Telling It Like It Is
As the profiles in this book delineate, the children who killed were mostly children who’d been almost killed themselves by adults. Often the abusive adult was their primary carer – so they were struck, mocked and neglected by the people they trusted most Dr Roy Eskapa, a sex therapist, has written that ‘Almost every violent prisoner investigated turns out to have been subjected to severe corporal punishment during childhood’ and ‘when children are subjected to corporal punishment, they learn that violence is the norm.’
And in an American conference about violence in schools, psychologist Frank Zenere said that the factors included ‘child abuse, ineffective parenting, violence in the home, poverty, prejudice, substance abuse and easy access to guns.’
A recent article on compassion by Julia Goodwin, the editor of a parenting magazine, confirmed that ‘children aren’t born bad – in fact, experts say we’re all born with a tendency to be kind. Witness the toddler who, in an effort to alleviate another child’s distress, will offer up their teddy to be cuddled.’
Dan Korem has studied children who commit ostensibly random acts of violence. He found that the family profile included divorce, separation, physical abuse, sexual abuse or a severely dysfunctional parent. (Korem and other such experts are briefly overviewed in Jon Bellini’s excellent study of child killer Luke Woodham, Child’s Prey.)
This abuse – be it sexual, emotional or physical – usually goes back several generations for such cruelty is learned behaviour. The hunted becomes the hunter, with a man or woman who has been abused or unnurtured as a child going on to perpetrate very similar abuses on his own offspring. Ironically, when these parents desert the child, it’s often given to grandparents whose patenting methods left their own children with low self-esteem. William Allnutt, Rod Ferrell, Wendy Gardner and Johnny Garrett all fit into this category.
Older parents, who understandably have lower energy levels, can also pose a problem to their children if they see normal activity as hyperactivity and seek to curtail it, as happened with late baby Kip Kinkel. Older parents (and very young immature ones) can also have unrealistic expectations of what a child can offer them. Luke Woodham’s mother demanded that her sons get A’s at school then come straight home and offer her adult conversation. She even insisted on driving Luke the one mile journey to his school, refused to let him go to school dances and accompanied him on his pitifully few dates. Such parents presumably believed that they wanted children – but they refuse to let them be childlike.
This author once spoke to a children’s charity worker who said the worst case of abuse she’d seen involved a professional woman who had waited until her late thirties before having her first child. She expected a textbook child and was soon complaining to neighbours that the baby ‘wasn’t playing properly’ with its toys. By the time the child was a toddler she was so disturbed by its normal toddler-like playing that she shut it in a playpen and went out for the day. She did this every day until neighbours complained to the authorities and the horrendously neglected child was taken away.
Some of these neglected and traumatised children’s brains will develop differently to the brains of children raised in loving families. A Royal Society Of Medicine conference showed images of the brains of Romanian orphans who hadn’t enjoyed normal adult-child play-times or been shown love. The frontal-temporal areas of the children’s brains were noticeably underdeveloped. As this area is responsible for regulating the emotions, these children showed abnormal emotional responses to everyday stimuli.
Professor Perry of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston commented on such brain abnormality in an article on the subject in the Observer Magazine (20th January 2002) and explained that ‘Adverse experiences influence the mature brain, but in the developing brain they actually play a role in organising the neural system.’ The Professor added that such understimulated children ‘can have profound social problems, but are often very bright.’
The article also noted that the children who are understimulated by the parent are also often overstimulated by stress. (For example, if the parents are ignoring the child but hitting each other.) The article said that as a result of such ongoing fear, the children often had increased muscle tone, extreme sleep disturbances and abnormal heart regulation. Child psychiatrist Dr Dora Black added that this constant hyper-arousal was so unbearable that many of the sufferers turned to drink or drugs.
Dr Black said that, though later stimulation can improve the child’s brain, prevention is better than cure and children should be removed from a toxic environment as soon as possible. Professor Perry added ‘In order to solve the problems of violence, we need to change our childrearing practices. If not addressed, maltreatment in early life increases risk for substance abuse, mental health problems, school failure and criminality.’
