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

by Gavin De Becker

  The list of PINs includes a fascination with violence and guns, which was a central part of James’s personality—to the point of his planning to become a gunsmith. Both he and Ray regularly went target shooting and played games involving guns. As part of what James called his “training to be a mercenary,” he often played “war,” pretending to be in gunfights. “There would be two cops and one criminal. The criminal would be behind you and would have to flush you out, you know, how cops check a house out. Ninety-nine percent of the time I always got both of the cops.” About his less violent friend Ray, he said: “I would usually get him because, you know, just watching TV, you learn. TV is a really good teacher.” James said he watched the news and saw “a lot of violence and killing and fighting go on.” He summarized all this succinctly: “Violence excited me.”

  Finally, he unknowingly described one of the leading PINs for attention-getting violent acts: He said he felt “ignored for 20 years.” Explaining how Judas Priest motivated the shootings, he said that he perceived the song “Hero’s End” to be about how one has to die to be recognized.

  When James was asked if anything other than the lyrics might have caused the shootings, he responded, “A bad relationship? The stars being right? The tide being out? No.” Though he was being sarcastic, any of these is probably as reasonable as blaming the lyrics on an album for what happened, for once he excluded family life and parenting from the inquiry, he might as well have cited anything. By pointing his trigger finger at a rock band, James washed away all of the scrutiny that might reasonably have been focused on himself, his family, or even his society.

  After all, James was not the only young man who spent more time consuming media products than he spent on any other activity in his waking life. He was an avid patron of the violence division of the entertainment industry. In Selling Out America’s Children, author David Walsh likens it to “a guest in our families that advocates violence, but we don’t throw him out.” He notes that since children learn by modeling and imitation, the 200,000 acts of violence they will witness in the media by age 18 pose a serious problem. Dr. Park Dietz has said that “the symbolic violence in an hour-long episode of a violent television show does more harm, when summed up over the millions of participants, than a single murder of the usual variety.” Finally, writer (and mother) Carrie Fisher says that “television exposes children to behavior that man spent centuries protecting them from.”

  The content of media products matters, but the amount may matter more, whether it is watching television too much, playing video games too much, listening to too much rock music, or for that matter listening to too much classical music. It isn’t only the behavior this consumption promotes that concerns me. It’s the behavior it prevents, most notably human interaction. I would admittedly be happier if my children chose Tina Turner or Elton John or k.d. lang over Judas Priest, but the bigger issue arises when media consumption replaces the rest of life.

  No matter what their choice of music, in the lives of too many teenagers, recognition is more meaningful than accomplishment, and, as it was for James, recognition is available through violence. With the pull of a trigger, a young person whose upbringing has not invested him with self-worth can become significant and “un-ignorable.”

  If you took away James’s obsession with Judas Priest, you would have just another young man with goals and ambitions that changed day to day, with unrealistic expectations of the world, and without the perseverance or self-discipline to succeed at any endeavor. At various times, James planned to write a book, be a gunsmith, be a member of a band, even be a postal worker, but in the end he will be most remembered for just a few seconds in his life—a few seconds of barbarism in a churchyard.

  The court eventually decided that the proprietors of the record store could not have predicted the shootings, but James Vance did not get to finish his search for someone to blame. He died, finally, from that single shotgun blast to the head, though the complications took a long time to kill him, longer than anyone could have expected. I never got to ask James about his early years and never learned about the childhood which the lawsuit so effectively eclipsed.

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  Some parents are unable to blame anyone for the violence their children commit because they are themselves the victims. Children kill their parents far less frequently than parents kill their children, but the cases so fascinate the public that it might seem they happen frequently. In fact, any kind of murder by a young person is relatively rare. Though Americans under eighteen make up almost 25 percent of the population, they commit less than 10 percent of the murders. Even so, people are afraid of teenagers, and at times with good reason.

  So you’ll know which times those are, I want to inform your intuition accurately: Most people killed by teenagers are known to them, but about one in five is a stranger killed during a robbery, either because the teenager panicked or because of peer pressure. Murder is most likely to occur when two or more juveniles jointly commit a crime, so fear in that context is appropriate. A recent study shows that an astonishing 75 percent of homicides by young people occur when they are high or drunk, so encountering criminal teenagers under the influence is most dangerous.

  Though teenagers are generally not as dangerous to you as adults are, some juvenile offenders, like Willie Bosket, acquire remarkable criminal credentials early in life. By the time he was fifteen, he had stabbed twenty-five people and been in and out of detention facilities for an estimated 2000 other crimes. When authorities finally released him, a jailer made the prediction that “One day, Willie Bosket is going to kill somebody.” That prediction was doubly accurate: Willie killed two people, saying he did it “for the experience.” (Being a minor, he was incarcerated for only five years, but is now back in prison for other crimes. Even there, his violence continues: he has reportedly set fire to his cell seven times and attacked guards nine times. “I’m a monster the system created,” he says. The statute that allows the state of New York to try juveniles as adults is now called the Willie Bosket law.)

