The Causes of Violence
By Kathryn Seifert, Ph.D.
Children and teens that have problems with violent behavior have a particular set of characteristics. The greater the number of characteristics that are present, the higher the risk for aggressive behaviors. The presence of more than one of the following problems is cause for concern and closer assessment of a child's potential for violence.Factors that could lead to risk are attachment disorders, skill deficits, comorbid psychiatric symptoms, neurological conditions, below Average cognitive development, unmodulated emotion and lack of self-soothing ability, ineffective interpersonal skills, negative self-image, early onset of chronic behavior problems, and delayed moral development.
Attachment Disorders. ?Attachment is the deep and enduring connection established between a child and caregiver in the first several years of life. It profoundly influences every component of the human condition--mind, body, emotions, relationships, and values? (Levy & Orlans, 1998, p. 1). A positive, nurturing caregiver bond is necessary for healthy emotional and physical development from infancy through early childhood. Caregivers can help facilitate the learning of social skills by explaining other points of view to children and providing a safe environment for exploration. For this to happen, the caregiver must provide the initial bonding by understanding the child?s point of view.
However, parents can be unavailable for a number of reasons, including addiction, mental illness, criminal behavior, emotional immaturity, violent relationships, death, or abandonment (James, 1994). Abuse, neglect, and exposure to domestic violence can cause problems in the development of the primary attachment bonds between caregiver and child (Levy & Orlans, 1998). Parents can be absent from their children for many reasons. It is not merely the absence of the parent that causes the problem, but the pathological care giving and not having a good caregiver when the parent is absent from the child that leads to attachment problems. Consequently, these children have not learned the basic trust necessary for normal human relationships. The assistance and information necessary for healthy growth and development is not incorporated into the psyche of the child (Abidin, 1995). The child, self-protectively, becomes emotionally withdrawn. He/she becomes his/her own boss.? He/she cannot allow adults to be in charge because he/she cannot trust the adults to take care of him/her. These children are unable to follow the rules of society because of their attachment problems. These youth have ineffective interpersonal skills.
Attachment problems can result in children who are violent, lack empathy, and are out of control. This lack of empathy may be seen in bullying, fights, and cruelty to animals. Exercising power over and being cruel to a helpless animal or a smaller child can be an indicator of the absence of caring feelings about the welfare of other living beings. Such emotional indifference can allow a child to harm or inflict pain on others without pangs of conscience. Infamous adult psychopathic serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, and Ted Bundy all had histories of torturing animals as children (Levy & Orlans, 1999).
Statistics indicate that 800,000 children with severe attachment disorders are coming to the attention of the child welfare system every year. Boys who experience attachment problems early in life are three times more likely to be violent (Levy & Orlans, 1998). Eighty percent of maltreated children show disorganized-disoriented attachment patterns resulting in behavior that is impulsive, wrathful, out of control, and violent. They lie and steal and lack trust in others.
Later in the child?s life, when the assistance of adults is available (in school, for example), the child can?t trust the perspective of adults, and thus rejects others' attempts to help. Again, the child fails to bond with others. In adulthood these men and women commit heinous crimes and inhabit the segregation units of adult prisons. Even in prison, they cannot voluntarily control their behavior and impulses.
Comorbid Psychiatric Symptoms. Often, violent children have a combination of symptoms including hyperactivity, impulsivity, depression, anxiety, obsessive/compulsive or bipolar disorders, and frank psychosis. According to Fago (1999), ADHD is a strong predictor of delinquency and conduct disorders in adolescence. Children who have ADHD, verbal learning disabilities, and/or social skill deficits are at a serious risk for displaying anti-social behavior throughout adolescence and adulthood.
Violent youth frequently have poor reality testing, which makes them similar in many ways to those who have thought disorders. On some parts of the Rorschach scoring they are more similar to schizophrenics in their thinking than they are to normal children. They do not perceive or interpret their environment accurately, and they tend to oversimplify information. They are ineffective problem solvers and they do not manage stress or emotions (especially anger) well.
The "Unabomber", Theodore Kaczynski was characterized as a strange child, unable to interact effectively with others. It appears from public reports that the family did not recognize his mental illness. Consequently, he did not get the help he needed. A psychological evaluation while he was at Harvard should have alerted someone that he needed help, but it did not happen there either. Ted also said at one point that he had been abused as a child. His father committed suicide and Ted attempted suicide in jail. The psychiatrists who examined him said he was a paranoid schizophrenic. As bright as he was, his ability to cope with reality and choose non-violent ways to meet his needs was impaired. What caused this area of development to be stunted?
