Qualities of Murder
Doublethink
Admin, 8th Day Host
in Purgatory
Why do we as a society (in my case the UK but there are many others) treat murder by strangers, or for political motives, as worse than murder by people you knew or even loved ?
Why does it require different laws and policies, than plain conspiracy to murder and incitement to violence ?
Why are we supposed to be more frightened of an arsehole who kills for a cause than, say, Harold Shipman or Fred West ?
Why does it require different laws and policies, than plain conspiracy to murder and incitement to violence ?
Why are we supposed to be more frightened of an arsehole who kills for a cause than, say, Harold Shipman or Fred West ?
Comments
It makes sense to me that different crimes come under different laws - spree killers are typically very different to serial killers for eg. There's also the fact that serial killing is now much less common than in the 70s and 80s, often hypothesised to be due to the disuse of leaded petrol and easier access to abortion (and in the US, further distance from the Vietnam War - many US serial killers were Vietnam vets or children of those vets). Spree killers and terrorist threats are now arguably more common than serial killers.
There is no evidence that US serial killers are disproportionately veterans or children of veterans that I know of. Most serial killers, though have a history of childhood abuse, family dysfunction, and psychological trauma.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael-Aamodt-2/publication/373258117_RadfordFGCU_Annual_Report_on_Serial_Killer_Statistics_2023/links/64e3b51f0acf2e2b520960ea/Radford-FGCU-Annual-Report-on-Serial-Killer-Statistics-2023.pdf?origin=publication_detail
https://jaapl.org/content/jaapl/11/4/331.full.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7144278/
But a murderous stranger who appears "out of a dark alley" is an unknown, like lightning from a clear sky. That makes it far more terrifying. Humans don't like to deal with being threatened by things that they do not understand and cannot control or make familiar horror stories about.
And I think that might be why we get fixated - and this is even me thinking back to adolescence - on horror stories about "crazed" serial killers and weirdos. We want to have control of the eldritch "unknown" violence that could come out of a dark alley and grab us.
Or maybe if we see someone targeting people for political reasons, maybe we're afraid that we might be targeted. And that makes such crimes scarier. I wouldn't marry an abuser. I wouldn't join a gang. I wouldn't get into a relationship with a violent drunk. But I might have enough privilege that a political malcontent might decide I'm a target. I might have enough money to be worth getting killed over.
We want to put especial control on those things that menace us in particular.
Whew. That was some unpleasant rationalizing, but I think there's some sense to it.
I’m guessing that less lead means less brain damage, but how does abortion reduce serial killing?
That was the hypothesis put forward in popular science book 'Freakonomics' a while back. I thought the book was plausible but I don't remember if the hypotheses in it were tested. I have a copy that I mean to re-read. Meanwhile here's a link.
A 'pro-life' argument would ask how many future Gandhis, Mozarts or Attenboroughs we may have lost that way.
I don't want to get into Epiphanies territory but a blanket 'abortion reduces serial killing' argument strikes me as simplistic in the extreme.
Why not propose a eugenics style solution with forced sterilisation of anyone deemed likely to produce future serial killers?
On the Vietnam thing, serial killing isn't purely a US phenomenon.
There have been recent school shootings in Turkey, for instance.
@Gramps49 is right to cite childhood abuse, trauma and dysfunctional factors and I'm sure there are wider societal factors too. Social isolation. The breakdown of communities. The availability of extreme material online.
'It takes a village to raise a child.'
There's a distinction between school shootings - which in many cases are more like so-called 'crimes of passion' - and serial killing which is generally defined as three or more killings, spaced out and taking place across three or more separate events.
Personal murders usually have domestic reasons.
But the law certainly shouldn't be more lenient.
Is it in the UK?
I think that is why getting murdered by someone who just wants to steal from you or because they are a follower of some ideological dogma or who just hates their fellow human beings at random, like serial killers, school shooters or the Southport stabbings is so much worse.
From your point of view, I suppose there is not a great deal of difference. You are just as dead and that as a result of somebody else's deliberate action. In that sense, I agree with you, @Doublethink that there is no conceptual difference, and that there should not be. It is murder irrespective. The sentence used to be death and it is now automatically life imprisonment. I do not agree with those who demand that some sorts of murder should be treated conceptually as of a different order, whether by reference to motive or victim.
Where I think there is a difference, is whether there should be any scope for any recommendation for 'life' to be less than life. A distinction can and probably should be drawn. On the one hand there are the sort of murders that an ordinary person can, sort of, imagine themselves being tempted to commit, or being so angry that they might just simply kill. Obvious examples of the latter are finding a burglar in one's house or one's spouse in bed with somebody else. On the other hand there are the sort of murders that no normal person should be expected to imagine themselves committing, things like stabbing children at a dance class in Southport or attacking a synagogue in Manchester. In those sort of cases, any motive a person might claim in mitigation is not going to be one that the public at large, a jury or a judge should be expected to recognise. I do query for those whether there either is or even should be much scope for any recommendation that life should mean anything less than what it says.
