Practical Guidelines for Identifying Signs of Potential Violence
Strange Behavior: What to Look For
Social and political solutions, the result of budgetary allocations, are designed to solve the major problems over the longer term when it comes to addressing violence and mental illness. But on a more practical level, one has to ask what a parent or teacher should do when a child or student exhibits signs of strange behavior. We know what happened at Virginia Tech, Pima Community College, and the University of Colorado. The students in question—Cho Seung-Hui, Jared Loughner, and James Holmes—were all summarily removed from the campus community and dumped into a public safety network ill-equipped to deal with their dangerous behavior until after they had perpetrated their crimes. We believe we know what Nancy Lanza tried to do with her child, who was behaving strangely from an early age and who was the object of bullying when he attended Sandy Hook. She taught him all about guns. And then he turned the guns on her. We know what happened when former Navy SEAL and bestselling author Chris Kyle tried his own brand of immersion therapy on PTSD sufferer Eddie Ray Routh by taking him target shooting. Routh turned the gun on him.
This approach does not work and cannot work, but people still keep following it as if oblivious to the failure of their own pursuits.
How many times must a person ram his or head into a brick wall before looking into a mirror to see how much blood is running from the wound? Is it only Bob Dylan who can point us to the answer?
If we analyze what we know about a point of contact between an at-risk individual and a parent, a teacher, or even an educational administrator, we might be able identify red flags that parents and teachers can recognize to see whether the child requires heightened scrutiny or observation or if an intervention is called for.
Physical Abuse or Emotional Abuse.
Children who are abused sexually, physically, or emotionally are automatically at risk for either PTSD or emotional impairment as they reach adolescence. This is actually a no-brainer and one of the issues that President Obama has raised in his call for heightened awareness to children in trouble. Kids react to events at home, whether the events are the breakup of a marriage, the results of substance abuse, physical abuse inflicted upon them, or even sexual advances from relatives or neighbors. The results of these types of trauma turn up in a child’s behavior, and we can see them as the following: marked behavioral differences over a short time, aggressive behavior toward others, lack of resiliency, lack of empathy, refusal to follow standard rules of behavior, outbreaks of emotional instability, or outbreaks of temper inconsistent with the stimulus.
Emotional reactions, sometimes violently self-destructive or even homicidal, can result from bullying and abuse at school. As reported by relatives of Nancy Lanza, Adam was bullied at Sandy Hook Elementary to the point where his mother had contemplated suing the school district. Recently in the news is the story of Audrie Pott, a fifteen-year-old student from Northern California who committed suicide. The teenager had passed out from drinking alcohol at a party and was raped by teenage boys. Videos of the rape were posted on social media, and the girl was bullied and tormented by other students who saw the videos. Audrie, seeing no way out, committed suicide. One can only wonder how attorneys will defend the teens accused of raping the victim.
Ideations of Violence
People who contemplate suicide, even violent suicide, will almost always find an outlet to express their ideations of what the suicidal moment might be. Christopher Dorner was explicit in describing what plans he had in store for those in the LAPD who he believed persecuted him. Cho Seung-Hui wrote an entire essay in high school about the Columbine high school shooting, his admiration for shooters Klebold and Harris, and his plans to emulate their crimes. He described it again in his writings in college. James Holmes expressed his ideations in letters to Dr. Fenton at the University of Colorado, and Anders Breivik wrote about his intentions in his manifesto. You do not need Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew, or Oprah to tell you that when someone explains exactly what he or she is going to do, you should take it seriously because you can bet your bottom dollar that he or she will do it.
Manifestations of Violent Behavior
Children will sometimes react aggressively if they or their territory is challenged. We can see this in nursery school or kindergarten settings before the teacher can communicate the rules of social behavior. However, a teacher will occasionally notice that a child exhibits extraordinarily violent behavior toward another child. This is a warning sign, not just that something is wrong at home, but that the child has no resilience to whatever the challenge or stimulus was. Simple discipline, a time-out, or sitting in a corner is not enough. The warning sign indicates that something is wrong emotionally and needs to be followed up on, ideally by a school counselor who is trained in pediatric psychological counseling.
