Natural Born Criminals?

Outline

What causes crime?

Case study – serial killers

Theoretical recapTheories Marxism Feminisms Functionalism

Some theorists

Karl MarxDavid Harvey

Germaine GreerAnne Oakley

Emile DurkheimTalcott Parsons

Key vocabulary

CapitalismCommodityClassAlienation

GenderPatriarchyExploitation

StructureValuesNormsAnomie

Focus Capitalist exploitation of workers

Male exploitation of women

How society is so stable

Weakness Overlooks genderIgnore individual

SplinteredReductionist

Doesn’t explain changeDownplays conflict

Card game

For each crime consider:

Which theoretical viewpoints are most useful in discussing them?

Which features of the crime would those theorists focus on?

What kinds of questions would they ask?

What causes these crimes? How does the theory help explain them?

Serial Killing

“Serial killing industry”• Film, computer games• Detection software and hardware

Rare in UK

Individualised detection efforts are effective • Historical and cultural specificity of SK is ignored

What is a serial killer?

Defining serial killing

Egger (1984) • there must be at least 2 victims; • no relationship between perpetrator and victim; • the murders are committed at different times and have no direct connection

to previous or following murders; • the murders occur at different locations; • the murders are not committed for material gain; • subsequent victims have characteristics in common with earlier victims

• FBI definition• one or more offenders • two or more murdered victims • incidents should be occurring in separate events, at different times • the time period between murders separates serial murder from mass murder

Medical psychological explanation

Assumption that individual actors are driven to extreme behaviours because of psychological ‘abnormalities’

Hare Psychopathy Checklist: are you a psychopath?

Superficial charm

Grandiose sense of self

Need for stimulation

Pathological lying

Cunning and manipulative

Lack of remorse

Shallow affect

Lack of empathy

Parasitic lifestyle

Poor behavioural controls

Sexual promiscuity

Early behaviour problems

Lack of realistic long term goals

Impulsivity Irresponsibility

Failure to accept responsibility for actions

Many short term relationships

Juvenile delinquency

Revocation of conditional release

Criminal versatility

Problems with medical explanationsMost serial killers are not mad.

Growing acceptance of social factors, but still minor

Can’t explain variations in time and space• E.g. Interwar germany

Break

Hunting Humans (Leyton 1986)

First study to suggest that psychological explanation are not enough to explain multiple killings

Concept of “Homicidal protest” • “the configuration of the social structure is such that some persons when

faced with challenges to their position in the social hierarchy react to those challenges through the 'protest' of killing members of the threatening group”

Pre-industrial Industrial (modern) Post modern (since 1960s)

Killer Aristocratic Middle classes (e.g. doctors, teachers)

Upper working/ lower middle class (e.g. security guards)

Victim Peasantry ‘Lower orders’ (e.g. prostitutes, servants)

Middle classes (e.g. university students

Pre-industrial

Little evidence of serial killing (esp. with peasant victims)

Aristocrats were threatened by peasantry and merchant classes

• Serial killing about class control• E.g. Gilles de Rais

Industrial/ Modern

Creation of middle class professionals to serve needs of bourgeoisie

Serial killing here symbolic extension of industrialised discipline

Enforced new moral order, one which demanded extraction of maximum value from proletariat

“heinous conclusion the unprecedented control demanded by the cash-nexus of industrial Capitalism”

Post-modern (post 1960s)

Significant rise in serial killing from this period• Could be rise in recording and conviction

Perpetrator/ Victim class relationship reversed– “those increasingly excluded from desired socio-economic goals were

wreaking their revenge upon those whom they saw as frustrating their ambitions, and therefore, being responsible for their exclusion”

Killers and their victims in UK

Paper looks at 15 trials involving 17 serial killers

Mixed support for Leyton

Killers not from ‘truly oppressed’ , overwhelmingly male and all white• Most were working class/ lower middle class occupations

• 40% were unemployed

Victims were not from middle classes though, generally were from relatively powerless groups (young, old, women, gay, unemployed)

Evaluating ’Homicidal Protest’ in UK

Leyton’s focus on class relations and ‘modernity’ seems unhelpful in explaining UK serial killing

If we broaden scope of social relations to include patriarchy

Some evidence of material and social frustration in killlers

Patriarchy useful in explaining British serial killing• Dominance over women, often violent• Crisis of masculinity

Conclusions

Engine of patriarchal capitalism is social and economic competition.

Those who can’t compete are pathologised as the incompetent or lazy.

State legitimises this treatment by affording them minimal social and economic protection to not exacerbate their 'idleness'

Inability of individuals to compete not only has a role in 'creating' serial killers but the increasing vulnerability of certain groups plays an important role in providing the victims for serial killers.

Group work

Read the information in your case study and answer the following questions

What is the class position of the killer? Of the victims? • How can you tell?

How might gender and patriarchy explain the killer’s actions or the choice of victim?

Do you think that these cases supports the homicidal protest thesis?