Texts about “evil children” have been on the rise since the 1950s and have become especially popular during the new millennium. To date, for example, I have identified over 600 films that feature an evil child of some kind; of those, almost 400 were made since the year 2000. 1 In the most famous of these works, like The Exorcist (1973) or The Omen (1976), the child villain is aided by supernatural forces. However, juvenile killers who murder without much motive and with even less remorse have also seized the cultural imagination at various times in our cultural history, especially from the mid-1980s to the end of the century. Films included The Boys Next Door (1985), Twisted (1986), Heathers (1988), Little Sweetheart (1989), Mikey (1992), Child of Rage (1992), Benny’s Video (1992), The Good Son (1993), Tainted Blood (1993), The Paper Boy (1994), Relative Fear (1994), and Daddy’s Girl (1996). The allure of the juvenile murderer was also reflected in a series of nonfiction books that appeared, including High Risk: Children Without a Conscience (1988), When Children Kill (1990), When a Child Kills (1991), Why Kids Kill Parents (1992), Killer Kids (1993), Children Who Kill (1996), Kids Who Kill (1997), Young Killers (1998), and Jack and Jill, Why They Kill (2000). Elayne Rapping has also noted the prominence of killer kids on television during this period, claiming that 59 juvenile homicide trials were “televised on Court TV and condensed into Crime Stories segments from 1997 to 1999” (230).
Today, we typically refer to these types of kids as “child psychopaths” or “child sociopaths,” even though technically those terms are oxymorons, at least according to the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM ), the fifth edition released in 2013. The DSM-V states that sociopathy and psychopathy are more casual terms for the manual’s formal category of antisocial personality disorder. The manual states, however, that “[f]or this diagnosis to be given, the individual must be at least 18 years”; children who display antisocial behaviors, including “aggression to people and animals, destruction of property, deceitfulness or theft, or serious violation of rules,” are diagnosed instead with a “conduct disorder,” a diagnosis that was first added to the third edition of the DSM in 1980. However, that distinction has not prevented the terms from becoming quite widely used today.
I employ the terms “child psychopath” and “child sociopath” interchangeably throughout this essay to refer to a certain type of fictional child—the remorseless, cold-blooded killer kid, who was popularized during the 1980s and 1990s, long before those terms became commonplace. 2 As I argue in this essay, fascination with the child psychopath emerged at the end of the twentieth century in direct response to various factors, including a dramatic increase in juvenile crime generally and several high-profile criminal cases involving children specifically. 3 Furthermore, interest in serial killers directed attention to the childhoods of such figures, especially after the popularization of the Macdonald triad, which held that various behavioral tendencies in childhood were predictive of later violence, often serial in nature. 4 Concerns about adopted children impacted the subgenre as well, especially fears generated by various adoption studies that appeared to point to biological causes for criminal behavior and reports of the high prevalence of attachment and other disorders among adoptees. Finally, anxiety about the child killer was also a side effect of the neoliberal politics fostered particularly by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Viewing crime as the product of deviant individuals rather than large-scale social problems, these conservative regimes advocated punitive measures rather than welfare programs.
In short, then, a nexus of cultural factors at the end of the twentieth century led to a proliferation of the figure of the “child psychopath” in a variety of popular texts, but nowhere more prominently than in film. These popular portrayals of the “child psychopath” in turn primed the public to believe that society was being invaded by “superpredators,” ultraviolent juvenile criminals who operated without remorse or conscience. Even though superpredators never made an appearance and juvenile crime was already declining by the time the term was coined, the widespread belief in their existence at the end of the twentieth century had profound repercussions on juvenile justice.
The Birth of the Child Psychopath
Child psychopath films of the 1980s–1990s were first and foremost responses to increases in juvenile crime during the period and to perceptions about the reasons for and details of that increase. According to Jeffrey Butts and Jeremy Travis, “juvenile arrests for murder shot up 167 percent between 1984 and 1993 alone, from a rate of 5 arrests per 100,000 juveniles to 14 per 100,000” (2). Moreover, media coverage of juvenile crime was vastly disproportionate to the number of crimes actually being committed, giving the impression that it was much more common than it actually was. For example, in their analysis of reported homicides in Newark, New Jersey, between 1997 and 2004, Jesenia M. Pizarro, Steven M. Chermak, and Jeffrey A. Gruenewald demonstrated that “the media give much more attention to homicides involving younger suspects” (101). 5 The younger the offender and the more violent the crime, the more likely the story would be covered—a trend that continues today.
