerard, Jackson, Chou, Whitfield & Browne, 2014; Lizotte & Bjerregaard, 1995) with some evidence that gang-related homicides in the US have increased over the decades (Miller, 2014).

Seeking Control through Fantasy

A common side effect of a hostile home environment is to create coping mechanisms, such as the fantasy of a better life which can exacerbate the desire to exert dominance over others in order to achieve this fantasy (McMillion, 2018). These fantasies reach a peak where just fantasizing isn’t satisfying the child and they decide to embody the fantasy (Miller, 2014). They receive pleasure thinking of this fantasy until they finally replace reality with the imagined story, giving the killer a misguided impression that they will be able to change either their past or future (McMillion, 2018). This imagination process allows the killer to have gratification that can substitute for the unhappy experiences.

As Franklin McMillion states from Malizia’s research, “The satisfaction originating from the activity cannot be obtained from any other event, but only killing” (McMillion, 2018; Malizia, 2017). These fantasies can have different motivations, whether trying to substitute unhappy experiences with better ones or have inspiration from movies and/or real-life criminals and believe that they will be able to achieve a level of fame through this murder. As seen in case study 3 two children influenced by the movie scream believed they were “gonna go down in history; [and] we’re gonna be just like Scream except in real life terms” (Williams & Vincent, 2018) and they highly revered other child murderers such as the Columbine High School shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Williams & Vincent, 2018). Children's imagination can create a fantasy of a better life and in order to achieve this they believe that murder will give them the power to make these changes.

Case study 3

Scream Movie Inspired murder

In 2006, two 16-year-old boys became fascinated with the movie Scream and decided to kill a friend of theirs in order to gain fame. They filmed themselves before and after the murder, based on the same style Scream employs in their film. In the videos they discussed their fantasies of the murder, how they were going to commit the crime and also reflecting on what would happen to them after, saying “we’re gonna go down in history…. hopefully this goes smoothly and we can get our first kill done and then keep going”. They stabbed the female victim 12 times in her own home after they had all watched a movie together. They both revered previous serial killers and child killers, wanting to be like their ‘inspirations’ by saying “we’re gonna be murderers, like, let’s see Ted Bundy, like the Hillside Strangler...Zodiac killer”.

Source: [3]

Risk factors

Risk factors are an important tool in predicting and identifying traits in young children that have commonly appeared in specific crimes, in this case child murderers. Case studies help create, update and inform risk factors. Ducan & Ducan's seven risk factors for the involvement of young children in murder is widely used (Sellers & Heide, 2012):

The intensity of a child's hostile reactions
The degree of control the child has over his or her impulses
The child's inability to formulate alternative solutions to difficult life situations
The provocativeness of the intended victims
The degree of helplessness of the intended victim
The availability of weapons
A history of homicidal threats made by the would be perpetrator

Psychological theories attached to child homicide

[Provide more detail]

Attachment theory

John Bowlby described attachment theory as the “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings” (Bowlby, 1982). This theory looks at the tremendous impact the early life experiences can have on a child's personality and behaviours, particularly the bond between children and parents. Bowlby proposed that children are born with an innate drive to try and create attachments with their caregivers rather than attachment only being a learned behaviour (Bowlby, 1982). Research has found that children whose caregivers respond with comfort and protection are more likely to have stronger self-esteem, better self-reliance as they mature, perform better in school, have higher successful social interactions and experience less depression and anxiety (Young, Simpson, Griskevicius, Huelsnitz & Fleck, 2019).

For those children who don’t have highly engaged or abusive caregivers, they already face higher rates of being diagnosed with personality disorders and increased chances of committing crime before the age of one (Young, Simpson, Griskevicius, Huelsnitz & Fleck, 2019). It’s vital for children to create an attachment with their primary caregiver to learn how to trust and rely on others in order to avoid growing up and believing that everyone is untrustworthy and out to get you. Already we know that a large majority of child killers face abusive and neglectful upbringings, placing them into a higher risk category for committing crime when they're older.

Social learning theory

Social learning theory looks at how an individual can create new behaviours through observing and imitating others, based on their learning processes and social behaviours (Bandura, 1971). People learn through observation of others in social contexts and vicarious reinforcement (rewards and punishment). As a general view, if an individual's action sees them be repeatedly punished, they will most likely cease continuing it and if rewarded they will continue said behaviour.

Burgess and Akers state that criminal behaviour is learnt through a combination of direct reinforcement, explicit instruction, vicarious reinforcement and observation (Burgess & Akers, 1966). For child killers, many grow up in hostile home environments where they observe violence from a young age that goes unpunished. Violence over time can become their ‘normal’ and initial method of punishing or interacting with others, as that is what they have personally experienced and learnt to be correct.

Conclusion

There are numerous motivations that can cause children to commit the terrible crime of taking a life and this chapter outlines a few of the most dominant motivators.

A majority of the motivators were heavily impacted by an abusive and hostile childhood, both at home and school environments. Through the psychological theories and case studies used to support child killer research, it’s known that a child’s upbringing significantly impacts their social interactions and motivation of the crime itself. Children who were abused at home were more likely to act in self-defence, seeking control through fantasies and even revenge in some cases. Revenge also stems from constant abuse at school environments, often presenting as school shootings in child killers.

“	there was much public awareness of child murderers from newspaper headlines but very little scientific study	”
—Kathryn Adams

Gender and age also play a significant role in differentiating child killers, in determining methods of crimes due to gender and how maturity can influence their decision making. There isn’t a large presence of severe mental illnesses amongst child killers, though psychopathic tendencies were the most common, particularly Antisocial Personality Disorder and impulse-control.

Academics are calling for more research to be undertaken in this field of study. There are limitations in measuring the psychological and cognitive maturity of child killers and research into the motivation of child killers that is separate to adult killers. Further research would allow for earlier diagnosis and intervention, as many adult murderers committed their first kill as children (i.e Ed Kemper, Thomas Quick and Henry Lee Lucas).

It’s important to note that this chapter takes a small sample out of a range of different motivations and psychological theories that could be used to discuss child killers.

References

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Williams, D. J., & Vincent, J. (2018). "It's going to be Extra Fun!": Analysis of an Atypical case of teen homicide as leisure behaviour. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 63(6). https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/doi/full/10.1111/1556-4029.13796

Young, E. S., Simpson, J. A., Griskevicius, V., Huelsnitz & Fleck, C.(2019). Childhood attachment and adult personality: A life history perspective. Self and Identity, 118(12), 22-38. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2017.1353540

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