Detecting the Potential for Violence
Jane F. Gilgun
Copyright 2012 by Jane F. Gilgun
About the Author
Summary
This article presents an assessment that helps professionals detect the potential for violence. The assessment is balanced and looks at both risks and protective factors. Rather than having a zero tolerance policy where a single risk can get a child expelled, this assessment looks at the whole child, especially the factors that show the child is at low risk to act out in violent ways.
Detecting the Potential for Violence
Persons who have to decide about the levels of risk for violent behaviors must look at a wide range of factors. The following is a framework for assessing the potential for violence. The framework covers five areas:
____One: precipitating events,
____Two: patterns of direct statements,
____Three: circumstances that increase the likelihood of violence,
____Four: signs of cumulative stress, and
____Five: indicators of lowered risks for violence.
Precipitating Events
When individuals commit violent acts, there often but not always is a precipitating event. Examples include Major Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who is accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others at Ford Hood, Texas, USA, in November 2009. Major Hasan believed he was about to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, and he did not want to go.
Another is Kip Kinkel, who killed his parents and two classmates, and wounded 22 others. He told a classmate the day before the killings that he wanted to get back at the people who had expelled him from school that day. He was expelled for having a loaded pistol in his locker. Andrew Golden, 13, who murdered a teacher and classmates in Jonesboro, AK, had been rejected by a girl on whom he had a crush.
According to an accomplice to five of his murders, Genildo Ferreira de Franca, a Brazilian who killed 15 people, “laughed as if the devil possessed him” after each murder. He had experienced two precipitating events: his young son had died and his father-in-law spread rumors that Franca was gay. Franca’s mother said, “But that was not true,” she said, “My son was a womanizer."
Sometimes there is no known precipitating event. Thomas Hamilton, who murdered 16 young children and their teacher in a Scottish village, had no known precipitators, but instead appeared to have seethed in rage for more than 20 years on slights and rejections he’d experienced. In particular, he was enraged at being dropped as a Boy Scout leader all those years ago. This was a man the children in his village called “Mr. Creepy” for his voyeuristic interest in boys.
Patterns of Direct Statements
Direct statements about committing violence are red flags. When persons have made statements more than once, to several different people, at different times, and in different contexts (e.g., home, schoolyard, classroom, neighborhood, workplace, another social setting), the danger is increased.
Sometimes they are just blowing off steam and do not have a pattern of making violent threats. Such persons are unlikely to be at risk, as stated in the introduction, but to make such judgments, social workers and others who do assessments must look at the overall patterns of positive behaviors and beliefs and pro-violence behaviors and beliefs.
Verbal statements
Verbal statements include talking about harming/killing others, idolizing violent heroes, and providing specific details of how the violence will take place, including who the intended victims are, and when and where the violent events are to take place. These statements often are made gleefully, as if the person is enjoying thinking of harming, mutilating, and killing others.
Written statements
Writing poems and stories about killing people could be warning signs in combination with other indicators. The more often the person does this and the variety of places in which such writings are shared may increase the likelihood of violence. Joy and glee in anticipating this violence are major red flags.
Circumstances that Increase
the Likelihood of Violence
One or more of the following increases the likelihood of violence.
Preoccupation with Violence
____Beliefs that violence is the means of choice to get what you want, to assert manhood, to redress wrongs, and to exact vengeance.
____Enjoyment of these violent activities, including enjoyment of thinking about harming others
____Collecting weapons
____Not understanding that violence hurts other people permanently
____Seeing violence as a way of demonstrating manhood and "guts"
Means to commit the violence
____Access to weapons
____A history of fascination with weapons
Patterns of bullying and being bullied
____A history of being bullied
____Feeling picked on and full of resentment about being bullied
____A history of bullying others
Note: most children who are bullied feel hurt and do not fantasize about and make plans to hurt others. Being bullied by itself is not sufficient to act out violently. There must be other risk facts that operate as well and few if any factors that diminish the risk for violence.
Psychological vulnerability
____Perceptions of self as weak and powerless
____Fantasies about hurting others
____Fascination with violent others
____Wanting to please violent others to the point where own moral compass is lost
Note: Many people are psychologically vulnerable, but they do not commit violence. Psychological vulnerability as defined here includes dangerous ways of coping with vulnerability. Most people who experience vulnerability deal with these issues constructively and do not seek to harm others.