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8/3/2019 ATTACH Keynote

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Richard Rhodes

609 Summer Hill Road

Madison CT 06443 USA

(203) 421-5882

(203) 421-5469 Fax

[email protected]

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knew seems to have been replaced by a stranger we hardly recognize.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.

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