Coverage of juvenile crime is also affected by the race of the offenders, but in ways that may be unexpected. Research has revealed that violent crimes committed by white, middle-class, suburban, and very young children are given much more news time. The reason for this, however, is entrenched in racist assumptions. As scholars have pointed out, the media presents a very skewed view of crime by choosing to give more attention to shocking and unusual offenses. Brooke Barnett writes, “[J]ournalists typically weigh how much a given crime deviates from the norm in deciding how much coverage it gets. … [S]tatistically speaking, unlikely victims or perpetrators, unusual methods, or sympathetic victims receive more coverage than ‘status quo’ criminal events” (373). This is the reason why juvenile crime as a whole, and juvenile crime committed specifically by white offenders, are overreported. 6 The presumption is that crimes committed by white children are especially unusual and worthy of deeper investigation. As Elayne Rapping puts it, “[W]hile it is certainly true that blacks generally, and poor black youths in particular, are the paradigmatic media symbol for the ‘problem’ of ‘crime’ in America, it is the very ubiquitousness of this image and its meaning, its ‘taken for grantedness,’ that makes it less ‘newsworthy’” (224). Films about child psychopaths during the 1980s and 1990s show a similar bias in that they focus almost exclusively on white, middle- or upper-middle-class, suburban families.
The attention given to child psychopaths at the end of the twentieth century was also likely the result of a growing interest in adult serial killers; as Peter Hutchings writes, “[T]he serial killer is the 1980s movie monster par excellence ” (91). According to a report on the FBI website entitled “Serial Murder: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators,” during the 1970s and 1980s, “serial murder cases such as the Green River Killer, Ted Bundy, and BTK sparked a renewed public interest in serial murder, which blossomed in the late 1990s after the release of films such as Silence of the Lambs .” Philip Jenkins also notes the boom in attention to serial killers leading up to this era in Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide ; he points out, for example, that “[b]oth in fiction and in true crime, there were considerably more publications in the three years from 1991 through 1993 than in the 1960s and 1970s combined” (2). Because it was believed that one could detect the signs of a budding serial killer during childhood, a logical next step was “to extend the construct of psychopathy to youth,” a trend which Randall T. Salekin and Paul J. Frick claim was beginning in the 1990s (404). 7 The tagline for the 1992 film Mikey —“Remember, Jason and Freddy were kids once, too”—directly plays on this belief by linking its child killer to the popular villains of the slasher films Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street .
Since so many of the child sociopath films of this era focus on children who have inherited violent tendencies, contemporary studies of the heritability of antisocial traits likely also served as an influence. In their 1998 study of criminology textbooks, Richard A. Wright and J. Mitchell Miller discovered that “biological perspectives have experienced a major resurgence in the last two decades” (14) and noted that the most recent textbooks were the most favorable toward theories that championed nature over nurture; since they were writing in the late 1990s, their study suggests that the era that saw the birth of the child psychopath was positively predisposed to biological explanations of his or her origins. Twin/adoption studies were especially responsible for renewing interest in biological approaches to crime at this time. Deborah Blum claimed in 1995, “Twin studies, building through the 1970s and 1980s, helped reshape behavioral science” and “get universal credit for pushing psychology away from the belief that environment alone shapes humanity” (A16). Jay Joseph describes the research that was so influential as including “two major Scandinavian criminal twin studies … published in the 1970s” (283): a 1984 Danish Adoptees’ Family criminality study (295), and “the publication of the Minnesota reared-apart twin results in Science ” at the beginning of the 1990s (65). The media often reported the most sensational findings of these studies, such as the remarkable similarities between Jim Lewis and Jim Springer, identical twins separated when they were only four weeks old who, as adults, both “smoked Salems, chewed their fingernails, suffered from tension headaches, vacationed on the same Florida beach, and had twice married women with the same first name (Linda and Betty)—without ever having met” (Segal 10). Such articles implied that genetics was far more important than environment in determining personality and behavior. The child psychopath film typically relies on a similar belief, that violence bred in the bone is so powerful as to be resistant or immune to environmental influences.
Relative Fear (1994) plays on fears about the inheritability of violence but instead presents genetics rather than abuse as the vehicle that transmits aggressive tendencies from parent to child, regardless of the household in which the child is reared. In this film, Linda and Peter Pratman have an autistic son, Adam. Not only is Adam largely disconnected from the world, but, due to his disorder, he frequently becomes the target of cruelty from children his own age, from the housekeeper who believes that he simply needs a good spanking, and from his own grandfather, who at one point calls him “as dumb as a rock.” A cluster of deaths occurs in the Pratman house, and Adam is always found at the scene of the crime. A neighborhood boy is shot in the head after showing Adam a loaded gun, Adam’s grandfather dies when someone disconnects his oxygen, and the housekeeper is killed when the dumb waiter—on which Adam is known to frequently play—suddenly slams down onto her head. Adam’s presence at every death brings him under suspicion, and his “strange” behavior, which includes complete muteness and obsessive predilection for the National Murder Network, only deepens the misgivings that other characters and the viewer have about him. When Linda discovers that another baby was born in the same hospital at the same time she delivered and that both of that child’s parents were violent criminals, she becomes convinced that her child was switched at birth and is now living in an orphanage under the name Henry and that Adam is really a dangerous little boy following in the footsteps of his parents. The ending confirms that Linda is somewhat correct: Adam is likely the sire of criminal parents, but he is not responsible for the deaths that occurred around him. His biological father—who had been posing as the child’s occupational therapist—is the real murderer. The film thus functions as a narrative exploration of whether a child with a genetic predisposition to criminality (problematically associated with autism) will become a criminal if raised in a “good” environment. 8
Initially, the film seems to champion nurture over nature. After all, Adam willingly exposes his biological father to his adoptive mother, Linda. Adam speaks his first word, “Mommy,” just before he shoots his biological father, who is strangling Linda. The suggestion is that filial loyalty is the fruit of one’s love and not simply of one’s loins. At the end of the movie, the Pratts have adopted Henry as well, and the two boys are seen playing happily together. However, when Henry approaches Adam with a long stick, declaring, “I’m King Arthur, and this is Excalibur. En garde . Come on, Adam, get a stick,” Adam picks up a much smaller piece of wood, points it at Henry, and says, “Bang, you’re dead,” hinting that he may well be predisposed to violence after all. While this scene might have been included simply to give the film a more dramatic, cliffhanger ending, its effect is to cast doubt on Adam’s innocence and, in turn, on the viability of the adopted child whose genetics may prove beyond the help of the upper-class home.
