Why Kids Kill

Why kids kill

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2007

The phrase children who kill ' evokes a variety of different images - the eightand nine-year-olds who threw a six-year-old off the roof of their tenement , the Oregon and Colorado teenagers who killed fellow classmates after months of careful planning , the teenage girl who kills her newborn in a frantic effort to hide her pregnancy , the gang killing and the abused child who finally kills his parent . In fact there is no single dynamic that explains homicide by children , and the causes likely

br vary by type of homicide : for example , the dynamics of the offender in gang-related homicides are likely to differ significantly from those of the abused child who kills a parent

The classic wisdom once was that juvenile homicide was the result of poverty , drug abuse , and child abuse (Ewing , 1990 , but the dramatic school shootings of the late 1990s seemed to defy this conventional view . Kip Kinkel , who shot and killed first his parents and then two students at an Oregon high school , and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who shot classmates at Columbine High School in Colorado , were so-called good kids from middle-class neighborhoods . They were not known drug users , and they were not believed to be from abusive homes Nevertheless , numerous mental health experts opined , in retrospect , that it should have been obvious that they were time bombs . Kip Kinkel , for example , was said to have turned in classroom assignments filled with violent imagery . This raises the question of predictability

The number of juveniles arrested for homicide in the mid-nineties was almost three times the number of two decades earlier , a number that cannot be attributed solely to increases in population (Heide , 1997 . In the mid-nineties , about 16 .7 percent of those arrested for homicide were juveniles (Federal Bureau of Investigation , 1995 . In raw numbers this represented between 1 ,000 and 1 ,700 homicides a year (Ewing , 1990 However , the notion that teenagers are more violent than adults is erroneous . Although those under eighteen represent about 19 percent of the population , they commit only 9 percent of all the homicides (Mones 2001 . The vast majority of children who kill are fifteen , sixteen , or seventeen years old fewer than 1 percent are under fifteen (Ewing 1990 . A clear percentage of these juvenile killings occur during the commission of another crime . In these instances , there may have been no intent to kill , and the mental states of the juveniles involved were not remarkable nor was there a defined purpose to psychological evaluation of these minors other than to consider rehabilitation

There is no single dynamic that explains juvenile homicide . Most questions about the cause of juvenile homicide are too broad and poorly specified to be meaningful and can be answered from many different perspectives or levels of analysis (Cornell , 1989 . The dynamics , as mentioned earlier , often vary by victim for example , the cause of the killing of a parent is different from the cause of a school shooting The dynamics of...