In her study of violent children, Lewis (1998) found evidence for Dissociative Identity Disorder, as well. She documented long histories of violent teens that, from childhood, exhibited changing identities, habits, handwriting, hand dominance, academic performance, and personality structure. They also had brain waves, allergies, and visual acuity that changed along with these personality traits. Usually, at least one personality was very violent and one was very docile. This disorder usually is the result of severe sexual abuse of very bright children.
Noted author Cloe Madanes talks in her workshops about how sex offenders in her program at the Family Therapy Institute of Washington, DC, appear to be thought disordered before treatment, but not after successful treatment. It is possible that sexual abuse is such a terrible assault on the psyche that it causes youth to withdraw into their own mental processes. This causes information from the environment to be distorted and lack a reality base.
According to Dr. Lewis, paranoia is probably the most common symptom fueling repeated violence. It is the misperception that someone has threatened, endangered, or disrespected the offender. It is an over-attribution of hostile intent. In her book, Guilty by Reason of Insanity, Lewis (1998) described an interview with a teenager who was chronically violent. The teen became agitated during the interview and began to pace. He worked himself up and could not calm himself. She terminated the interview because of her concern about his agitation, and as he walked back to his room, he struck and broke the jaw of another teen in the area. He claimed the other teen had called him a name, but in actuality nothing had been said. Lewis states that paranoia is present in many psychiatric disorders, and occurs when something goes awry in the brain.
Many children who have suffered past traumas such as those described above also engage in violence against themselves. From 1980 to 1994, the suicide rate by firearm for African American male teenagers more than doubled, while the overall rate increased from 4.9 to 6.1 per 100,000 youths aged 10 to 19. The rate then declined to 5 per 100,000 youths by 1996. These rates are much higher than in most industrialized nations (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999). Body piercing and self-harming behaviors such as cutting and burning also are apparent in this population.
Neurological Conditions and Problems. Many of the violent offenders examined by Lewis (1998) had frontal lobe damage and a history of seizures. The areas damaged in violent children often are those that modulate aggressive behavior. She found children incarcerated for murder that had severe brain damage due to accidents and deliberate abuse.
There is now some evidence that childhood abuse and neglect can affect brain development and chemistry, as well. In infancy, brain cells migrate from the primitive brain to the frontal cortex. Severely neglected children, who are not rocked and nurtured and held, may have arrested cell migration causing the frontal cortex to fail to develop properly. There are studies showing smaller brains among maltreated children.
Among adult psychopaths, Hare (1997) reports that the frontal cortex does not function adequately--especially when processing words and concepts involving emotion. Other research reported by Hare (1995) demonstrates that this insufficient processing of emotion results in problems with language and communication. Perry and Pollard (1997) found smaller brains among maltreated children when compared to non-maltreated children. This might explain the faulty perception and processing in the former group.
Below-Average Cognitive Development. Many aggressive and violent children have borderline intellectual functioning and learning disabilities, and don?t do well in school. Some violent children simply do not learn from their mistakes, or are unable to delay gratification. They also have lower social anxiety than normal children do. Social anxiety is one of the things that helps society sublimate personal desires in order to follow the rules of society. Because many conduct/attachment disordered or violent youth lack social anxiety, punishment is less effective for them than it is for other children. This has been demonstrated by the work of Hare; his book, Without Conscience (1998). He determined that this difficulty in learning from mistakes is actually biological and has to do with arousal and fear responses.
Many children who perform violent acts do not understand means-ends relationships, how to generate plans or alternative solutions, or the importance of looking at consequences before action and evaluating outcomes.
Unmodulated Emotion and Lack of Self-soothing Ability. Violent children experience little emotion, but when they do, it is often explosive. Their ability to distinguish and communicate emotions verbally and appropriately is weak. They are unable to self-soothe or self-calm--skills normally learned in infancy. If a nurturing parent is unavailable, the young child does not learn those skills.
Violent children work themselves up until there is no turning back. It is a formula for disaster. Thirteen-year-old Eric Smith bludgeoned 3 1/2-year-old Derrick Roby to death with a rock. He said he ?switched? into a rage mode. Eric was diagnosed as ADHD and repeated two grades. He was impulsive and had anger management problems and low self-esteem.
