The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence

by Gavin De Becker

  ▪ CHAPTER SEVEN ▪

  PROMISES TO KILL

  “Man is a coward, plain and simple. He loves life

  too much. He fears others too much.”

  —Jack Henry Abbott

  “I am going to kill you.” These six words may have triggered more high-stakes predictions than any other sentence ever spoken. They have certainly caused a great deal of fear and anxiety. But why?

  Perhaps we believe only a deranged and dangerous person would even think of harming us, but that just isn’t so. Plenty of people have thought of harming you: the driver of the car behind you who felt you were going too slowly, the person waiting to use the pay-phone you were chatting on, the person you fired, the person you walked out on—they have all hosted a fleeting violent idea. Though thoughts of harming you may be terrible, they are also inevitable. The thought is not the problem; the expression of the thought is what causes us anxiety, and most of the time that’s the whole idea. Understanding this will help reduce unwarranted fear.

  That someone would intrude on our peace of mind, that they would speak words so difficult to take back, that they would exploit our fear, that they would care so little about us, that they would raise the stakes so high, that they would stoop so low—all of this alarms us, and by design.

  Threatening words are dispatched like soldiers under strict orders: Cause anxiety that cannot be ignored. Surprisingly, their deployment isn’t entirely bad news. It’s bad, of course, that someone threatens violence, but the threat means that at least for now, he has considered violence and decided against doing it. The threat means that at least for now (and usually forever), he favors words that alarm over actions that harm.

  For an instrument of communication used so frequently, the threat is little understood, until you think about it. The parent who threatens punishment, the lawyer who threatens unspecified “further action,” the head of state who threatens war, the ex-husband who threatens murder, the child who threatens to make a scene—all are using words with the exact same intent: to cause uncertainty.

  Our social world relies on our investing some threats with credibility while discounting others. Our belief that they really will tow the car if we leave it here encourages us to look for a parking space unencumbered by that particular threat. The disbelief that our joking spouse will really kill us if we are late to dinner allows us to stay in the marriage. Threats, you see, are not the issue—context is the issue.

  For example, as you watch two people argue, an escalation of hostility that would otherwise cause alarm causes none if it is happening between actors on stage at the theater. Conversely, behavior that is not normally threatening, such as a man’s walking up some stairs, becomes alarming when it is an uninvited audience member marching up onto that same stage. It is context that gives meaning to the few steps he takes.

  A single word between intimates, perhaps meaningless to others, might carry a strong message of love or threat, depending on context. Context is the necessary link that gives meaning to everything we observe.

  Imagine a man arriving for work one morning. He does not go in the unlocked front door where most people enter the building but instead goes around to a back entrance. When he sees someone ahead of him use a key to get in, he runs up and catches the door before it re-locks. Once he is inside the building, he barely responds as a co-worker calls out, “The boss wants to see you.” “Yeah, I want to see him too,” the man says quietly. He is carrying a gym bag, but it appears too heavy to contain just clothes. Before going to his boss’s office, he stops in the locker room, reaches into the bag, and pulls out a pistol. He takes a second handgun from the bag and conceals both of them beneath his coat. Now he looks for his boss.

  If we stopped right here, and you had to predict this man’s likely behavior on the basis of what you know, context would tell the tale, because to know just one thing changes every other thing: This man is a police detective. If he were a postal worker, your prediction would be different.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Though knowing context is key to predicting which threats will be acted upon, people are often reluctant to put it ahead of content. Even some experts believe that threat assessments are aided by identifying and considering so-called key words. The assumption is that these words are significant by their presence alone, but the practice is rarely enlightening. As a person creates a communication, his selection of words is part of that creation, but they are instruments, not the final product.

  Look at this list of words:

  SKIN RIP

  PEEL WARNING

  BLOOD KILL

  MUTILATED BOMB

  A key-word enthusiast could enjoy plenty of alarm from a single paragraph containing kill, blood, and bomb, but you decide if the final product merits concern:

  The whole car trip I was cold right down to my skin. The wind would rip along so hard I thought it would peel the roof off. And here’s a warning: Don’t ever travel with relatives. Blood may be thicker than water, but trying to kill time listening to Uncle Harry’s mutilated jokes bomb was just too much.

  Conversely, look at this list of words and the context in which they appear:

  TIDY

  PRETTY

  FLOWERS

  BEAUTIFUL

  WELCOME

  Tidy up your affairs and buy some pretty flowers, because God has ordered me to take you to his beautiful place, where he is anxious to welcome you.

  Here is a letter I once assessed for a client:

  As I walked with you yesterday, the sheer grace of your body thrilled me. Your beauty gives me a starting point for appreciating all other beauty, in a flower or a stream. I sometimes cannot tell where you let off and the beauty of nature begins, and all I want is to feel your body and share my love with you.

