Savage Spawn Page 6

  VII

  The Scapegoat We Love to Hate

  Social problems may require long-term solutions, but that shouldn’t deter us from seeking efficient, short-term solutions to severe juvenile crime. If increased public safety is our goal, efficiency also dictates that we cease pouring money into research and clinical activities that have little direct impact upon rates of child criminality. A prime example of such diminished returns is the flood of studies conducted on the factor most often blamed for childhood criminality: media violence.

  Each time another “senseless” crime involving a young criminal hits the news, one reaction is certain: a spate of editorials blaming the outrage—and the downfall of society in general—on rising levels of violence portrayed on television, motion pictures, and video games.

  This is nothing new. During the pioneering days of radio, panic calls were sounded about the deleterious effects of radio crime shows upon American youth (42). And there is no doubt that children do have the opportunity to avail themselves of more vicarious violence than in previous generations (though it might be argued that boys drafted into the wars that preoccupied America during the previous two and half centuries were exposed to a good deal more real violence than are today’s virtual warriors).

  Numerous studies have produced correlations and other statistical associations between media violence and aggression in children (43). Explanations include (1) sanitization and desensitization—after repeated exposure to violence, kids get used to witnessing cruelty and mayhem and grow less loath to use it; (2) identification—kids imitate whatever they see on-screen; (3) arousal—kids are unhealthily stimulated by media violence and perceive it as thrilling and something to be tried; and (4) positive reinforcement—kids learn from TV and the movies that violence is rewarded.

  Though some statistical support has been obtained for all four suppositions, not a single causal link between media violence and criminality has ever been produced.

  Part of the reason for the failure to establish causation may be methodological: Television and motion picture viewing are ubiquitous—virtually every child in America and other Western cultures watches oodles of TV, so it is difficult to come up with control groups and to otherwise tease out specific effects of media violence. For that reason, most prospective media studies have taken place in laboratory settings where children are exposed to media images and then tested, using paper-and-pencil questionnaires or interviews, on their attitudes about violence and aggressiveness.

  The problem with this approach is one that plagues social science research in general: laboratory experiments and field (“real-life”) studies have proven notoriously inconsistent. In fact, in certain areas of psychological inquiry, such as attitude change, results from lab research are often the opposite of those obtained by field studies, with the former concluding that attitudes are comparatively easy to modify while the latter find them resistant to change.

  Lab/field discrepancies may be due to the artificial nature of the experimental setting: The experimenter overly controls the situation by projecting an air of authority that leads the subject to respond in a certain manner. In addition, the attitudes and behaviors measured in the lab are often constructed to be experimentally “clean”—unrelated to prior prejudices and relatively value-free. Unfortunately, this also means they have little or no relevance to the experimental subjects. It is fairly easy to change one’s opinion about some trivial construct created by Professor Gadget, and quite another matter to modify one’s deeply ingrained views on race and religion.

  Another problem with media violence research involves applicability. Do the results of a questionnaire about some theoretical situation involving risk taking or aggressive problem solving filled out by a child who’s just watched a violent cartoon have anything to do with real-life aggressiveness, let alone psychopathy or criminality?

  Further clouding the issue are contradictory data, such as a lack of evidence of rising crime rates in comparatively nonviolent societies, such as Japan, following the introduction of TV, and the fact that the highest rates of recorded violence in today’s world are found in regions, such as Latin America and Africa, where television viewing is lower than it is in the United States.

  Yet other findings bring us back to the old correlation/causation snafu: Both degree of exposure and reactions to the violent images portrayed by TV and film appear to interact with the traits and characteristics that the child brings into the viewing situation.

  For example, it has been found that highly aggressive boys watch more TV than nonaggressive boys and that they are affected more by what they see (44). This may be due to their lack of creativity and subsequent need for “canned” stimulation. It is also consistent with biological notions of psychopaths as chronically, physiologically understimulated emotional paupers who lack rich mental imagery and chase sensation.

  Another reason high-risk boys may be the ones mostly attracted to the easy, passive stimulation provided by the visual media may be parental incompetence. We know that many violent kids are more likely to grow up in chaotic, neglectful, and abusive households, and to be exposed to drug and alcohol abuse. Perhaps the poorly raised boy, allowed to play hooky and to veg out at home, stoned or drunk, simply has more time available to sit glued to the tube.

  Yet another potential complication is the possibility that children who grow up in the rotten households that practice and glamorize violence may be more likely to regard the violent imagery they see on the screen as comfortingly familiar. If so, the media are playing a reinforcing role rather than a generative one. While this is certainly harmful, it is the chaotic family that we should be addressing, rather than the media.

  The importance of considering temperament, traits, and personality characteristics as they interact with media violence cannot be overemphasized. Let me offer a totally unscientific, but I believe instructive, example from my personal experience.

