While looking at a single criteria with the DSM open to a dogeared page may encourage you to apply a label enthusiastically that will then follow the child around remorselessly and influence everything in his life from social service entitlements to classroom choice, at least until he passes into the adult system, clinically speaking a single episode (which is what we are viewing), dramatic as it may appear to those who love the small and fuzzy (or in this case the small cold and scaly), could be the culmination of a Tourettian rage or a first psychotic break as easily as it could be any of the favourites here that people are trotting out.
Conduct Disorder overenthusiastically applied = even more miserable future given that even practitioners will be biased against wanting this boy on their caseloads. You might as well take a 19 yo aboriginal girl and send her out of the emergency room as a lifelong Borderline PD the first time she shows up with cigarette burns on her arms.
I don’t know what you’re rambling on about here. You said that " killing and torturing animals at the age of seven is not particularly diagnostic of anything," when in fact it is a symptom of Conduct Disorder. All this business about dogeared DSM pages, Tourette’s, or Borderline Personality Disorder does nothing to address how clearly incorrect your statement was. I have not asserted anything about whether this child meets the criteria for CD or not. I merely corrected your misinformation.
Of course we can’t diagnose this kid over a message board. We’re looking at a snapshot of his behavior; granted, it’s a particularly gruesome snapshot, but it’s just one moment. However, I have my doubts that a child who is capable of breaking into a closed zoo, climbing into the animal cages, and bludgeoning them to death with a rock, is just having a ‘bad day hiccup,’ behavior-wise. My guess is that this child already has quite the rap sheet. It’s not even the killing that really shocks me – it’s the complete lack of fear and regard for safety and authority.
Yes, sometimes children kill animals. Sometimes they squish spiders, pull the wings off of flies, throw rocks at birds. They do not engage in B&E at the local zoo and gleefully beat endangered animals to death, animals that they know belong to someone, and that serve a purpose (education and entertainment).
It is not misinformation to say that a single criteria met is not diagnostic of anything – this is an accurate statement. It is disingenuous, inaccurate and uncharitable to say that it is more likely to be diagnostic of one thing than another before you have adequate supplementary information at hand, which many in the thread have been doing. A single criteria met simply presents you with several possible new paths to pursue in a complex decision tree.
edited to add: Is it really necessary to explain the difference between the terms “symptomatic of” and “diagnostic of?”
I have bolded the parts I don’t agree with. Unsupervised children (and I cannot stress enough the importance of the fact that the problem is parental negligence, from where I see it) do things that look stupid to adult eyes. Sometimes because they don’t know what they are doing, sometimes to see what happens, sometimes to get a reaction.
It is like yelling at a kid for breaking the expensive figurines in the living room instead of the cheap ones that your MIL gave you because she hates you. They just don’t know. They grab what is within their reach and they explore. Exploration often ends in destruction.
He didn’t know about endangered species, he didn’t know (or even cared at that age) about who they belong to, they don’t know all the good a lizard does to humanity as a teaching tool. And I have no idea what B&E means, but he wasn’t engaging in it and didn’t know what it was.
This was just a kid figuring out something he hadn’t seen before. There is no way you can differentiate this from throwing rocks at birds or pulling the wings from flies.
We don’t know anything about this kid and his previous behavior. He might be the sweetest kid on the block (hard to believe from a neglected child, but hey), he might be a bona fide monster. From this one incident, we cannot tell.
This is certainly beyond “boys will be boys”. That said, it is also certainly below “snuff this baby monster before he ends civilization as we know it” (which I realize is not what you are saying).
This is something that needs to be looked into. Something that needs a serious follow up. Slapping a label on the kid and hoping for his violent death won’t do him any good.
And for the nth time, someone needs to take that magnifying glass to the parents and see WTH is wrong with them. Monsters are not born, they are raised.
Pretty much all seven year olds are capable of knowing the function of the zoo. He knows that the animals in the zoo belong to the zoo. He knows that they are there so that others can see animals they might not see in everyday life.
A seven year old also knows that the spider, the fly, and the bird living his yard belong to no one. No one comes to see them. In a burst of cruelty, or empowerment, or exploration, a child might throw a rock at that bird who belongs to no one. If he hits the bird, how does he feel? A pang of guilt? Does he go look at the dead bird and feel bad for what he did? Does he do it again? Maybe, maybe not. But my guess is that most kids don’t go find more rocks and see how many more bird they can take out.
This child broke into a locked zoo, possibly with the intent to kill the animals. He didn’t kill one, then look at it and feel guilt. He killed one and he liked it. He liked it so much, he did it again. And again. And again. Thirteen times. For half an hour. While smiling.