Most of the parents in this book will understandably be viewed by the reader as hate figures – but if this author had profiled their childhoods there would be equal sympathy for them. Thomas Pomeroy was battered by his father – and went on to batter his sons Jesse and Charles. James Pierson was slapped across the face so often by his parents that his friends were desperate to get him out of the house. When James became a father he would slap his three children across the face and was proud of his youngest daughter because she refused to cry.
Lou Wolf’s early life was marred by a violent father who sexually abused Lou’s sister, by an alcoholic stepfather and by a priest who took nude pictures of him whilst he was in care. In turn, Lou beat his own children, sexually abused his daughter Shirley and took explicit photos of her when she was small.
Ann and Robert Thompson senior had endured violent childhoods – and passed this violence on to their children. Johnny Garrett’s mother Charlotte was so multiply-abused that she was in and out of psychiatric care. By marrying one violent man after another, she recreated this sexual, emotional and physically abusive hell for Johnny until his mind fractured and he too ended up mentally ill.
Betty Bell was frequently spanked by her mother and was terrified of her. By five she had developed eating disorders and her mother would also spank her for not eating. Upset after her father’s death at age fourteen, she started staying out late and her mother gave her further hidings. An uncle also hit her for stealing a purse from another relative. At fifteen she took an overdose of her mother’s tranquillisers and almost died.
These individuals parented as they were patented and were unable to look clearly at the damage they were doing. As psychologist Dorothy Rowe has written ‘until we meet the important needs we bring into adulthood from childhood we are not ready to take on the responsibilities of bringing up a child.’
Psychologists such as Alice Miller have been writing for decades about the harm done by such so-called legitimate childhood punishment. Her book Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries has received worldwide recognition. Other psychologists such as Gitta Sereny have made it clear that all children are born good and that ‘the offending child is a symbol of family – and more than that, of societal – breakdown.’
In 1999 E Thompson overviewed 88 studies which showed that physical punishment led to less compliance in children aged two to six. It caused increased aggression in the child, an aggression which remained when that child grew up. The smacked children had less ability to empathise with others and had more mental health problems than children who weren’t hit. They grew into adults who were more likely to hit their spouse and who had an increased probability of antisocial and criminal behaviour in adulthood.
Criminologist Lonnie Athens has written about why our value system wrongly believes that hitting is good and not hitting is bad. He says it stems from more warlike times when people believed that they had to toughen children up for when they went into battle. Ironically, corporal punishment in the home today continues to make children more warrior-like so that the violence goes on.
It should be clear to the open minded reader by now that adults hitting children is both wrong and damaging. Yet many of the people who champion or tolerate such violence against minors are the first to mock eroticised corporal punishment between consenting adults.
In reality, they are entirely different. The adult who hits a child does so to cause pain and distress, whereas the dominant adult who hits a willing submissive adult does so to invoke pleasure. The first is an abuse of power whereas the second is a consensual power exchange.
In his book Radical Desire which looks at fetishism, bondage and domination, author Mark Ramsden explains that ‘like most people with this sexuality, I have experienced much anguish along the way; partly because of the constraints imposed by the Christian religion and partly because of the myths propagated by the therapy industry.’ He adds that ‘Many otherwise liberal people still confuse S/M play with abuse. It is actually a reaction to abuse, an attempt to heal a deep wound.’
Many frequently-punished children end up with a sado-masochistic adult sexuality. No one knows exactly why this is, but perhaps children try to make sense of corporal punishment from supposedly caring parents by convincing themselves that this is a form of love. After all, they are frequently being told that it’s for their own good. Or maybe the beatings just happen to occur at the same time as the libido is awakening so that sexual stimulus and blows become confused.
Whatever the reason, the punished child grows into an adult who has erotic fantasies involving discipline. For the first time ever, he or she can take a hated act and turn it into something where the ultimate result – in the form of an orgasm – is good. It’s incredibly ironic that the adults who failed the child when he or she was being beaten now try to punish it again for its adult sexuality, calling it deviant or sick.