  I have four children, three of whom are old enough to have viewed many popular violent movies, including numerous horror films. My eldest daughter, in particular, displayed an early attraction to motion pictures full of images I found disgusting and shocking. My wife and I were reluctant to let her watch these bloody flicks, but my daughter insisted they wouldn’t harm her. Since she’d always been a delightful girl, we relented . . . and watched for problems. None followed. My eldest daughter passed through the splatter-flick phase and moved on to new fare. Never did she exhibit a trace of violence or antisocial behavior as a consequence of what she saw. Never did I observe any side effect of viewing, and this shrink dad was looking for symptoms. Years later, my eldest daughter remains an honor student and one of the sweetest, least violent people I’ve ever met.

  My son and my second daughter never developed any idiosyncratic interest in violent films, but simply by being teenagers in contemporary America, they too were exposed to violence and gore at a level much more explicit than what I grew up with.

  I recall viewing the classic Hitchcock film Psycho in my late teens and leaving the theater absolutely petrified. At its initial release, Psycho was considered a revolutionary film primarily because it ratcheted screen violence up several notches. Adults were terrified by the images Hitchcock purveyed, especially the famous shower stabbing scene. Some viewers were even reported to have experienced heart attacks.

  When my three oldest watched Psycho—as early adolescents—the film barely raised their eyebrows, so mild did they find it compared to Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and others.

  Personal anecdotes are not scientific. But the absolute lack of effect upon my progeny of violent media images remains in stark contrast to all the warnings promulgated by would-be media-blamers. Yes, desensitization definitely occurred in my kids—lowering their anxiety about screen violence but not real-life violence—and I suspect the same is true of tens of millions of other kids, because while nearly all American children watch violent movies and TV, only a very minute per
centage becomes criminal.

  This is not to say media violence is harmless. To the extent that gory junk attracts high-risk youngsters, it’s anything but. Is it possible that an already psychopathic boy with a head full of violent impulses that have festered since early childhood, sitting around the house sucking on a joint or sniffing glue while he watches Scream, can be spurred to imitate what he sees on the screen? Absolutely.

  The same is true of printed violence—serial killers often collect violent pornography and true-crime magazines in order to heighten sexual arousal. But for these psychopaths, print images are used to stimulate associations between sexuality and violence that are already well developed. The overwhelming majority of people who read pornography and true-crime magazines are not serial killers, nor do they become serial killers because of what they encounter between the covers of Shocking Detective.

  Given no bloody books, no Freddy Krueger on video, no thrash metal or gangsta rap, would Billy Rotten of bullying, cat-mutilating proclivities have picked up a knife and stabbed his mother anyway? No way to know for sure, but I’d bet yes. And the likelihood of Billy’s engaging in serious violence somewhere along the line would remain extremely high no matter what he read or viewed, because the variables that strongly influence violent behavior are likely to be a lot more personal than those elicited by wielding the remote control.

  Even granting that media violence affects some kids negatively, what can be done to fix the problem?

  The best solution is obviously to have parents exercise good judgment and restrict access to nasty material in the case of a child who shows tendencies toward violence. But failure to limit TV is way at the bottom of the list of parental inadequacies experienced by high-risk kids.

  We are certainly unlikely to put in place the large-scale solution that might partially handle the problem—widespread censorship foisted upon 99.9 percent of the population in order to shield a tiny minority—because that type of group punishment is antagonistic to our democratic norms, not to mention unconstitutional. And I emphasize partially, because any kind of blanket prohibition of violent films and shows will inevitably result in a black market of forbidden images, with those we are trying to shield most likely to get their hands on illegal goods.

  A thorough and well-thought-out review of media violence and children summed it up wisely: “Aggression as a problem solving behavior is learned early in life, is usually learned well, and is resistant to change. Individual variation in the level of aggressive behavior and violence in children, adolescents and adults depends on many interacting factors of which media influences are likely to be less important than constitutional, parental, educational and other environmental influences. Contributing factors include being the victims of violence and bullying and witnessing violence perpetrated against others, especially at home. The emphasis on establishing whether television violence and actual violence are related has resulted in the neglect of these other, more important influences on the development of aggressive behaviors” (45).

  Nevertheless, railing against the media is likely to continue as the knee-jerk response to child criminality because it is the type of facile, glib “explanation” that is perfectly in sync with today’s short-attention-span journalism, and because it offends no constituency other than a small group of network executives and moguls. Using the media as a whipping boy is also extremely attractive to that most superficial and insincere group of “experts”—politicians—because it lends itself to sound bites and generates funding for the scores of do-nothing legislative commissions that pass for problem-solving units in a bureaucracy.

  Though essentially a dead-end topic, media violence is likely to endure as a fruitful source of research grants for social scientists, producing much more heat than light about the causes and fixes of criminal violence.

  VIII

  The Biology of Being Bad

  During our discussion of environmental factors, biology has crept in often, because, as noted, the distinction between nature and nurture is artificial. Nevertheless, a number of studies do exist that have attempted to isolate organic variables, and they deserve attention.