School shootings aren't serial killings, but spree killings. Serial killings require a gap between killings. The motivations are psychologically very different - spree killings are often elaborate cases of suicide by cop. Serial killers were at their peak in the US in the 70s and 80s - although there have been more recent examples, they are now much less common.
I think you're reading too much into my comment about abortion preventing serial killers - it's simply a side-effect, not a deliberate thing (nor did I suggest that it should be used for that). Leaded petrol wasn't phased out due to it causing serial killers, but it was still a side-effect.
Obviously these things are multi-layered and there are many causes behind the decline of serial killing in the US (and similar statistics exist for the UK) - easier divorce, increased awareness of domestic violence, greater co-operation between regional police forces, better forensic technology meaning potential serial killers get caught after a single murder, etc etc.
I think where the difference comes is in terms of determining causes in order to prevent future murders of that type. In that sense, crimes of passion (as you might call the former example) are more frightening as there isn't an opportunity to prevent them as there was for eg the Southport stabbings.
I would also question whether the average person should be able to imagine themselves killing someone upon finding a burglar in one's house or one's spouse in bed with somebody else. I don't think murder should be considered a reasonable response. Neither examples are of violence requiring self-defence, nor would insanity or unsound mind be a reasonable defence.
I believe UK police define serial killing as two or more murders spaced out across separate events - I think internationally it varies as to whether it's two or more, or three or more.
Different phenomena but I'd imagine there would be overlapping factors /causes to some extent. Dysfunctional relationships of whatever kind seem to be a common factor.
How to tackle those at a societal level is easier said than done.
There are a lot of assumptions in there. People known to you may have had years to push all your buttons, to belittle you, and then you finally snap. In other words, there are more likely to be shades of moral justification. Whereas a complete stranger is unlikely to have had the opportunity to earn your animus.
From the point of view of risk of reoffending, it seems that someone who is relentlessly bullied, and finally murders their bully is less at risk for murdering someone else, because similar circumstances are unlikely to arise, whereas gangsters, armed robbers, and terrorists are very likely to commit the same acts again.
Serial killings may have decreased due to major improvements in detection (DNA, etc.), the massive rise in the use of surveillance cameras, cellphone cameras, etc., and because very few people hitchhike anymore compared the the 1960s and 1970s. Fifty years ago when I was a young woman I hitchhiked shortish distances in my college town every so often; “everyone” did it, so it seemed safe. It was dangerous then and it still is. I was damned lucky nothing bad ever happened.
I absolutely did not suggest that abortion is a means of preventing serial killers. I said that there seems to be a link between abortion and reduced crime. Personally, I think that massively improving the care system, so that the outcome for cared-for children is not, as it currently is, poorer than for children raised in their birth family would help. Or creating a better social safety net for struggling single mothers, especially if it forced absent fathers to provide adequately for their children.
I could say a lot more, but this is Purgatory, not Epiphanies.
A friend of mine mentioned this argument from a book called "Freakonomics," arguing that as fewer families were forced to carry children that they couldn't afford, crime rates went down as more children were properly raised and supported into adulthood.
Neglected, abused children are a lot more likely to become various and sundry types of criminals because they're still trying to work out crap they didn't get the chance to deal with in childhood, a la "hurt people hurt people."
So, forcing mother's to raise children against their will is setting up a lot of kids to fail.
And yes, the village can take up some of that slack, but in America, a lot of these villages are also failing.
I don't like tying that particular argument to "serial killers" in particular, but I do think there's some sense in tying it to crime. And of course, there's a lot going on with crime rates in general. It's a sad situation all around, and one I have some contact with in my own life.
I think that there's a peculiar mythology around serial killers and "stranger danger." We don't want to think about familiar violence, so we project it onto a mysterious figure who we imagine. And that becomes the mythical "serial killer" or "stranger in a dark alley" that people talk about so much. It's basically the bogeyman for grown ups.
While there are occasional freaks of nature, so to speak, the reality is that most violent crimes are committed within familiar circles for familiar reasons. And that's the thing that a lot of us don't like to face.
I didn't say otherwise. I was responding to what @Pomona posted because how they'd phrased it sounded like a sinister form of social engineering.
Pomona has clarified what they meant.
And @North East Quine my response was aimed at Pomona's post not yours.
It's not my intention to get into an Epiphanies style debate about abortion. I was simply taken aback by it being cited in this particular context.
On the issue of 'qualities' or 'degrees' of murder, UK law has the concept of 'manslaughter' as opposed to outright deliberate murder. US law has 'degrees' of murder - 'Murder in the third degree' etc.
Which sounds rather Masonic but I understand what the terms represent.
Terms like 'manslaughter' don't apply of course to the kind of 'homicides' we've been discussing here. I put that in inverted commas because it's not a term we tend to use over here, not in a 'scare quotes' way.
There was a landmark case here in the UK recently where a judge waived the 'standard' tariff for a killing as the bloke who was killed had been a serious serial abuser who had inflicted tremendous damage on his partner who killed him.