Sadism and Cruelty
We know that children can be cruel. But by the time a child is eight or nine and has been socialized to work and play with others in a classroom setting, the child tends to demonstrate empathy for others’ feelings. However, children who are not only unsympathetic or unfeeling but who manifest cruelty to others and enjoy others’ suffering are emotionally at risk. When those children immerse themselves in the types of video games that actually extol sadism and cruelty as virtues and amalgamate sadism and cruelty with the larger purpose of saving the planet from extraterrestrials, monsters, or terrorists, we are not talking about a simple game anymore. We are talking about a mechanism inculcating the habits of mass destruction.
Withdrawal from Others
If anything typified Adam Lanza in elementary school, it was his withdrawal from others. Nancy Lanza, however good her intentions might have been, failed completely in addressing the psychological problem that plagued her son and manifested into a full-blown psychosis. Children who display an aggravated level of fear-driven withdrawal also display signs of a behavioral disorder or emotional upset on which a teacher should follow up.
A Child Who Bullies
Bullying behavior is often learned at home from an early age. It is not just about striking out at other children or at the teacher. It is about refusal to follow any rules and inability to deal with other children except in terms of bullying. It is about a level of cruelty toward others that defies any logic. Bullies learn abuse from their parents or caregivers and impose what they learn on others. Ninety-five percent of bullying behavior can be addressed and remedied in the classroom. But for those children who are at risk because they are victims of abuse at home, bullying might be their way of acting out. Consistent, sadistic bullying evidencing a level of cruelty toward others is a clear psychological problem that the teacher should report to a guidance counselor, who should bring in the parents sooner rather than later.
Indifference to Others’ Pain
Sympathy toward others usually manifests itself in classroom interactions in children older than eight years. However, when indifference to the pain of others lasts beyond age eight and into the preteen years, it usually indicates that something is wrong and the child is disturbed in some way. This behavior does not pass away as the child grows older. It only gets worse as the stressful transition to high-school social and sexual interaction or competitive sports ramps up aggressive behavior. It is up to parents, teachers, and coaches to mediate this behavior and to discourage indifference to or enjoyment of others’ pain.
Violent Mood Swings
Anyone who has raised a child remembers how that child could move from wild laughter and ebullience to a flood of tears very quickly in early age. Manic behavior followed by a collapse into sadness usually means, for children ages two to five, that the child needs a nap because weariness and fatigue have drained him of the ability to cope. However, as a child gets older, violent or dramatic mood swings may indicate something is amiss either chemically or emotionally. People who might be predisposed to violent behavior experience dramatic changes in mood from calm to violence with no provocation whatsoever. These hair-trigger behavioral swings often mean that an older child is under severe pressure at home, is suffering at school, or has a severe neurochemical imbalance or even type-1 diabetes. Any of those conditions might imperil the child’s ability to cope with life’s stresses. Most children grow out of this. But some do not, and these are the children school personnel need to observe.
Cruelty to Animals or Inanimate Objects
Some children exhibit extreme cruelty to animals, to the point where they feel that they cannot stop themselves because the emotion is somehow addictive and feeds upon itself. Animal cruelty is an indicator of potential violence, as is violence toward inanimate objects. The destruction of things, whether animate or inanimate, who pose threat indicates that the perpetrator of violence and cruelty has little or no impulse control, is controlled by violent emotion, and probably has little regard for the consequences of his or her actions. The person may simply be deriving a sense of pleasure from the destruction of something over which the person exercises control.
History of Violence
A history of violent or sadistic acts is also an indicator of potential danger. For older children and young adults, any history of unprovoked sexually or racially tainted assault is a real sign of dangerousness, particularly when the individual attempts to use weapons, including common tools for blunt-force assault, against others. A first resort to violence is a significant red flag, especially when combined with a lack of impulse control and a substance or alcohol abuse problem. This means that unless that individual is treated for lack of impulse control and substance abuse, he is likely to be at odds with law enforcement in the future.