  It is context that makes the prose in this letter so alarming: it was written by a fifty-year-old man to the ten-year-old daughter of a neighbor. (The man moved soon after we interviewed him; he is now in prison for a predictable offense: repeatedly propositioning an under-age girl to have sex with him.)

  The phone message, “Hi honey, it’s me” might, all by itself, communicate a terrible threat if it is the voice of an ex-husband whom a woman has tried to avoid by fleeing to another state and changing her name.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  As I said, context is much more important to predictions than content, and this truth relates to safety in some significant ways. For example, as I write this I am in Fiji, where from time to time a person is killed by something most of us don’t consider dangerous: a coconut. Given that the trees are often very tall and the coconuts very large, if one falls on you, the impact is comparable to having a bowling ball dropped on your head from the roof a five-story building.

  Are there ways to see the coconut hazard coming? Absolutely, there are many, but to detect them would involve evaluating all the factors that influence a coconut’s readiness to fall. I might have to climb the tree, test the stem strength, consider such things as the moistness and density of the fiber, the weight of the coconut, etc. I could measure the wind velocity and the rate at which similarly ripened coconuts have recently fallen from nearby trees. Ultimately, however, there’s just one practical pre-incident indicator. It’s the sound of a coconut falling through dried bark or leaves. Most of the time, this warning comes much too late to exploit. In other words, it could be the last sound one hears. So is there a way to avoid this lethal outcome?

  Yes, there is, but I needn’t sit at the base of a tree contemplating the question as a coconut rushes downward toward my skull. Since the outcome only happens in the very limited context of being under a coconut tree, I can avoid the hazard altogether… simply by sitting elsewhere. Similarly, we can avoid risks that are inherently present in certain situations. We need not walk defiantly through the territory of a violent gang, or wear our Rolex on a trip to Rio or stay in a violent relationship. Context can be a useful predictor of hazard all by itself.

  Context c
an also be a reliable guarantor of safety. Teaching a criminal-justice class at George Washington University, I asked five of the students to think up the most frightening, convincing death threats they could and then deliver them to me. I would assess and then accurately determine the seriousness of each one.

  The first student I called on stood up and said matter-of-factly: “It’s ironic that you would have this exercise tonight, and I can’t believe you chose me to go first, because I actually have been planning to kill you. When I saw on the schedule that you were teaching tonight, I borrowed, well, took my brother’s pistol. I have it here in my briefcase.”

  He held up the case and tilted it from side to side so we could hear that it did indeed contain something heavy. “I first planned to shoot you as you walked to your car, but I have decided to do it here in the classroom. Given the topic of the class and the fact that you are an expert on threats, this shooting will intrigue people and bring me attention for a long while.”

  He looked around at the other students, some of whom were a bit uncomfortable. “If anybody wants to avoid seeing this, you should leave right now.” As he reached slowly into his briefcase, I called out, “Next threat,” and he sat down. I had told the class I’d be able to predict the seriousness and outcome of each threat with perfect reliability, and I did. That’s because it made no difference what they said or how they said it. Since I had asked the students to threaten me, context—not content—dictated the obvious: None of the threats would be acted upon.

  Still, because most people have had little experience with death threats, and because they mistakenly believe that the death threat is inherently different from all other threats, the words usually cause undue fear. In fact, the death threat is among the threats least likely to be carried out.

  The first step toward deciding which words actually portend danger is understanding what threats are and what they are not. A threat is a statement of an intention to do some harm, period. It offers no conditions, no alternatives, no ways out. It does not contain the words if, or else, until, unless. Sentences that do contain those words are not threats; they are intimidations, and there is an important distinction.

  Intimidations are statements of conditions to be met in order to avert a harm. For example, “I will burn this building down if I don’t get the promotion” is an intimidation, not a threat, because a condition is offered to avert the harm. With intimidations, the motive is always right in the statement and the outcome the speaker desires is clear. “Unless you apologize, I’ll kill you” (the speaker wants an apology). “If you fire me, you’ll be sorry” (the speaker wants to keep his job).

  These statements differ importantly from threats because they are brought into play as high-stakes manipulations. The speaker wants his conditions met—he does not want to inflict the harm. With threats, conversely, no conditions are offered, usually because the speaker sees few alternatives. Thus, threats carry more likelihood of violence than intimidations. Another tip: Threats that are end-game moves—those introduced late in a controversy—are more serious than those used early. That’s because those used early likely represent an immediate emotional response as opposed to a decision to use violence.