In truth, intelligent adult players in the BDSM (bondage, domination and sado-masochism) scene often go to great lengths to ensure that the only pain they offer is erotic. And anecdotal evidence suggests that these adults view spanking as an erotic act so they don’t hit their kids.
Consensual sado-masochism is a world away from criminal sadistic acts where one person terrorises the other and causes intense fear and unendurable pain.
Ironically, many unthinking adults will criticise the man or woman who canes their partner for joint sexual release. Yet these same adults will champion an adult caning a helpless child.
Broadcaster and writer Claire Rayner OBE has fought energetically for an end to such violence towards children. She also has a long term interest in crime and has written many crime novels. This author interviewed her on 24th January 2002 whilst researching Children Who Kill.
Claire said that she’d first become interested in the subject when she was a child. ‘I saw the way that adults lied and behaved towards children.’ In 1939, at the age of eight, she became a wartime evacuee and had a very unhappy time.
When she grew up she became a nurse at the Royal Northern Hospital in London then studied midwifery at Guy’s Hospital. She later became a Sister in the Paediatrics Department of the Whittington Hospital. Throughout her nursing career, she was appalled to see some of the nurses smacking sick children and she saw other children brought in with injuries caused by their parents. One night two little girls from different families were brought in dead, both killed by parental punishments that had gone too far.
Claire started to appear on radio programmes suggesting that parents shouldn’t hit their children but in those days almost everyone regarded her viewpoint as stupid. The general public and the media believed that if children weren’t beaten they would simply go wild.
But slowly the broadsheets started to come round to her way of thinking bolstered by the number of studies showing that it is children who are hit who have problems, not children from violence-free homes.
During these years she became well respected for her medical advice and published bestselling books on everything from sex education for children to home nursing. Everyone could see that her advice on a broad range of issues worked – yet many people still ignored her recommendations to stop hitting juveniles.
Asked why a significant percentage of the public is still in favour of smacking kids, Claire says it’s because it’s what they’re used to so they think it’s normal. So what would she say to those people who suggest that they were hit as children but that it didn’t do them any harm? ‘I’d tell them that you can’t know how much harm has been done to you,’ she says simply, adding that you can often see by such adult’s aggressiveness or depression that they have been damaged by their early experiences.
In 1996 she was given an OBE for her services to women’s issues and to health issues. In truth, she has done equally valid work to protect children. Yet it’s still an uphill struggle with one child per week in Britain dying at its parent’s hands.
Claire has never struck her own children, so they in turn have never struck their children. Asked which parenting guide she’d recommend she says The No Smacking Guide To Good Behaviour by Penelope Leach.
Penelope Leach is a childcare expert and research psychologist, the author of several bestselling parenting books and the writer of the aforementioned no smacking leaflet. The leaflet explains that ‘giving up smacking altogether doesn’t mean going soft on discipline’ and ‘children don’t get spoiled because parents are gentle and try to treat them as people.’ The leaflet stresses the importance of praising a child’s good behaviour rather than ignoring the child until it does something bad. (For details of how to obtain this free leaflet please see the Appendix at the end of this book.)
Penelope spoke at the Children Are Unbeatable conference in January 2002, noting that child-beating was rooted in the historical belief that children were the property of the father and his to do with as he wished. In other words, children were originally domestic slaves.
She noted that today our government protects a wife from her husband, but not a child from its parent. Our most vulnerable citizens have the least protection under the law.
She’s found that adults who were hit as children try to hide behind the mantra of protection, namely the belief that ‘it didn’t do me any harm.’ This comes about because children blame themselves for the violence rather than blaming their parents. It is easier – in the short term – to deny the emotional hurt caused by these blows.
Penelope said that being struck was not a trivial matter and that it affected the hurt children strongly, though not in the way that its parents desired. In other words, a naughty child that was smacked became naughtier. She’d found that the more educated the parent, the less likely he or she was to hit.
Penelope has found that some parents try to minimise the amount of physical pain they cause their children whereas in the USA and France parents thought they had a moral justification for hurting their young. Indeed, Arizona and Arkansas recently passed laws strengthening the parental right to hit a child.