Like so many of these films, Relative Fear is clearly interested in exploring which force is more powerful, nature or nurture. However, rather than choosing a switched-at-birth plot, most child psychopath films tackle this debate via the stories of adopted children who carry a predisposition for crime into their new, pristine homes. Like Relative Fear , most films remain silent about which factor is stronger, nature or nurture, because the children often appear to have both faulty genetics and an early history of abuse. However, the films are unambiguous in their defense of the white, upper-class, suburban family. If juvenile crime infiltrated these neighborhoods, it was only because they had generously but naively tried to care for the children of lower-class failed families.
Adoption was a particularly topical issue during this period anyway. Although adoption rates had already reached an all-time high around the 1970s, “the share of unrelated adoption in total adoptions” rose during the 1990s due to increases in inter-country and foster-care adoptions. 9 Both formal research and the informal reports of adoptive parents revealed that a high number of these adoptees, particularly older children who had spent time in orphanages or other institutions, suffered from various attachment disorders, especially Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). Initially added to the DSM III in 1980, the same edition that first included the childhood psychopathologies of conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder, the definition of RAD was refined for the 1994 edition to “markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness in most contexts” (qtd. in Zeanah, Boris, and Lieberman 295). Its cause was neglect and abuse.
The association of RAD with adoptees has been hotly debated. In her 2004 dissertation “Forging Family, Fixing Family: Adoption and the Cultural Politics of Reactive Attachment Disorder,” Rachael Joan Stryker, for example, claims that diagnoses of RAD may result from conflicts between idealized beliefs in what adoption will bring versus its actual reality. Stryker argues that adoptees are expected to happily integrate into the family and thereby prove the adoptive family’s worthiness; when the children fail to do so, they are often assigned responsibility via a RAD diagnosis. Stryker claims that “adoptees are ultimately called upon to assert the family as a body and to express appreciation for parents’ offering of the family. Adoptees are also expected to replicate particular, modern forms of family” (6). Stryker also believes that adoption agencies are to blame. The agents’ reliance on medical discourse “encourage[s] parents to place the onus of post-placement problems on children, decreasing the chance that parents will accept their own complicity” (46). Lynda Ross has also found RAD diagnoses problematic in that they “undermine the need for economic reform while privileging socially constructed notions of normality that decrease tolerance for individual differences” (51). In addition, she points out that “[w]hile deprivation is a serious social issue, it is not one effectively addressed by pathologizing those behaviours that occur as a result of the deprivation” (54). Ross proposes that the cluster of problematic behaviors associated with RAD could be seen as “adaptive responses to intolerable social and economic conditions” (56) instead of signs of a mental disorder. For these reasons, some scholars proposed alternatives, such as “Adopted Child Syndrome,” coined by David Kirschner and first used as a legal defense in 1986, or what Betty Jean Lifton called “cumulative adoption trauma” in Journey of the Adopted Self , published in 1994. Giving startling statistics, such as the high number of serial killers who were adoptees or that adoptees are 15–20 times more likely to murder their parents, such scholars hoped to call attention to the fact that any adoption could be a potentially traumatic experience for a child and therefore deserved to be treated as a therapeutic issue. 10
In the media, however, it was simply the sensational stories about violent adoptees that made the headlines. Charles Zeanah notes, for example, that popular accounts of children with RAD typically include “a strong emphasis on externalizing behaviors (e.g. defiant, aggressive, self-abusive behaviors) and angry affect. … The emphasis on aggressive, externalizing symptomatology is somewhat reminiscent of accounts of the ‘affectionless psychopath,’ a description from the 1940s and 1950s of institutionalized children who exhibited a pattern of antisocial and aggressive behavior” (232). In fact, fears of what Stryker calls “RAD Kids” were so widespread that she believes they constituted a moral panic (“Violent Children and Structural Violence”). Not only RAD Kids but adoptees in general were presented as dangerous. In her article “The Symbolic Crises of Adoption: Popular Media’s Agenda Setting,” Beth Waggenspack makes clear how negatively adoption was portrayed in the media during this period. She claims that a survey of articles published in major newspapers between January and July 1997 revealed “more than a 2:1 representation of negative outcomes of adoption,” while a survey of national broadcast news media programing from January 1992 to July 1997 described stories that featured, among other topics, “medical ‘horror’ stories of unwitting families adopting unsalvageable children” and “murderous adoptees” (63, 64). Waggenspack points as evidence to a 1995 episode of The Maury Povich Show entitled “Adoption Horror Stories,” in which one guest stated, “Adopt knowing that you may be getting a potential Charles Manson” (73, 75). 11