  As an instrument of communication, the threat is most similar to the promise (though promises are kept far more often). With a promise, if we judge that the speaker is sincere, we next assess the likelihood that he will retain his will over time. One may promise something today but feel different tomorrow. Because threats are often spoken from emotion, and because emotions are ephemeral, threateners often lose their will over time. Threats and promises alike are easy to speak, harder to honor.

  Both promises and threats are made to convince us of an intention, but threats actually convince us of an emotion: frustration. Threats betray the speaker by proving that he has failed to influence events in any other way. Most often they represent desperation, not intention. Neither threats nor promises are guarantees, contracts, or even commitments; they are just words. (Guarantees offer to set things right if the promise isn’t kept. With contracts there is some cost for breaches of the promise. People making commitments have a personal cost if they fail to keep them, but those who threaten have found the cheapest form of promise, and also the one that others actually hope they’ll break.)

  Though you wouldn’t know it by the reaction they frequently earn, threats are rarely spoken from a position of power. Whatever power they have is derived from the fear instilled in the victim, for fear is the currency of the threatener. He gains advantage through your uncertainty, but once the words are spoken, he must retreat or advance and, like all people, he hopes to retain dignity through either course.

  How one responds to a threat determines whether it will be a valuable instrument or mere words. Thus, it is the listener and not the speaker who decides how powerful a threat will be. If the listener turns pale, starts shaking, and begs for forgiveness, he has turned the threat or intimidation into gold. Conversely, if he seems unaffected, it is tin.

  Even in cases in which threats are determined to be serious (and thus call for interventions or extensive precautions), we advise clients never to show the threatener a high appraisal of his words, never to show fear.

  These days, bomb threats are a tactic popular with angry people. It’s amazing how much fear can be caused by a single phone call; it might compel an organization to evacuate a building, close for the day, or enact restrictive security procedures. But to believe the caller who says, “I’ve planted a bomb, and it’s going off in three hours,” you have to believe that the person went to the extraordinary trouble and risk of obtaining the bomb components, then found a location where he could be sure nobody would ever see what he was doing, then assembled the bomb, then took the chance of losing his liberty and life while placing the device, and then undid it all by making the warning call.

  What might be his motives for calling and telling you what he’d done? Does he make the call as a warning to help save lives? Wouldn’t it be easier to save lives by planting a bomb in a place where there wouldn’t be any people, or just not planting it at all?

  Let’s go one level deeper: Imagine a person built and planted a bomb but then changed his mind and called in a threat to be sure nobody was hurt. Wouldn’t this unlikely on-again-off-again sociopath give you highly specific information, such as exactly where it was planted?

  Another possible motive for a real bomber to call in a threat is to ensure that he gets credit for the explosion, because after it happens, several people or groups might say they did it. Only the person who called before the explosion is guaranteed the credit. Think about this though: If a bomber is so egomaniacal that he wants to ensure he gets the attention for his mayhem, is he really going to self-sabotage by giving police time to find and defuse his pride and joy?

  We give so much credence to the words “I’ve planted a bomb” that I often wonder if we’d react as gullibly to other unbelievable claims. If some anonymous caller said, “Listen, I’ve buried a million dollars cash in the planter in front of the building,” would everybody from the CEO to the receptionist rush out and start digging through the dirt?

  What about when the caller contradicts himself? First he says he planted a bomb in the lobby, then he calls ten minutes later and says he didn’t plant a bomb in the lobby after all. Do we stop the search and just let everybody go back to work? What about when the same bomb threat we evacuated the building for on Monday comes again on Tuesday and again on Wednesday? At what point do we stop treating anonymous threateners as if they were the most credible people we’d ever heard from when in fact nearly 100 percent of these calls are bogus? The answer is, at the point where we have greater confidence in our predictions.

  We get that confidence by understanding as much as possible about threats. For example, if the bomb threatener is angry and hostile, the call is probably designed to do what most threats are designed to do: cause fear and anxiety. A caller who wants to discharge anger
over the telephone by using violent imagery (“You’ll all be blown to bits”), or who is agitated and aggressive, is not behaving like a real bomber. Most real bombers are patient, I’ll-get-you-in-time type people who can mortgage their emotions for another day. They express anger by blowing things up, not by making hostile calls. Ironically, bombers do not have explosive personalities.

  (Because bomb threats raise so many liability questions for employers, i.e., Should we evacuate? Should we tell employees about threats so they can make their own decisions? How should threats be assessed? Who should be notified? our office assists organizations in establishing bomb threat response policies. Most of the big questions can be answered ahead of time so one isn’t searching for a light-switch in the dark. Without this approach, critical decisions are made in the stress of some highly charged moment. As with all threats, context is the key issue. A threat made at an Olympic event, which is politically charged and the focus of world media attention, will be assessed differently than the same words aimed at a shopping center.)