Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993 TAG: 9301170041
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
VIOLENT HOMES CREATE OUT-OF-CONTROL CHILDREN
Children are becoming killers at an alarming rate. And in about one of every three murders they commit, they kill other children: Schoolmates, gang rivals, neighbors, their own babies.The first comprehensive long-term studies of childhood murderers are in, and they document a long-held belief: Violence breeds violence.
The upsurge in murder by the young is a legacy of abuse and neglect by parents and child welfare institutions, say psychiatrists, psychologists and justice workers who compared juveniles convicted of murder in Cook County, Ill., with juveniles of the same age, race and type of neighborhood convicted of non-violent crimes.
Not only do children tend to mirror the behavior of the adults around them, but the research suggests that children exposed to early, chronic abuse and violence also may suffer permanent changes in the brain that affect judgment, reflexes and the ability to empathize with others. Those children, in turn, are most likely to commit violent acts themselves.
The proposed solution is obvious: Prevent child abuse and create less-violent neighborhoods. But the social ills that trigger child abuse and foster violence are confoundingly complex and have proved frustratingly resistant to solutions.
"Somewhere, somehow, we have all failed to humanize a generation, and we are seeing the results," said Grady Dale, a psychologist who has evaluated more than 500 troubled young people for the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services in a recent address to the International Society for Adolescent Psychiatry in Chicago.
"The blank stare, devoid of emotion, [seen when interviewing troubled teen-agers] tells me that the child has never experienced warm, affirming emotional support," Dale said. "He knows nothing of human bonding and can only express [himself] through anti-social behavior."
In many killings, especially those in which a baby or toddler is killed for crying or wetting the bed, a psychologically troubled teen-ager, often abused as a child, has not learned that it is acceptable to feel anger without acting on that anger, experts explain.
"Criminally violent adolescents can't tell the difference between feelings and action," said Dr. Richard Marohn, professor of clinical psychiatry at Northwestern. "In their mind, to think is to feel is to do something about it. They can't differentiate their feelings and stop their actions."
Children who kill are not just mildly troubled, experts say. They may have suffered permanent psychological, emotional and even physical damage from their earliest interactions with others.
"They are walking time bombs that may never recover from the trauma of their early childhood," Dale said.
Nationally, the number of murder arrests of those 17 years and younger increased 85 percent from 1987 to 1991, from 1,336 in 1987 to 2,476 in 1991, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
Many killings occur in neighborhoods raked by poverty, drugs and gangs. But within those neighborhoods, the children who share certain characteristics are most likely to become killers, according to ongoing studies of Chicago violence by psychiatrists and psychologists at the Juvenile Division of Cook County (Ill.) Circuit Court, Northwestern University, Loyola University and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
"What we have is violent parents making violent children," said Robert Zagar, a psychologist in private practice who is a consultant to the Juvenile Division of Cook County Court and one of the researchers.
Four factors were found to be significantly more common among 101 juveniles convicted of murder compared with 101 juveniles convicted of non-violent crimes. Both groups of juveniles were equally poor, lived in similar neighborhoods and were of the same race.
The young killers were nearly three times as likely as the non-violent teen-agers to come from criminally violent families.
The children had learned from the time they were infants to deal with difficult situations through violence and aggression, Zagar said. They were significantly more likely to have been physically abused than the non-violent teen-agers.
The young killers had severe learning problems that often stemmed from head injuries or central nervous system disorders present since infancy and other medical problems. They were twice as likely to be mentally retarded and four times as likely to suffer from epilepsy as the non-violent teen-agers.
Head injury is the major cause of epilepsy, and it could have been caused in these youngsters by early childhood abuse, said Dr. John R. Hughes, director of the Epilepsy Center at the University of Illinois Medical Center and one of the researchers. In the young killers, epilepsy was an indication of "a damaged brain that cannot easily adapt to difficult situations."
Youngsters who are raised with violence can develop "malignant memories" that trigger violent reactions when they become teen-agers, experts say.
"Memories that grow out of violence can be so intrusive that they can destroy the core of our existence," said Dr. Eitan Schwarz, assistant professor of clinical psychology at Northwestern Medical School.
A study of 2,000 delinquents by Hughes and others showed that those convicted of murder were significantly more likely to have neurological, psychiatric and respiratory problems than those convicted of non-violent crimes.
The young killers were significantly more likely to start using alcohol and illegal drugs at an early age and to use them to an excessive degree throughout adolescence.
Hughes says the medical problems must be viewed in the context of the children's other problems. "The most basic rule for human behavior is that people treat the world the way they believe the world has treated them," he said.
"Children who have all three risk factors - they have been abused, they live in violent neighborhoods and they have physical problems - often become the most violent of all because they perceive that the world has treated them very badly," Hughes said.