Many child psychopath films of the 1980s and 1990s are guilty of similar problems in their presentation of adopted children. These films may tip their hat to the idea that juvenile violence arises when children are neglected and abused. However, the disgust and outrage caused by the violence these children commit ultimately supersedes any sympathy that might have been generated by allusions to the unfortunate circumstances of their early childhood. The HBO documentary Child of Rage (1990) and its fictional adaptation are one exception. The documentary proclaims to be about “children so traumatized in the first years of life that they do not bond with other people. They are children who cannot love or accept love—children without conscience who can hurt or even kill without remorse.” The film focuses on just one example, a six-year-old girl, Beth, who displays violent tendencies due, the documentary explains, to the severe neglect and physical and sexual abuse she suffered as a very young child. Beth’s adoptive parents, who came to care for her and her brother, Jonathan, at nineteen months and seven months, respectively, were told that both were normal and healthy, but Beth’s dangerous behavior soon led them to seek professional help. The half-hour documentary primarily shows footage of Beth openly describing not only the abuse she suffered but also her desire to kill her family and the acts of violence she had already committed; the image of a pretty little girl with big blue eyes admitting her desire to stab her parents to death was surely part of the film’s shock appeal. However, the documentary does end on a positive note, with an older Beth seeming to have made great progress due to her therapy. Beth’s story inspired a movie, also entitled Child of Rage , which aired on television in 1992. In the film, we witness the Beth character, renamed Catherine or Cat, carrying out many of the acts of violence that Beth admitted to in the documentary. However, the film ultimately paints Cat as far more of a victim than villain. Several times we witness Cat tormented by nightmares that feature her father entering her bedroom before sexually abusing her. In addition, because the film, like the documentary, focuses on how treatment eventually improves Cat’s condition, it suggests that her violence is a temporary response to her abuse rather than evidence of a fundamental lack of empathy or conscience.
Child of Rage sourced the violence committed by the child to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her biological parents. 12 However, horror thrillers that followed mention abuse as an explanatory but not an exculpating device. The child psychopath’s abusive background is quickly mentioned and then sidelined to leave more room for graphic depictions of the violence he or she commits, which rapidly become so appalling that the child becomes difficult to forgive despite his or her early suffering. Furthermore, while both versions of Child of Rage focus on therapy as an effective means of dealing with the blossoming psychopath, most films that followed dispense with the possibility of reform altogether. Obviously, part of the reason is that, as horror films, these narratives naturally favor the haunting triumph of “evil”; creating sympathy for the child villain would unnecessarily complicate their ability to generate disgust and terror and our desire for the child villain’s downfall.
Mikey , for example, begins by showing a young boy murdering his entire family in cold blood: after knocking his younger sister into a pool and watching her drown, he then electrocutes his mother while she is in the bathtub. When his father comes home and finds his daughter floating in the pool, he runs toward her and slips on some ball bearings Mikey has deliberately laid out for just this purpose. The father crashes through a glass door, and Mikey then bludgeons him to death with a baseball bat. When the cops arrive, Mikey is found innocently ensconced in a closet, pretending to have hidden there while intruders murdered his family. Mikey is then adopted by Rachel and Neil Trenton. During his time with them, he kills another five people, including the both of them, and destroys the family home in a fiery explosion, faking his own death in the process. At the end of the film, we see Mikey being adopted into another unwitting family, where he is sure to continue his homicidal habits.
Although one of Mikey’s relatives rather offhandedly reveals that Mikey was “abused or something” by his biological parents, the after-effects of the abuse he suffered are given very little attention. The only time the subject even seems to come up is when Rachel, who specializes in high-end aquariums, sells the baby fish that Mikey has been caring for, which upsets him greatly. It is likely that we are meant to see Mikey’s excessive emotional response as a sign of his fear of abandonment. Otherwise, however, Mikey hardly seems haunted by his abusive past. Indeed, it is difficult to see the boy as anything other than coldly calculating because he exhibits little emotion other than developing a very obsessive crush on the teenage girl next door, which leads him to kill her boyfriend and record the whole thing on his video camera. Later, his mother discovers him watching the tape and reliving his kill. When she shakily asks him what he is doing, he responds that he is “watching Mikey’s funniest home videos.” Mikey is clearly an antagonist against whom we are meant to root. Although he is declared a victim of abuse, his past is not used as a mechanism by which to build sympathy. Instead, he is portrayed as enjoying the acts of violence he commits, even when they are perpetrated against those closest to him.