  Steven Pfiel is another young person who was relentless in his efforts to hurt others. At age eight, he dropped bricks onto traffic from a freeway overpass. At nine, he assaulted another boy with an ax. School officials designated a separate bus stop for him because he regularly threatened to kill other children. By fourteen, he was abusing drugs and reportedly drank entire bottles of hard liquor in single sittings. At seventeen, he committed his first known murder, that of a young girl. (A court ruled that his parents could be sued for negligence because even knowing about his past behavior, they gave him the knife he used to kill the girl.) While awaiting trial, he killed his older brother.

  In the brilliant book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes seven key abilities most beneficial for human beings: the ability to motivate ourselves, to persist against frustration, to delay gratification, to regulate moods, to hope, to empathize, and to control impulse. Many of those who commit violence never learned these skills. If you know a young person who lacks them all, that’s an important pre-incident indicator, and he needs help. Another predictor of violence is chronic anger in childhood. If you know a child who is frequently or extremely angry, he too needs help.

  There are usually plenty of warning signs for teen violence, as with eighteen-year-old Jason Massey, who killed a fourteen year-old boy and his thirteen-year-old step-sister. He was missing all the abilities Goleman cites, but it was the lack of an ability to control impulses that probably explains the gruesome things Massey did, like cutting off the girl’s hands and head. The warning signs were obvious: He idolized serial killers Ted Bundy and Henry Lee Lucas, studied everything he could find on Charles Manson, and avidly followed his favorite music group, Slayer. In the years before he killed people, Massey slaughtered cows, cats, and dogs. He kept the skulls. He often spoke of wanting to kill girls. He robbed a fast-food restaurant. He stalked and terrorized a teenage girl for five years, sending her letters about s
litting her throat and drinking her blood. People knew all these details, and yet denial prevailed.

  Unlike James Vance, Massey was forthcoming about his goals: “All I want is the murdering of countless young women. I wish to reap sorrow for the families.” This kind of anger at family does not come out of nowhere.

  Many young murderers kill within the family, often shooting abusive fathers or stepfathers, which is no surprise. You will, however, be surprised at how young they can be. A boy I’ll call Robbie shot and killed his father after watching his mother being beaten. The drunk father had left a gun on the table and though Robbie confessed to the killing, few people initially believed that he could have done it. That’s because he was only three years old. After gunpowder tests confirmed him as the killer, he explained to authorities: “I killed him. Now he’s dead. If he would have hit my mother again, I would have shot him again.”

  In his compelling and disturbing book When a Child Kills, lawyer Paul Mones unflinchingly explores parricide. He observes that unlike with most murders, events which occur twelve years before a parricide are as important as those which occur twelve hours before it. The single most reliable pre-incident indicator of parricide is child abuse. It is recognized that most runaway children in America leave their families to escape abuse or to call attention to it, but some of those who stay at home, Mones explains, “lay family secrets bare with the report of a gun.”

  Children who kill their parents are usually found to have been beaten, degraded, sodomized, tied up, or tortured in other ways. Mones tells of one sixteen-year-old, Mike, whom prosecutors described as “just one of those violent, rebellious, degenerate teenagers who are cold hearted killers.” But there was much more to the story than that.

  Mike had been beaten by his father from kindergarten on. Though he was an athletic and coordinated boy, he had constant injuries from “falling off his bike,” “tripping,” or “cutting himself.” During the trial, he was asked to strip to a bathing suit so the jury could see the scars his father had given him over the years.

  The abuse ended abruptly one night. Mike had returned home late and his father was waiting for him with a pistol. “You got two choices,” he explained to the boy. “You kill me or I kill you.” The ultimatum had been offered before, but this time Mike’s father actually held the gun out to him, and this time Mike took it and shot his father in the head.

  Another young boy who killed a parent told Mones that living in prison is better than living with the abuse at home. He describes himself as “locked up but free.”

  Some people believe that children who kill shouldn’t have been so docile during their abuse; they should have at least reported the abuse long before it reached the point that murder seemed their only way out. Proponents of these ideas may have forgotten that adult victims of rape or hijacking are often just as docile as children, and we don’t later blame them for failing to do something.

  The warning signs of parricide and other awful violence are shown to parents, teachers, policemen, neighbors and relatives. It is they (often we), not children, who must report these cases.