Insatiable Sex Drives and Violent Sexual Fantasies
Although more in the category of episodic or serial sexual crime, fantasies that combine sexual urges with ideations of violence and violent control over the victim are indicators that the individual is on the spectrum of becoming a sexual offender. Fantasies, although not crimes, can be fed by pornographic and violent sexual material so that the individual pushes the envelope of engagement to the point of indulging in real-life versions of fantasies. What seem to be mere flirtations in the workplace can push the envelope of social acceptability and can quickly escalate to real sexual offenses.
Abnormal Fascination with Blood, Gore, and Death
This type of indicator usually goes hand-in-hand with immersion or addiction to violent video games. These dark nihilistic fantasies tend to be manifestations of the individual’s own feelings of worthlessness and deep remorse, bordering on the suicidal. As we have seen in the cases of Lanza, Holmes, Loughner, Breivik, and Cho, the deeper and more obsessive the fascination with death and gore is, the more problems the individual will likely have in separating his fantasies from real life.
The Importance of Early Intervention
Because society is changing and childhood exposure to graphic violence and violent video games is prevalent, what once might have been considered hypervigilance twenty years ago should now be considered the norm. There is just too much violence in the environment for parents to ignore their child’s fascination with it. A parent who suspects that his or her child is spending too much time interacting as a warrior avatar in a digital world should ask the child what he gets out of the game, rather than banning video games outright. Are there frustrations that the child is working out? Are there anger issues that crop up at school that can only be addressed within the four corners of an onscreen video game? Is the child being bullied or coerced into doing things that embarrass him or make him feel guilty? Or is the child so frustrated that pseudo violence is his or her only resort? And how is all this being reflected in the child’s performance at school? Is the gaming more social, with visible friends seen talking about it, or obviously isolative? The latter is of far greater concern.
Consider for a moment how a school might look at procedures to follow if a child turns up in class constantly sick, constantly hungry, or even carrying what the school might consider to be a communicable disease. Would that child simply be ignored in the expectation that things will ultimately work themselves out with no intervention? Absolutely not. In fact, the school would involve itself directly with the family and even notify county or state child or family services if the situation was serious enough. The school counselor or social worker would become involved, and they would open up an official investigation. However, this is not a routine procedure for emotional problems, which is why school districts are becoming more vigilant about children manifesting significant emotional disturbance problems.
These seem like basic questions that might turn up in any television commercial. However, in many households where the burdens of raising the child, keeping up with bills, and holding onto a job can be overwhelming, it is easy to overlook or query what is going on in the inner world of a child’s imagination or emotions. There are very early indicators of a child’s difficulty in coping with issues in school or at home, some of which raise problems that even parents are sometimes too embarrassed to deal with. What if the child is having problems with a step-parent? What if there are issues of emotional abuse? Environments in which children can feel empowered to speak freely to parents, even if the child is bristling with hostility, are more healthy than those that are cloaked in silence.
If a child exhibits real signs of emotional difficulty, the earlier a parent or caregiver addresses these signs with the child’s pediatrician and takes any advice to consult with a child psychiatrist, the better it is. This does not mean that every child who appears hyper needs to begin a Ritalin or Adderall regimen. It does mean that if there are neurological or emotional issues, the earlier they are dealt with in a professional context, the better.
We may never completely understand the dynamic between Nancy Lanza and her son. We may never be able to see whatever medical records exist about Adam’s diagnoses or what a psychiatrist might have said about him. But the tragic outcome of the Lanza relationship and Adam’s mental illness speaks for itself. Parents have to intervene early so that mental illness, which is progressive and not static, does not wind up so badly crippling the child’s grip on reality that he is no longer able to differentiate between violent fantasies and real life.