Daddy’s Girl (1996) also plays upon fears of adopted children and minimizes the extent to which a child’s early traumatic experiences should earn sympathy. In this film, parents Don and Barbara have only recently adopted eleven-year-old Jody. Like Mikey, Jody is also assigned an abusive past. Specifically, we learn that she saw her mother kill her father when she was only four years old. The traumatic event appears to have had some direct psychological repercussions on Jody, making her especially possessive and protective of her father; most of the murders she commits are done to ensure that she is not separated from him. However, as in Mikey , Jody’s abusive past is not employed to ameliorate our judgments of her behavior. Rather than a vulnerable victim, she comes across as merely conniving and cruel. The series of one-liners she delivers upon striking her fatal blows eradicate any sympathy we may feel for her. “You know, most accidents really do happen at home,” Jody says after pushing her adoptive grandmother down the stairs. “Divorce this,” she declares after hitting a friend of her mother who, as an attorney, was planning to help her separate from Jody’s adoptive father. “Now you’re dead meat,” she tells an unconscious social worker after striking him with a tenderizing mallet. Although a victim of trauma, Jody treats violence like a game, and the film in turn ends up presenting the traumatized child as a subject of campy spectacle rather than serious study.
The Paper Boy (1994) similarly traces a violent youth’s behavior back to abuse suffered in childhood. Initially, Johnny, the very troubled boy at the center of the story, simply seems like your run-of-the-mill psychopath; the movie begins with him suffocating an elderly female neighbor with a plastic bag and then flippantly thanking her for the cookie he takes on his way out. However, we soon discover that Johnny suffered emotional and physical abuse from his mother while she was alive, which his father did nothing to prevent. Johnny therefore took matters into his own hands and pushed his mother down the stairs, causing her death. He murders his elderly neighbor at the beginning of the movie in order to force the woman’s daughter, Melissa, to return home so that he can adopt her as his new mother. In his attempts to hide his true character, he kills or attempts to kill another four people.
Some scenes do remind us of the abuse Johnny has suffered and its connection to his violent behavior. For example, at one point, he chastises himself for being a “[d]umb boy” and shouts out that “God hates stupid children,” clearly repeating the words of his mother. In another scene, he yells that he doesn’t “want to be a bad boy.” However, for the most part, Johnny comes across as an obsessive, manipulative, and remorseless young man, especially at the film’s conclusion, when, arrested for his crimes, he yells from the backseat of the police car, “I’m a kid! You can’t touch me!” If previous scenes suggested that Johnny’s behavior is an uncontrollable manifestation of his mental illness, these lines imply that he has a far deeper understanding of right and wrong and simply believes he is above the law because of his young age.
Johnny’s belief that his status as a juvenile means he is untouchable taps into a prevalent fear of the time—namely, that defense attorneys were beginning to use the “abuse excuse” to secure not guilty verdicts for people who deserved to be punished. Alan Dershowitz is credited with coining the term, and, as the title of his 1994 book The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility makes clear, his position on it as a legal defense was hardly positive. Rapping explains, “Not only did the so-called abuse excuse fail to convince, but it became an increasingly unpopular defense in general. … Notions of illness and treatment have increasingly given way, in both the courts and the media, to theories of innate evil and the increasing monstrousness of youth” (228). Films such as Mikey, Daddy’s Girl , and The Paper Boy similarly sneer at the idea that abuse is an adequate explanation for murder, even murders committed by young children.
Child sociopath films also provided subtle support for the contemporaneous neoliberal politics surrounding juvenile justice that emphasized individual rather than social responsibility and disciplinary rather than rehabilitative responses. As Joseph argues, a belief in the biological origins of criminality was also entirely in line with the politics of the time in the USA: “The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the subsequent cutbacks in social programs, were aided by a belief that social problems were the result of biology, as opposed to unequal income distribution, racism, unemployment, etc.” (64). Likewise, changes in the UK, under the leadership of Thatcher, “represented a move away from treatment and lack of personal responsibility to notions of punishment and individual and parental responsibility … from the ‘child in need’ to the juvenile criminal” (Gelsthrope and Morris 972; qtd. in Newburn 65). 13 One of the most evident ways in which these political attitudes prevailed is in emphasizing the “evilness” of individual juvenile criminals while downplaying the impact of structural changes, such as cuts to social programs, an economic recession, and the availability of guns, on juvenile crime rates. 14 These politics are echoed in the child psychopath films of the period, which portray their child villains as simply evil and beyond the possibility of redemption.
The most famous film of the era, The Good Son (1993), offers the bleakest view, imagining that psychopaths can be born to the most “normal” of parents and in the most loving and privileged of environments. The tagline even hints that this is the message: “In a quiet town … In a comfortable home … In a perfect body … Evil can be as close as someone you love.” The film brings together two boys, the angelic-looking Henry (Macaulay Culkin) and his cousin, the troubled Mark (Elijah Wood), who has recently lost his mother. Mark quickly realizes how dangerous Henry is after witnessing his escalating violence. Henry not only kills a dog with a self-made weapon and causes a major multicar accident by dropping a mannequin off a bridge into traffic, but also attempts to murder his sister and his mother. We discover, too, that Henry’s violent behavior did not begin with Mark’s arrival but actually dates to much earlier in his life, for Henry is responsible for drowning his baby brother, Richard. That act seems to have been partially motivated by jealousy—when his mother finds Richard’s rubber ducky in Henry’s things, a toy that Richard was playing with when he drowned, Henry coldly states, “It was mine before it was his.” However, the murder seems to have been as much an act of callous curiosity, for he tells Mark that he has a scientific interest in death and that he therefore “took a real good look when [his] kid brother Richard drowned in the bathtub. … He was completely blue.”