  Of all the violence discussed in this book, being killed by one’s own daughter or son is the easiest to avoid. A precaution that is virtually guaranteed starts years before the child is big enough to hurt anyone: Be a loving parent.

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  Unlike teens, pre-teens who kill within the family are more likely to kill a sibling than a parent. As with other violence, it doesn’t happen without warning. Most of these cases have involved an abused or severely disturbed child whose prior attempts to kill a sibling were not taken seriously. That’s because many people believe that violence by children against children is a natural part of growing up. It may be, but when a child does something that places another child in serious hazard, it should not be ignored. I recently testified in a case where it was, and after reading what follows, few parents should ever feel blind confidence when sending their children off to school.

  The offender was a grammar school student I’ll call Joey. He sodomized a seven-year-old boy in the school bathroom. Though he acted alone, he was aided by some astonishing negligence on the part of the school system, and the principal in particular. The school district claimed Joey’s rape couldn’t have been predicted, but there had been a striking pre-incident indicator a month earlier: Joey had actually been arrested for victimizing another boy the same way in the same bathroom!

  Because this was not my only case involving disturbing negligence by schools, and because school policies and personnel are not what you think they are, I want to take a moment and give some background.

  First of all, though they claim otherwise, schools are in the business of high-stakes predictions. School teachers and administrators regularly face these predictive questions:

  Will this visitor seek to kidnap a child?

  Will this teacher molest a child?

  Is this child being abused at home?

  Will this child bring a lethal weapon to school?

  Though most people cannot imagine that young boys can rape anyone, the school district in Joey’s case knew better. For years they’d had a specific written policy entitled “Child-On-Child Sexual Abuse.” Since the existence of that policy makes clear that such things happen, it in effect raises a predictive question for every principal.

  Imagine that all the students are gathered in the auditorium and the principal surveys the group with this question in mind: Who among these students might sexually abuse another child? Through his behavior, Joey stands up in this imaginary assembly and calls out, “It might be me,” but the principal chooses to ignore the boy.

  The administrators at Joey’s previous school had made the whole matter simpler for the principal: they actually predicted—in writing—that Joey would act out in sexually inappropriate ways, and they sent his records to the school where the rapes ultimately occurred. It is hard to imagine that anyone could have ignored the warning signs he wore like a banner: carrying a knife, threatening homicide, threatening and attempting suicide, lighting a building on fire, pouring gasoline on his mother and trying to light a match, displaying fascination with sex and sexual organs, inappropriate sexual conduct toward other children, exposing himself, aggression, violence. As if all these warning signs were not enough, the principal took no effective action when he learned of Joey’s sexual assault of another student. Is this kind of negligence really possible? This and more.

  After the first rape accusation, the principal chose not to take the obvious step that might have increased supervision of Joey at the school: He did not tell the boy’s teachers anything about what had happened. It gets worse. When one teacher found Joey to be unmanageable, he was sent to another class of younger, smaller boys! By this action, the school provided him a virtual “beauty contest” of victims, and he chose one.

  The presence of security guards at a school may add comfort for some parents, but understand that at this school, part of one of the nation’s largest school districts, security guards received absolutely no training on any aspect of student safety. They received no written guidelines, no post instructions, no policies on the topic whatsoever. Even if they’d known what their jobs were supposed to be, they weren’t informed about the rape accusation, not even told anything as simple and easy as “Be extra alert,” or “Keep an eye out.” When organizations of any kind are pressured to improve security, a typical response is to hire guards. Everyone sighs and feels the matter has been addressed, but if guards are not trained or supervised or properly equipped, if there is no intelligent plan for them to follow, their presence can hurt more than help. That’s because, having taken this expensive step, everyone stops looking at safety and security.

  I’ve noted the precautions the principal failed to take, but there is one precaution he did take. After the first rape accusation, he arranged to have the dangerous boy escorted whenever he went to that bathroom. This may sound like a reasonable precaution until I te
ll you that the principal had Joey escorted not by a teacher or security guard, but by another student! I do not imagine that any parent would have volunteered his or her son for the job of escorting a violent criminal, particularly one that even experienced teachers could not handle.

  If an adult employee at the school, say the janitor for example, had Joey’s background and was arrested for raping a student, would the principal have let him come back to work? I can’t answer even this obvious question with any certainty. I know only that Joey leaped on the stage of that imaginary assembly and yelled, “It is me, I am the child-on-child sexual offender,” and the principal turned away.

  Joey was finally taken out of school and placed in a treatment facility (where he sexually attacked two people in one day). The investment of abuse and neglect in Joey’s own childhood will continue to pay dividends of pain and violence for others, including those he will likely kill one day. As I write this sad but accurate prediction, Joey is only nine years old.