  Biological explanations for psychopathic (and all types of deviant) behavior are frightening, because biological determinism seems to fly in the face of concepts such as free will and social rehabilitation, and it raises the terrifying specter of the immutable “bad seed.”

  More important, serious abuses of biological determinism have been frequent and nightmarish, leading to such repellent outrages as eugenics—the pseudoscience of “cleansing” the human race through selective breeding, developed by the brilliant but misguided (and sterile) nineteenth-century British mathematician Francis Galton—and its philosophical offspring: forced sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide. Genetic dominance of intelligence and other traits has long been a pet cause of xenophobes and racists. The Nazi Holocaust had its roots in eugenics theory.

  Another risk when evaluating biological research is the intellectual seductiveness of apparently hard science. It is easy to overvalue studies crammed with chemical compounds, graphs, and equations because they appear to offer authoritative, relatively clear-cut answers to complex questions, especially when compared to the fuzzy conundrums produced by social science research. But what looks like incontrovertible science often turns out to be no more than supposition and guesswork overlaid with a veneer of quantitative data. Just as is true of its softer cousin, “hard” science is profoundly vulnerable to the value judgments and prejudices of its all-too-fallible practitioners. The same methodological problems that often scrape the blush from the first fruits of social science data can apply equally to biological studies. Cautions such as our old friend Correlation ain’t necessarily causation are just as valid.

  Nevertheless, nearly five decades of research on the biological aspects of psychopathy and criminality have produced some provocative data that deserve to be addressed.

  And though we must examine biological data critically, we needn’t be scared off by some brave-new-world threat of genetic determinism, because while some biological phenomena are genetically based, many others are not.

  In fact, the distinction between genetics and biology is a prime example of the correlation/causation caveat appropriately applied: Simply because something manifests itself on a cellular, hormonal, or biochemical level does not mean its origins are based in inborn cellular, hormonal, or biochemical processes.

  Put simply, biology modifies environment, but environment also modifies biology.

  Consider the example of identical (monozygotic) twins—pairs of siblings endowed with identical DNA. Most identical twins resemble each other strongly, yet individual sets of twins differ greatly in their degree of identicality. Some are almost completely identical, while others display significant physical and behavioral differences. Most important, no identical twins are absolute carbon copies of each other.

  I am personally familiar with identical twins, young women, one of whom is two inches taller than her sister. Height is to a great extent determined by genes, but even here the causal pathway is clearly not 100 percent genetic.

  What nongenetic (but biological) factors might have played a role in the two-inch discrepancy? Perhaps as fetuses these women underwent specific intrauterine experiences that affected their respective heights, with one twin lucking into a superior position within the womb—a literal upper hand—that provided her with the lion’s share of placental nutrition and movement, simultaneously restricting her sibling’s snacks and aerobic exercise. Or maybe postnatal experiences, such as illness and injury, intervened.

  We needn’t limit ourselves to twins when searching for examples of the discontinuity between biological and genetic causality. Average heights and weights of Japanese citizens and those of other developing nations increased significantly following World War II, due to changes in nutrition.

  With regard to children, a variety of prenatal insults that have nothing to do with
chromosomes can strongly affect growth and subsequent development. Youngsters exposed to maternal malnutrition and injury, as well as to alcohol, tobacco, and other toxins, are more likely to evince brain damage, birth defects, learning problems—and antisocial behavior—than are nonpoisoned controls. The same goes for birth complications, prematurity, and postnatal damage, such as poisoning by lead chips in old paint, head trauma, infections, and recurrent fevers.

  Several studies of child and adult murderers indicate high rates of brain damage as measured by learning disabilities, attention deficit, school problems, EEG (brain wave) measurement, and low IQ, but whether or not any of these deficits is genetic is unclear (9–13, 46). In some cases, such as documented episodes of cranial injury, they certainly are not. And given strong evidence that many psychopaths and criminals are more likely to be abused, it’s not much of a stretch to connect early maltreatment, such as kicks to the head, to environmentally caused brain damage.

  Before we jump on brain damage as a defense, however, it’s important to realize that the data on cerebral pathology and adult criminality are suggestive but not close to definitive. Some studies of psychopathic criminals have failed to produce strong evidence of brain abnormality (47). Nevertheless, a host of information does seem to indicate consistent differences between psychopaths and normal people that point to some kind of biological irregularity, possibly in the anterior (front) part of the brain, a region implicated in the regulation of emotion, reasoning, and social aggression.

  Most conspicuously, psychopaths appear to exhibit lower physiological arousal than do normal individuals. This fits with the long-documented observation that psychopathic criminals fail to display fear and anxiety in situations that upset normal people, and seem to have great difficulty learning from unpleasant experiences. They also appear to be underresponsive to emotional stimuli in general. The notion of the stone-cold killer is based in reality (48, 49).