At first, only Mark knows about Henry’s violent acts, but as the film progresses, Henry’s mother—Mark’s aunt—begins to suspect her son as well. The final scene of the film finds her lying on the edge of a cliff, hanging onto each boy with one hand. Aware that she cannot save them both, she chooses to let Henry, her biological son, fall to his death. The Good Son therefore literalizes Rapping’s claim that “[w]hat we see in these typical late 1980s and 1990s movies is a significant shift in television’s portrayal of troubled kids and—more significantly—in its message to parents about how to respond to such problems. No more the hopeful turn to therapy. … We must, they tell us, … simply give up on them and let them go” (223).
By the end of the twentieth century, concern about cold-blooded juvenile offenders developed into a full-blown moral panic. First defined by Stanley Cohen in the early 1970s, a moral panic is, simply put, a “situation in which public fears and state interventions greatly exceed the objective threat posed to society by a particular group that is claimed to be responsible for the condition” (Bonn 5). This is exactly what happened around 1996, when a panic emerged around the so-called “superpredator,” a term coined by Princeton political scientist John J. Dilulio in a November 1995 article for The Weekly Standard . Dilulio described superpredators as “perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons.” If the idea of superpredators wasn’t frightening enough, Dilulio warned that they would be arriving in droves. He predicted that “by the year 2010, there [would] be approximately 270,000 more juvenile superpredators on the streets than there were in 1990.” Other experts repeated Dilulio’s dramatic rhetoric and figures. One predicted that by the year 2000, there would be “thirty thousand more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now. Get ready” (qtd. in Howell 4). Others warned of “a bloodbath of teenage violence lurking in the future” (Zoglin) or declared the crime wave would be “‘Lord of the Flies’ on a massive scale” (“Superpredators Arrive”). 15
These scare tactics were effective. Haberman claims, “It energized a movement, as one state after another enacted laws making it possible to try children as young as 13 or 14 as adults.” To be fair, however, the superpredator panic cannot be blamed entirely for the new “get tough” policies on juvenile crime, for laws had begun to change before then, as Ronald Burns and Charles Crawford point out. 16 Even an article titled “The Superpredator Myth, 20 Years Later,” located on the Equal Justice Initiative’s website, notes that the increased “treatment of juveniles as adults for purposes of sentencing and punishment” began as early as 1992. However, the superpredator myth was embraced so widely that in 2001 the Surgeon General had to “release[] a report in which he declared the ‘superpredator’ theory a myth, finding that ‘there is no evidence that the young people involved in violence during the peak years of the early 1990s were more frequent or more vicious offenders than youth in earlier years’” (Tanenhouse and Drizin 643).
Important to the success of any moral panic is priming, “a psychological process whereby the news media emphasis on a particular issue not only increases the salience of the issue on the public agenda, but also activates previously acquired information about that issue in people’s memories” (Bonn 23–24). During the 1980s and 1990s, not only the news media but popular film gave the impression that the child psychopath was invading the happy, white, suburban home. Child psychopath films supplied a whole set of characters who easily fit the superpredator profile long before it was named; all that was needed was for a few experts to put their stamp of approval on the supposed epidemic of juvenile violence.
The Rebirth of the Child Psychopath
Today, the story of the superpredator epidemic that never came to be has become the subject of a series of articles critiquing the irresponsibility of both media and experts in contributing to a moral panic, such as Haberman’s April 2014 New York Times piece entitled “When Youth Violence Spurred ‘Superpredator’ Fear.” In addition, several documentaries have interviewed the experts most responsible for spreading the fear, who now admit their mistake. But before we dismiss the superpredator panic as the unfortunate mistake of a far less informed past generation, we should carefully examine our current culture because a new form of the superpredator is emerging today. The child psychopath has been reborn, this time not only in fiction but also, according to numerous news reports, in the everyday home. We can find the figure in films like Them (2006), Joshua (2007), Home Movie (2008), The Strangers (2008), Eden Lake (2008), Horseman (2009), Rosewood Lane (2011), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Every Secret Thing (2014), and The Boy (2015). In addition, various crime fiction writers—Gillian Flynn, Tana French, Jodi Picoult, and Jonathan Kellerman among them—have taken up the topic as well. Such children are also ever-present in television crime shows, too, appearing in Law and Order: SVU and Criminal Minds . There’s even a reality show entitled Killer Kids (2012–).
