On April 20, 1999, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold carried out a shooting at their high school, Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, in which 12 of their classmates and a teacher were murdered, They injured 23 others, and then committed suicide.
Similar violent events involving adolescents have been repeated with different faces, names and numbers of victims in other parts of the world and raise a cascade of questions, but the most important is: why?
Boys who kill
Countless articles have been written trying to explain the possible causes of these apparently totally inexplicable events. Eric and Dylan have been called murderers, crazy people, psychopaths, even devil spawns, but these tragic events raise a very interesting question for science: what can happen for a baby to become such an angry and aggressive teenager?
Science is still very far from being able to answer this question, but recent research into the relationship that exists between the social and psychological reality of these adolescents and the biochemistry of their brain sheds some light on the possible causes of the aggressive behavior they present. The conclusions that emerge from these investigations are not so simple as to conclude that violence is genetically programmed, or that a potential murderer hides in the folds of the frontal lobes of the brain, or in a childhood with continuous abuse. Rather, it is an extremely complex network of biochemical, social and psychological factors that, together, can lead to a violent and aggressive person, capable of committing murder. However, understanding the origins of violence offers us clues about how to try to prevent it. Have physiological or neurological differences been found in people who commit violent murders?
The biology of violence
At a clinic in Fairfield, California, Dr. Daniel Amen conducted studies on 50 murderers and found that their brains shared some common characteristics. The structure called the Cingulate Gyrus (or CG), which is located in the center of the brain, showed hyperactivity in all of them. CG acts as a transmitter for the brain, allowing it to switch from one thought to another. When it doesn’t work well, the person gets stuck on a single idea, to which he or she continually returns. Also the prefrontal cortex, which seems to act as a supervisor of the brain, functioned very slowly in the 50 murderers. “If you have violent thoughts that you can’t escape and there’s no supervisor to clear them up, you’re in trouble,” says Dr. Amen. This type of brain damage can result from severe blows to the head as well as significant exposure to substances harmful to the baby, such as alcohol, during pregnancy.
Other research has found that, in general, physically aggressive men have high levels of testosterone, a sex hormone involved, among other functions, in the development of male secondary sexual characteristics (such as beards and deep voices) and in building muscle mass. Studies carried out on prisoners in different prisons showed that men with the highest levels of testosterone were, in many cases, those who had committed violent crimes. But this relationship is not always direct and is mediated by many social factors such as drug use.
Fourteen different studies have found that there is a marked tendency for violent youth to have significantly lower heart rates than less aggressive people. Other studies have not found abnormal heart rhythms in psychopaths.
Males are also known to be the more aggressive sex in almost all mammals and this has led some people to assume that men are naturally aggressive and that violence is a natural consequence of male biology. However, variations in the number of homicides in different societies make it evident that culture has a great influence on the probability that a man will commit murder. For example, the proportion of the number of murders in Colombia is 15 times that of Costa Rica, and that of the United States is 10 times that of Norway. There are even very marked regional differences within the same country.
But the differences are not only geographical. Worldwide, youth homicides have doubled in the last 15 years. This is not because the brains that today’s boys are born with have changed in half a generation, or because a genetic mutation has made them more aggressive. If the current increase in violence cannot be explained by physiological or neurological issues, we must try to find other causes.
The firsts years
The learning capacity of a baby is amazing: in less than three years, it crawls, walks, assimilates a language and learns to relate to its environment. But such a young brain is also extremely vulnerable to psychological injuries that occur during this period. A young child who continually experiences stressful experiences (such as abandonment, abuse, or even terror) experiences physical changes in his or her brain. The continuous flow of chemicals related to behaviors that produce tension tends to restructure the functioning of the brain, putting its defense system in a state of constant alert. The result is a child who displays impulsive aggression. For him, any attitude that he interprets as hostile can increase the level of hormones in his brain related to responses to tense behaviors.
In other children, constant contact with pain and violence can block the natural response to stressful situations, like a button that has been pressed so many times that it stops working. These are kids with antisocial personalities, who often have low sensitivity to other people’s needs and emotions.
There may also be a genetic component that leads to an antisocial personality. Aspects of temperament such as irritability, impulsivity, hyperactivity, and low sensitivity to the emotions of others may have a biological basis. The way in which a baby who is naturally unreactive to displays of affection develops will depend on the ability of his parents to stimulate him and form emotional bonds with him. When a small child is excessively aggressive, the family should be trained not to continually confront him, challenging him and fighting with him, but rather teach him non-violent ways to solve his problems and thus reduce his frustration.
Different parental responses produce different brains and, therefore, different behaviors. Behavior is the result of a dialogue between the brain and experiences and, although people are born with some biological characteristics, the brain has many blank pages. The countless messages that a child receives from his environment will give him the guideline of how he is expected to behave when he is an adult. This is why parents who abuse their children physically or psychologically were often abused as children. Criminals, in many cases, have parents who abused alcohol and drugs, were criminals and were beaten children.
This sequence of events does not always occur, but it is a risk factor: having grown up in a violent or lacking affection environment increases the likelihood of creating violent people who repeat the vicious circle with their children. A child can be told a thousand times that it is bad to attack and hit others, but if he has been treated with beatings and insults, his parents yell at each other and he observes that violence is the way in which problems are solved, You probably understand that this is an acceptable way to behave.
Happy violence?
Current popular culture, in songs, video games, the Internet, movies and television shows, offers many examples in which the smallest character, or the one who has been humiliated and attacked, manages to take revenge, killing and destroying his opponents.
George Gerbner, a researcher at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the effects of television on its viewers for more than 30 years and found that on average there are more than five violent scenes in an hour of programming on television. prime time and 25 violent acts per hour in the cartoons that are broadcast on American channels on Sunday mornings, which are the same ones that our commercial channels broadcast. A child who watches on average three and a half hours of television a day will have witnessed more than 8,000 murders and 100,000 violent acts on television by the time he finishes primary school.
Never before has culture been so saturated with violent images. In the first movie Hard to Kill 18 murders are seen; in the second, 264. In Robocop I there are 32 dead; in its sequel, 81. The three films of The Godfather They piled up 12, 18 and 53 bodies, respectively.
What is the message of all this violence? The amount of violent scenes in the media encourages the idea that aggressive behavior is normal and even desirable. “Living in a society full of violence generates aggression in some people and a lack of sensitivity, insecurity and anger in others,” says Gerbner, who also thinks that the great danger of television is that it has become, not just entertainment, but in a modern religion that presents a vision of the world that is coherent, violent, aggressive, repressive, dangerous and false. “Happy violence” Gerbner calls the type of violence seen in the media; spectacle violence, without consequences. Will any viewer stop to think, as part of the film’s plot, about the widows, the orphans, the mothers, or what the 264 deaths of Die Hard II?
Born to Kill It was the favorite movie of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who managed to gather, in the basement of their homes, an arsenal of four high-caliber weapons, a bomb made from a 10-kilogram propane tank, and more than 30 small bombs built by themselves with gunpowder, nails and broken glass. And a good part of American society continues to think that it is their legitimate right to have access to weapons.
What can we conclude?
We are all terrified by the events that happened at Columbine High School, but we live in a society where violence has become a spectacle; mistreatment of children and women is daily; intolerance is a constant in relationships between people of different ideas, cultures, religions or sexual preferences; the impunity of certain sectors of the population is not the exception, but the rule; More than half of the population lives in poverty…