Lack of supervision may be at the root of his problem. A virus is at the root of influenza. Just because there’s an identifiable cause doesn’t mean that the person isn’t sick.
Exactly - he would need to show two further symptoms of CD to meet criteria. That means that cruelty to animals is not by itself to meet criteria. That’s the same as what I said initially.
Oh, fer goodness’ sake. I hardly think a hyperbolic statement about giving the kid to the croc is equatable to nuking an entire society. No, I woluldn’t seriously do such a thing. I wasn’t aware it is only Americans who make over-the-top statements that are not meant to be taken literally, but to convey the intensity of a personal reaction. Australia is a civilized (and wonderful!) society, and they will handle it in an appropriate way.
I do agree with the director’s “boot up the behind” suggestion.
I realise it amounts to little more than hearsay at the moment, but according to a piece in the Daily Mail newspaper today, the mother of the child was actually with him. If this is true, this mind is officially boggled!
7 years old is not clueless and stumbling over animal pain etc by accident. 7 year olds are very interested in right and wrong and they (usually) want to do things “right”. 7 year olds are in second grade, for heaven’s sake–we’re not talking about a 3 year old.
But even preschoolers can and do show empathy. Of course the amount and degree exist on a spectrum, given developmental and cultural issues (and familial). but for some here to say that a 7 year old is clueless about causing pain is incorrect. Most normal children can empathize with animals or people to some degree. We call them little savages and rug rats etc because they are still being taught (and learning) to share, to take turns etc–IOW, they are selfish creatures who haven’t learned yet how to oil the wheels of social interactions, but at 7, they are well on their way.
Unfortunately, I’d say this child is a symptom of a larger, sicker culture. I know very little about the Aboriginal culture, but do know that alcoholism, poverty and dysfunctional families abound. Given that sort of climate, what type of help can this kid get?
If the child has gone to school at all, and that’s not a guarantee because if he is Aboriginal unfortunately there’s a scary high incidence of truantism in Aboriginal communities from what I understand, he knew that the lizards in that zoo were at least special. From what I remember of early primary school, 99% of our time was spent talking about Australian species and doing projects on endangered animals. That sort of shit is big in Australian schools, they like to drum it into kids heads from an early age (along with our entitlement to insane amounts of public holidays :))
And he did know the lizards belonged to someone. He didn’t just find some lizards in the street. He had to climb over fences and break into pens to get to them. Sure, he may not have the correlation between “Zoo Animals = Teaching Tools” set in his head, but he would have known these were someone else’s.
Also, I believe B&E is breaking and entering. Which he most certainly was “engaging in”. Whether he’s aware of what B&E is, again is related wholly and solely to his background and upbringing. But it’s not unreasonable to think that even if he has never broken in to anywhere before, he’s got experience of friends, older family members or community members who have, and that he’s possibly seen them get arrested for it.
Just because this is a trigger issue for some people doesn’t mean that we set aside the same neutral methods we use to determine the veracity of other claims. Leaving the emotional baggage that we get from the picture of poor animals suffering aside, I’d like to see some real evidence of a correlation between abuse of animals in children as young as the one in the story and adult antisocial behavior.
Using Google Scholar, I was able to come up with a large number of sources showing a correlation for childhood patternistic cruelty to animals and aggressive adult behavior, but those studies also showed a high correlation of parental abuse in the exact same cases. That doesn’t sound conclusive to me. So if there is a conclusive study, I’d love to be enlightened.
Plus, we don’t even know if this kid has shown any patternistic tendency to abuse animals. He may have a loving relationship with his dog back home for all we know from the article. I don’t want to sound like I’m defending him, but I do believe there are some possibly unfair assertions being thrown around here.
And finally, I’m not the one claiming that there is a correlation, so I don’t want to do your homework for you. Neither am I making a claim against your position. Honestly, I just want to know if there’s a definite correlation or not. And I’d prefer a cite from a neutral source.
Thank you for the link. However, I don’t think that the abstract was very useful in determining what I’m asking. My fault, since I only said one word in my last post. But the abstract couldn’t tell me things like what age groups were studied, whether parental abuse was a factor, whether the abuse was reoccurring or limited to isolated cases of brutality, the definition of “extreme” animal abuse, etc.
Could anyone find one that doesn’t require registration or $20 for the study?
Exactly - he would need to show two further symptoms of CD to meet criteria. That means that cruelty to animals is not by itself to meet criteria. That’s the same as what I said initially.