However, what is distinctive about today’s child psychopath is that he or she is far more prevalent in the real world, cropping up in even the most “normal” of households, at least according to a large number of newspaper and magazine articles on the topic: “Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?” (New York Times , 2012), “Is Your Child a Psychopath?” (Daily Mail , 2012), “9-Year-Old Psychopath” (Huffington Post , 2012), “The Sociopathic Child: Myths, Parenting Tips, What to Do” (Psychology Today , 2014), “Can a Child be a Psychopath?” (Newsweek , 2015), and “Is Your Child Becoming a Psychopath?” (U.S. News , 2016). 17 Part of the reason is that in the cultural imagination, psychopaths have shifted from dangerous strangers to somewhat attractive familiars. Books like The Sociopath Next Door (2005), The Psychopath Test (2011), Why We Love Sociopaths (2012), The Wisdom of Psychopaths (2012), The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain (2013), Confessions of a Sociopath (2014), and The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success (2014) have increasingly familiarized and humanized the psychopath, suggesting their ubiquity and even appeal. Fictional psychopaths like Dexter, Hannibal, and Walter White have become some of the most popular characters on television, and recent horror remakes of prominent slasher films, such as Black Christmas (2006), Halloween (2007), Prom Night (2008), Friday the Thirteenth (2009), My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009), and Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), allow viewers to get to know their central serial killers more intimately, often treating them more like protagonists than villains. Ryan Lizardi notes, in fact, that it is “the expansion of the main villain’s backstory” that distinguishes the slasher remake from its original (126).
The child psychopath of this millennium is also appearing at a time when views of psychopaths and juvenile crime have dramatically changed. Juvenile crime is at a thirty-year low. Furthermore, recent legal changes would suggest that the courts now recognize, officially at least, a difference between juvenile and adult offenders. Supreme Court decisions Roper v. Simmons (2005), Graham v. Florida (2010), and Miller v. Alabama (2012) respectively ruled unconstitutional the death penalty, life without parole for non-homicidal crimes, and mandatory life without parole for juvenile offenders, suggesting that the crimes committed by youth deserve different treatment than those committed by adults. Furthermore, a variety of polls have shown that the public largely views the juvenile criminal as deserving rehabilitative treatment, even if it would cost them more in taxes. 18
As a result, the behaviors of supposedly disorderly children have been increasingly treated as medical problems. On the one hand, this change in approach to troubling juvenile behavior is simply part of the ongoing and broader medicalization of society, according to critics like Peter Conrad and Thomas Szasz. 19 However, as both Conrad and Szasz have argued, children may be particularly vulnerable to medicalization due to their lack of power as minors, 20 and now that legal responses to juvenile crime have been curtailed, it makes sense that they would be even more subject to medicalization as an alternative form of social control. Although medicalization can have some positive effects, such as allowing for treatment to be covered by insurance companies, it can also have many negative repercussions, including “domination by experts, individualization of social problems, depoliticization of behavior, [and] dislocation of responsibility” (Conrad, “Medicalization and Social Control,” 223) and in future might even result in disturbing forms of gene therapy (Conrad, “Medicalization, Genetics, and Human Problems”). The medicalization of child psychopathy, in other words, could result in biomedical measures that repeat the worst parts of the punitive turn in juvenile justice that took place during the 1980s and 1990s, but with its problems hidden behind the altruistic mask of “treatment.”
Conclusion
The cinematic “child psychopath” rose to prominence at the end of the twentieth century in response to a variety of cultural influences—rising concerns about juvenile crime; increases in intercountry and foster-care adoptions; and studies that suggested that these adopted children would import genetic inadequacies into the upper-class, white families who took them in. Furthermore, the punitive responses to crime favored by the political regimes that were in power at the time seemed more logical if they coincided with beliefs that criminality was an inherited condition that could not be combatted by social reform policies—or the “reform” that could be provided by the finest families in the USA. The child psychopath who has reappeared in recent years remains a creature of nature but is no longer seen as the offspring of the Other. No longer an anomaly, child psychopaths can be born to anyone, their disorder a sort of pre-existing condition requiring treatment not punishment. Over the past 30 years, then, the child psychopath narrative has thus proven responsive not only to fluctuations in family demographics and attitudes toward the criminal but also to the larger political climate and its approaches toward crime.
Notes
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1.
A list of these can be found in my Evil Children in the Popular Imagination (2016).
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2.
As Ronald T. Salekin and Donald R. Lynam point out in their introduction to the Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychopathy (2010), a search of PsycINFO cross-referencing psychopathy with several key terms, such as “child,” “adolescent,” “juvenile,” and “youth,” reveals only about ten articles for the years between 1978 and 1990. Using the same search from 1994 reveals 872 articles, over half of which were published since the beginning of 2003 (1–2).
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3.
In 1983, Cindy Collier (15) and Shirley Wolf (14) stabbed 85-year-old Anna Brackett to death. Shirley infamously wrote about the incident in her diary, stating, “Today, Cindy and I ran away and killed an old lady. It was lots of fun.” That diary entry would inspire the title of the 1994 film based on their crimes, Fun . Perhaps most noteworthy were the murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-olds, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, and the murder of four-year-old Derrick Robie by thirteen-year-old Eric Smith, both committed in 1993.
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4.