Negative Self-Image. When a child?s self-image is overwhelmingly negative, he or she does not expect to succeed in our society by prosocial means. Severe abuse and neglect can destroy a child?s self-esteem. Such children often are not successful in school and are rejected by prosocial peers. They think they can be successful through antisocial means in a deviant peer group. Antisocial peers give them the reinforcement they are seeking. They believe in the legitimacy of aggression as a means to an end. They can see that aggression has provided some positive tangible outcomes for some of their friends, and they are willing to take the chance that it can happen for them. It is an area where they can achieve a sense of power and success.
Early Onset of Chronic Behavior Problems. Violent youths have often had early and persistent antisocial behavior beginning with minor behavior problems around age 7. This progresses to moderate problems at about age 9, and serious behavior problems around age 11 or 12 (Loeber & Farrington, 1998). These children are often alienated, impulsive, and rebellious. In my practice, I have seen severe aggression in attachment disordered children as early as 4 years of age.
Substance Abuse. Violent children are often substance abusers, who are raised in substance abusing families. Substance abuse has been associated with a history of abuse, especially in women. The majority of prison inmates have problems with substance abuse and many are violent. Substance abuse creates immediate gratification without thought as to the consequences of the behavior. Many violent youth have the need for immediate gratification and they do not think ahead to the consequences of their behavior. There are many examples of this in the media. Little in the history of Jeremy Strohmeyer--except dropping grades, interest in pornography, and substance abuse?gives us clues to why he raped and strangled a 7-year-old child. He was a top student and was on the volleyball team before he started his downhill spiral. Daphne Abdela, 15-year-old daughter of a millionaire businessman, together with her boyfriend, stabbed a real estate agent 30 times. Both had long histories of substance abuse.
Enuresis and Harming Animals. A small, but significant number of violent youth have problems with enuresis and harming animals. Enuresis is probably due to neglect, brain immaturity, and physiological problems. The lack of empathy that results in harming animals is related to abuse, neglect and attachment disorder.
Delayed Moral Development. Just as there are stages of physical and emotional development, there is a progression of moral development throughout one?s lifetime. Lawrence Kohlberg (1969) studied the moral development of boys, and there is more recent work by Carol Gillian (1982) on the moral development of girls. She hypothesizes gender difference in the moral developmental sequences.
In the early stages of moral development, children think egocentrically. As they grow, they believe that what is right is what meets the needs of the self. ?Fair deals? are important in a legalistic way--not out of concern for being fair, but as the price of getting what one wants. It appears that violent children remain in these early childhood stages of moral development. They have not yet acknowledged that relationships, reciprocity, and memberships in groups are important. They certainly have not reached a stage where they have a commitment to the greater society, nor do they understand that social contracts are required to maintain the social order. Laws are viewed not as important societal glue, but as potential obstacles to self-gratification.
Protective Factors and Resiliency
There are conditions that have the potential to protect youths from a violent lifestyle (Levy & Orlans, 1998). These conditions are the opposite of the individual risk factors. They give us hints as to where to proceed with treatment. These conditions are:
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Constant, positive, and nurturing caregivers who set rules, respect a child?s individuality, and provide secure attachment in order for children to grow up emotionally healthy;
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Success in school;
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Positive social orientation and prosocial peers;
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A higher IQ and resilient temperament to help a child heal from environmental insults and learn to cope more effectively;
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Bonds to supportive and prosocial family, teachers, counselors, or other adults, so children have a chance to make choices other than violence;
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Clearly stated family and community rules and expectations, along with monitoring of child behavior to help children learn to follow social norms;
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Good social and problem solving skills, moral maturity, and an ability to manage emotions (particularly anger) effectively; and
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Curiosity, enthusiasm, alertness, the ability to set goals, high self-esteem, and an internal locus of control.
Conclusion
Violent youth have characteristics that support violent offending. They have multiple problems, disorders, and skill deficits. Moderate to severe behavior problems begin before the age of 12. Violent youth often have attachment problems resulting from abuse, neglect, exposure to domestic violence, and absence of a parent without a substitute, nurturing caregiver. These youth are violent, lack empathy, defy authority, are very manipulative and self-centered, and do not follow the rules of society. Violent youth often have psychiatric problems such as mood disorders, ADHD, and PTSD. They are often paranoid, hypervigilent and ineffective problem solvers, with poor social skills and deficient anger management. Many have brain injury or immaturity. They have learning problems. Logic and reasoning is not adequate. Cognitive development may be delayed. Violent youth are unable to modulate emotion effectively. A positive social orientation, a nurturing adult who provides good boundaries and positive activities can protect against the development of violence. Children who are enthusiastic, curious, and have positive activities and goals are less likely to become violent.