For example, a colleague was talking about an eighth-grader who was so traumatized about walking from home to school through a very violent neighborhood that he would smoke weed before school to calm himself down. There's a growing movement toward trauma-informed communities, trauma-informed education, trauma-informed everything. If lots of killers are untreated traumatized children controlling scary adults, one obvious place to start is to treat traumatized children. I find it useful in a lot of cases to communicate how and why if you live in an urban war zone, it's not surprising that you develop a war zone mentality - not as a pathological development but really as normal psychological development in an abnormal situation. When you put together hypervigilance and a belief in pre-emptive assault, you get a war zone mentality. In the extreme form, there's a belief in pre-emptive assault - get them before they get you. Another dimension is the legitimization of aggression - the belief that when you're threatened, you're morally entitled and psychologically required to defend yourself. That comes from being traumatized, having to be watchful. I began to hear from these killers that they had developed a hypersensitivity to threat. When I came back to the United States, I was struck by the parallels with kids growing up in areas with high community violence, gangs, chronic threats and stress. Kids growing up in those areas naturally adopted ways of looking at the world congruent with war zones. When I first started working on these issues, what struck me most was when I went abroad to official war zones: the Middle East, Central America and Africa. And then that trauma is compounded by the neighborhoods many murderers grow up in? Developmental psychology can be a bridge between social history and assessment and diagnosis. But when a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist sees them when they're 20 or 30, they may come up with all kinds of diagnoses, when in fact what they're simply doing is clumping together some of the outcomes from that early pervasive trauma.
Severe, pervasive, chronic trauma in early childhood is such a frontal assault on the basic processes of child development - attachment, emotional regulation and executive function. Or they'll talk about how someone was engaging in impulsive behavior as a teenager, but not why teenage brains are so vulnerable.ĭevelopmental psychology can also help unpack a lot of the clinical diagnoses.
They can say, "This kid's mother abandoned him," but don't go the next step about why maternal abandonment is so devastating. Often, the social history has a lot of facts in it, but the facts are not connected conceptually. Most of what's been done in the past in these cases is either what's called a social history, which is a biographical compendium, or clinical assessment and diagnosis. They see the result of trauma rather than a murder's origins in trauma. Trauma is fundamental, but often the general public doesn't see that part of it. But most killers are untreated traumatized children who are controlling the actions of the scary adults they have become.
The general public tends to view murderers as absolutely evil persons or people so damaged they can't possibly live among us. The Monitor spoke to Garbarino about what he has learned from his work in jails and prisons around the country. As he writes in his 2015 book, "Listening to Killers," "I listen for the human story behind the monstrous act." His goal is to explain the psychological and social factors - typically child abuse and war zone-like neighborhood environments - that contribute to a person's becoming a murderer. Garbarino reviews defendants' records, interviews their family members and spends hours listening to killers - often on death row - explain how they went from being innocent children to murderous adults. That was the first of more than 60 murder cases in which he has helped judges and juries understand the psychology behind why people kill and helped them make more informed decisions about a defendant's guilt and punishment. In 1992, he was asked to testify as an expert witness in a child abuse case that ended with a mother killing her child. He expected to spend his career teaching developmental psychology, like his mentor Urie Bronfenbrenner, PhD.īut as a professor at Penn State, the Erikson Institute, Cornell and, since 2005, Loyola University Chicago, Garbarino ended up becoming an expert on child abuse and neglect - a topic that led him to a new mission in life. He planned to be a lawyer, but "stumbled into" a graduate program in human development and family studies at Cornell. James Garbarino, PhD, didn’t set out to spend so much of his life with murderers.