But more and more people are turning to positive parenting. In 2001, the Open School Network – in partnership with Save The Children – produced a video called We Can Work It Out, subtitled Parenting With Confidence. The video is a before and after look at children who were parented with criticism then parented with praise.
During the criticism-based parenting, the children behaved exactly as the adults did. That is, if the parent shouted then the child shouted. If the parent pointed aggressively then the child pointed aggressively. The segment was called Copy Cats and explained how ‘much of our own behaviour determines the behaviour of our children.’
The parents then went on a parenting course and began to praise the good things that their children did rather than concentrating on the negative. The result was happier parents and more responsive children. Even parents with autistic children were helped as clinicians showed how to make a bedroom a pleasant place for an autistic child who had previously been very distressed when left in his room.
The video showed that children mainly felt fear when a parent was angry and that the child learned little or nothing from the verbal or physical assault. But when parents acknowledged their children’s good behaviour – even the little things – the entire family became happier.
Parents on such positive parenting courses find that they get results when they are loving and give praise – not when they shout and criticise and hit.
Slowly, the world is becoming aware that corporal punishment by parents promotes violence and constitutes an assault. Sweden was one of the first to ban smacking, doing so in 1979. They’ve subsequently seen impressive reductions in youth convictions for theft and for alcohol abuse. At the moment, over fifty children a year die in Britain at their parent’s hands and more than three thousand children a year die in America at their parents’ hands – but Sweden has only had one such death in the past seven years.
In 1983 Finland followed, as did Norway in 1987 and Austria in 1989. The nineties saw further strides towards abolition with Cyprus banning all corporal punishment in 1994, Latvia in 1998 and Croatia in 1999. Germany followed in 2000, for their research showed a clear link between hitting a child (which included even light smacking) and later adult violence. Italy, South Africa and Belgium have also made anti-corporal punishment statements that have yet to be confirmed in legislation. Sadly, both America and Britain still take a punitive stance.
Gavin de Becker, the survivor of a violent home, went on to establish a forty-six member agency which specialises in predicting violence. He has written that it is crucial that we stop mistreating children and view them ‘not as temporary visitors who will someday grow into citizens, but as fully fledged, fully contributing, fully entitled members of our society just as they are right now.’
Murray Strauss an expert on family violence has said ‘I want to see a national effort to help people avoid using physical punishment… 99% of the physical punishment that goes on, parents don’t want to hit their kids. They just feel it’s necessary for the child’s own good.’ He adds that most of these parents haven’t even considered alternative methodologies.
Strauss explains that when Sweden introduced a complete ban on smacking in 1979, three quarters of the population were against it. Nowadays, three quarters of Sweden’s population are in favour of the ban.
But we don’t have to wait for a change in the law before we create a non violent future. Adults who dare to recognise how their parents damaged them can avoid making the same mistakes.
Dorothy Rowe has written that though we may not be able to forgive such parents we can pity them ‘just as we can pity the child we once were, and so remember our past with sadness and mourning. Those of us who suffered in childhood, and most of us did, can never again live in total bliss, but it is better to live freely with sadness than to trap ourselves in denial and depression.’
Sadly, at the moment such depression is rife. More than seven thousand people in the UK commit suicide each year. That is, someone kills themselves every seventy-nine minutes. And one in four people will be deemed mentally ill at any one time. Depression is now so common that it often goes unremarked and we are becoming a Prozac nation. The UK anti-depressant market is valued at 600 million pounds, the second largest in the world. It’s no accident that both child abuse and subsequent adult depression are on the rise.
Paul Mones dedicates his book When A Child Kills ‘to all the children who suffer silently at the hands of their parents.’ He especially thanks those children he interviewed who have to read his words from the confines of their dimly lit cells.
Most of these children will eventually be freed and have their first chance of happiness – assuming they aren’t killed by enraged members of the public. Ironically these members of the public will make no connection between their own humiliating childhoods and their current aggressive stance. So misery is passed on from generation to generation, for as the philosopher Santayana said ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’