Many Americans have built-in prejudices toward seeking outside help for their children’s problems. First, there is a robust, albeit irrational, mistrust of psychiatrists because of the stigma of mental illness, regardless of the fact that a paranoid schizophrenic can purchase a gun on the Internet or at a gun show. There is no such stigma about going to a doctor for medicine to help a child get over the flu. Mental illness and emotional disorders are as medically legitimate as the flu. The more we understand the biology of the brain, the more we can understand that perception, or lack thereof, is essentially a matter of how the brain interprets signals. Because so much of the brain’s interpretation of sensory data is based on electrochemistry and the flow of mood-altering neurostimulants, we should know that we are dealing with molecules, not a moral stigma. If parents and caregivers can be educated to accept that, we will have gone a long way toward solving prejudice over mental illness.
Success Is Often Achieved at the Margins
In Oliver Stone’s 1999 feature film Any Given Sunday, Al Pacino’s character, coach Tony D’Amato, gives a very compelling speech about how football imitates life because, like life, football games can be won on the margins. Control the inches at the line of scrimmage, and you control the yardage. Control the seconds on the clock, and you control the time you spend in control of the ball. Inches and seconds can translate into yards and minutes, which can translate to the dominance usually required for victory. How does this translate into real life?
Control the number of rounds allowed in an ammunition magazine, and you control the number of times a shooter has to reload. Force a shooter to reload more than once, and you give more potential victims the time to escape and police to arrive on the scene and disarm the shooter. You do not save every life, but you save some. And every life you save is precious.
Control the ways people can obtain guns through background checks for all sales, and you control the individuals on the edges who are either too sick or have violent criminal backgrounds. Again, maybe not every single mass murder will be prevented, but some will. And those mass murders that are prevented will save precious lives.
Now apply this to a child or young adult who is exhibiting strange behavior. The earlier the intervention, even if that intervention only amounts to a heightened state of vigilance, the less bioneurological overhead may be required to remedy an illness. We are not talking about drugging an entire generation of video gamers so that they can become social or lobotomizing them so they act like zombies from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. We are talking about children and young adults at the margins who, because of a deteriorating mental state, are losing their grip on reality and replacing it with an inner reality fed by delusions, hallucinations, and the limbic music of the video games they are playing through their avatars: their extensions of self injected into a graphically violent digital world.
Conclusion
Even after the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Massachusetts state police, and Boston police closed in around Watertown to catch Dzhokhar Tsarnaev alive and take him into custody, the stakes for our society are very high. It is not just the guns, the video games, or the instructions from bomb makers on the Internet to show wannabe terrorists how to construct an improvised explosive device out of fertilizer, a battery, and a pressure cooker. We can address the problem of firearm access to felons and the mentally ill through basic gun control legislation. It is likely that the current Supreme Court would uphold this legislation. We can also make more stringent the regulations covering video game distribution. We know that in dealing with forms of entertainment, we bump right up against the First Amendment’s protection of speech. But that right to free speech is not absolute. It is governed by what the Supreme Court has called time and place qualifications. The content of speech, though subject to strict scrutiny by the Court, is governed by the notion of “incitement,” that is, whether the speech incites listeners to immediate violence.134 And the bar is very high for that as well, even though wannabe extremists constantly test the envelope of what incitement is. However, if that speech creates a neurochemical reaction in a listener or in a game player that incites violence directly attributed to the speech, it raises a possible qualification to the free speech protection the game manufacturer relies on. This is so particularly if the marketing to young children is reckless or willfully blind to the violence that the game can incite, which might be another qualification on the game manufacturer’s free speech. In the wake of Sandy Hook, might a court deem the game School Shooter as incitement speech? After all, if we can rethink the nature of absolute thinking and look at the vulnerability of our children and other potential victims of mental illness–inspired violence, we just might be able to stave off the kinds of draconian solutions that even Richard Nixon was afraid would have to be imposed if society degenerated into violence.
We can do this if we put our ideologies into the context of keeping our society and our citizens alive. We can do this if we can destigmatize mental illness, which modern brain imaging will help us do. We can do this if we realize that the pain of each one of the Sandy Hook parents is a pain that any one of us can experience if our children or grandchildren become the victims of an entirely preventable crime.
We can do this.
And we’d better do it soon.
134 Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 US 444 (1969).