I have never understood this phenomenon, and this latest story has raised the question again, particularly as I am from West Yorkshire.
Is it just gang mentality, childish maliciousness, or is mental illness at root. I know there will be no one answer, but what would cause 5 seperate 11 and 12 year olds to attempt to strangle a 5 year old? My brain just keeps returning with ‘Does Not Compute’
Yeah, this is a question that has been on my mind for a good many years.
I don’t have an answer, but there has GOT to be the possibility that some people are just born without the mental moral switch in their heads. In other words, being born “bad”, whatever that means.
Why or how, I don’t know. They say genius and madness have a thin line, perhaps it’s chemical imbalance that brings you to the brink of both. Perhaps it’s something similar…like some alcoholics seem to be born 2 drinks short, perhaps some kids are born missing this capability?
This is the nature vs. nurture argument. I suspect there can be many reasons why these children seem to lack a decent moral compass but I doubt it is likely due to being “born bad”. I have a dim memory that there is a psychological disorder where an individual literally lacks the ability for empathy or judging right and wrong but it was my sense that it is a fairly rare condition (I recall a young boy who would just do things like stab his dad with scissors for no reason…just had zero impulse control or something).
While humans have an in built capacity for moral behavior a moral and ethical framework are taught and not just built in to us. I would bet, if asked, the children arrested in this case could tell someone that what they did was wrong. Why they did not elevate the life of another to the point where they would not consider hurting that person is probably a complex answer. Family life, friends, societal influences, schooling…all probably played a role here.
To those of us who easily understand the moral aspects involved here, to the point that it is part and parcel of who we are, I doubt we can ever really understand how anyone could do this.
As soon as I saw this thread, I thought of this story, which I read in today’s paper.
I don’t know that I would say that kids are “born bad”, but they are born with the natural impulses of jealousy, rage, aggression, etc., that most can be taught to combat. Some, however, are not taught and some cannot be taught.
Note that this involved (apparently) a group of children. Peer pressure can do amazing things to ordinary individuals without any individual really being ‘to blame’. I would expect this to have been a dangerous game which children engage in, in testing the world, which spiralled out of control.
It will be interesting to see whether the press is able to whip this up into another Bulger/Venables/Thompson feeding frenzy. Have we learnt anything from that fiasco. We shall see.
This sounds highly likely to me. Mob mentality may need hundreds of adults, but a far smaller number of kids. And yes, eleven year olds don’t necessarily have
the understanding of risk that we do.
I doubt they will. The Bulger case had various factors crucial to a media storm, all of which were also present in Soham - a striking image (from the CCTV footage), a protracted hunt for a missing child, and a particularly brutal crime, specific details of which went unspoken apart from rumour. The OP’s case is too open and clear-cut for the media to really get the public fascinated.
We are not born “moral”, we are born human. Our brains are the evolutionary result of millions of years of killing things and eating them, or killing things which might compete with us in our killing-and-eating of things. Before the brief eye-blink we call “civilisation”, the opportunity to eradicate a future competitor while they are pitifully weak without other consequences might well have been taken.
Of course, there is always the possibility that very bad consequences might result, such as the parents finding out who eradicated that competitor and pressing their comrades into ensuring that such a danger to everyone’s progeny be eradicated themselves. Evolution was a tricky line to toe, but one can see how competitor-eradicators might statistically come to equilibrium with competitor-eradicator-eradicators. Arguably, it was cat and mouse equilibria like this which boosted the cognitive ability of our brains further and further thoughout evolution itself.
So now, civilisation must deal with those previously evolutionarily successful strategies which we now call morally reprehensible by changing the operant conditioning of those individuals whose ancestors may have profited by it. We call it “playing nice”.
Didn’t you previously say that humans evolved an “empathic response”?
And if we evolved an empathic response, doesn’t that go against what you’re saying above?
I did indeed, and it is the competition between what we call empathy and psychopathy (or absence of empathy) which made human evolution what it was. We now recognise that absence of empathy has negative social consequences, and so those individuals born without the same level of response, causing them to behave rather more “animalistically” in seeking to eliminate competitors, must be given special attention even though they might have bred more succesfully in our evolutionary history.
I am, hopefully, just as “moral” as anyone here - I seek only to explain how human morality developed from our animal past. The OP said he couldn’t understand childhood brutality. I’m suggesting that brutality is rather the default, and humans have somehow come to ameliorate its worst effects, but we should not be too surprised if brutality pops up here and there. (And, of course, the usual addendum: to understand is not to excuse.)
Just now on the news they mentioned the 9 yearold girl who killed her playmate and the 7 year old boy who killed his 7 month old stepsister(Lakeland FL)
Is violence becoming younger nowadays or reported more?
You mean, like a . . . Bad Seed?
Here’s a link to the crime library article on this subject. It might be of interest to some of you.