In a 1963 article published in The American Journal of Psychiatry , John Macdonald held that fire-setting, cruelty to animals, and enuresis (bed-wetting beyond an expected age) were indicators of “very sadistic patients” (126). Although the predictive abilities of the Macdonald triad have been frequently questioned, it continues to inform a great number of texts, particularly Law and Order: Special Victims Unit . For a list of episodes that refer to the Macdonald triad, see my introduction to The “Evil Child” in Literature, Film and Popular Culture (2013) (23, n. 12).
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5.
In a study of television news, for example, Danilo Yanich found that in the spring of 1998, the “proportion of KidsCrime homicide stories in the newscasts was 500 times higher than the proportion of homicide arrests for juveniles or adults in official statistics” (129). Another study conducted in the 1990s revealed that “94% of the stories about youth crime appearing in a sample of Toronto newspapers involved violent offenses while at the same time fewer than 22% of all youth court charges were for crimes of violence” (Shepherd 693).
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6.
In their study of newspaper coverage of juvenile homicides in two major Chicago newspapers from 1992 to 2000, John G. Boulahanis and Martha J. Heltsley found that “Caucasian offenders received disproportionately higher coverage than did African Americans and Latinos. More than 59% of the cases involving Caucasian offenders received newspaper coverage, compared to roughly 21% and 17% of the cases involving African American and Latino offenders, respectively” (145). Likewise, in their analysis of reported homicides in Newark, New Jersey, between 1997 and 2004, Jesenia M. Pizarro, Steven M. Chermak, and Jeffrey A. Gruenewald demonstrated that “homicides with black suspects were significantly less likely to be covered when compared to those with non-black suspects” (104).
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7.
Jennifer Kahn, however, argues that the tendency began much earlier with research conducted by Lee Robins in the 1970s, which suggested that “nearly every psychopathic adult was deeply antisocial as a child.”
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8.
For a discussion of the film’s portrayal of autism and its relationship to other “autistic thrillers” of the time period, see Foss.
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9.
See Bernal et al.
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10.
See David Kirschner’s “The Adopted Child Syndrome: Considerations for Psychotherapy” and “The Antisocial Tendency” in Betty Jean Lifton’s Journey of the Adopted Self (1994) (88–108).
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11.
Not all of the negative stereotypes of adoption were framed as horror stories. Christine Gailey sees them as informing two comedies that came out in the early 1990s, Problem Child (1990) and Problem Child 2 (1991). She writes, “The timing [of these films] coincided with a series of exposés in the newspapers regarding older children adopted from Romanian orphanages and the attachment disorders that adoptive parents began to identify among these post-institutionalized children” (82).
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12.
Other films, like Twisted (1986) and the German movie Benny’s Video (1992), also pointed the finger of blame at dysfunctional, upper-class parents who were still the guardians of their murderous offspring, but their crimes were far less serious. In Twisted , the mother is shamelessly cheating on her husband, who is an alcoholic. In Benny’s Video , the parents are almost entirely absent from their son’s life and cover up the murder he commits when he reveals it to them with barely a word to him or each other.
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13.
Crime in the UK did actually drop during this period, but Newburn notes that other factors could have been at play, including “a 17 per cent decline in the number of males in the 14–16 age group between 1981–88” (65). As Newburn points out, the Association of Chief Police Officers “challenged the view that there had been a decline in juvenile offending during the 1980s. They argued that given the decline in the juvenile population, the increase in crime more generally, and the generally reduced rate of detection, the period from 1980 to 1990 had in fact witnessed a 54 per cent rise in juvenile crime” (71).
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14.
Peter Elikann, for example, notes that “gun murders quadrupled during that period [from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s] while juvenile murders by all other weapons did not increase one iota” (9).
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15.
See Hancock for further details about the rhetoric surrounding the superpredator.
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16.
They write that “under toughened laws that have become increasingly popular since the 1980s, all 50 states and the federal government allow juveniles to be tried as adults” and that states began to “change[] their laws to make it easier to prosecute juveniles as adults” as early as 1994 (164).
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17.
The trend was predicted by an especially prescient Onion parody entitled “New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths.”
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18.
See the National Juvenile Justice Network’s “Polling on Public Attitudes about the Treatment of Young Offenders” at: http://www.pendulumfoundation.com/Polling%20on%20Public%20Attitudes.pdf and “Public Opinion on Juvenile Justice in America” at: http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2014/12/public-opinion-on-juvenile-justice-in-america .
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19.
See, for example, Szasz’s Cruel Compassion (1994), Conrad and Schneider’s Deviance and Medicalization (1980), and Conrad’s The Medicalization of Society (2007).
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20.
Conrad argues that because children are not believed to be capable of willful “badness,” their behavior is more likely to be medicalized; see Deviance and Medicalization (169–170). Szasz is far more extreme in his criticism of the medicalization of juvenile behavior, claiming, “A child’s mental illness is simply behavior that upsets the adults who have legal authority and power to define and control him” (70). See also Sam Timimi’s Pathological Child Psychiatry and the Medicalization of Childhood (2002) and Valerie Harwood’s Diagnosing “Disorderly” Children (2006).