Forensic Psychology

by Graham M Davies

  Autobiographical accounts (e.g. Collins, 1997; McGartland, 1997; O’Callaghan, 1998) of terrorists’ lives do reveal characteristics such as those described above; and particularly the sense of the process of movement into and out of different roles, even within what may seem a very narrow community (Alonso, 2003). McCauley and Segal (1989) illustrate that, before they became the Red Army Faction leaders, Ulrike Meinhof and Horst Mahler were involved respectively in community activism opposing nuclear proliferation and the moderate Socialist German Student Society. A number of IRA members in Northern Ireland came from the ranks of Sinn Fein (The Irish Republican Party) and some moved back into Sinn Fein roles at a later point. Clark (1983) in his study of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), an armed Basque nationalist and separatist organisation in Spain, notes that a picture of gradual socialisation towards increased involvement exists.

  In Italy, Jamieson (1989) interviewed the former Red Brigades (RB) member, Adriana Faranda. This account is exceptionally revealing, providing an unusually lucid and reflective account of increased engagement. Jamieson notes that Faranda became engaged in politics around 1968 as a student in Rome. In answer to an observation that she once heard Faranda describe her involvement as almost “necessary”, Faranda replied:

  Things are never quite as clear as that. Countless others lived in Rome at the same time as me: kids of my age who weren’t as involved as me, either in the political struggles or in the choices of the successive years. I suppose really it was the way I experienced the events of that time, my own personal stand-point on the problems, the crises, the hopes and the expectation that we had as well as what was happening outside which determined that particular path … there were lots of little steps which led to where I ended up … it wasn’t a major leap in the true sense of the word. It was just another stage … it was a choice.

  Faranda’s comment is especially important in that it reveals why at one level, questions about motivation in terms of understanding involvement in terrorism are essentially unanswerable (e.g. “I suppose really it was the way I experienced the events of that time”, Jamieson, 1989 p. 36), but also epitomises the way in which any such career path is shaped by what she describes as “lots of little steps”. She also added later in the interview that although she characterised her involvement as taking “lots of little steps”, she saw herself as later having reached a “point of no return”. In the sense in which Faranda uses it, reaching a point of “no return” or achieving “membership” does not appear to be clear-cut in any specific way, but might be characterised ritually, perhaps through engagement in a specific operation, where the previously virtual line between supportive activity and “direct action” is no longer unambiguous. Naturally this dynamic will differ depending on the kind of group in question and, for example, whether increased commitment necessitates (as raised in the analysis by Post mentioned earlier) a complete and total break from family and society.

  White and Falkenberg White (1991) interviewed an IRA veteran who pointed to a process of “nurturing” upon his initial progression into the movement (p. 120):

  … well it – there’s progression, you know? When you would go in you wouldn’t be, you would be given less difficult tasks initially. And then just as you become more experienced you would move along and somebody would come in behind you. And you know, and then somebody – people were probably getting arrested or interned or whatever, so there was that kind of progression along with military training until you were actively involved in operations … I suppose it took maybe six or seven months.

  From these accounts, we get a sense of constant change and varying levels of activity, commitment and overall “involvement”. At any one time, as McCauley and Segal (1989) note, some members are “beginning to find out … others are becoming committed, others are firmly committed, others becoming less committed, and still others are in the process of leaving entirely”. We can also see how profiling of terrorists, based on assumed invariant qualities, are likely to be at best a snapshot of the current situation, and at worst misleading and limited.

  A final feature of increased involvement to note for the individual is the sense that levels of engagement can have different values attached to them, which vary over time. These “role values” are available to the leadership to direct and control members. For example, within the Provisional IRA, engagement with active service roles may have been limited, but there was a sense of organisational and psychological value in keeping access to these roles available. A similar analysis might be made of the role of martyr in Hamas. Extensive interviews conducted by Hassan (2001) with members of al Qassam revealed that by limiting those accepted for martyrdom operations, “others are disappointed. They must learn patience and wait until Allah calls them.”

  As we can see from the above, increased engagement with a terrorist organisation is as much a developmental process as that which characterises initial involvement. In practical terms, however, there is a further point that can be made. The kind of processes we have identified that contribute to initial engagement, whilst overlapping with those that sustain engagement, are of a qualitatively different character. This might suggest that in terms of the practicalities of managing terrorism, different strategies need to be adopted to address different phases of development.

  12.7 DISENGAGEMENT

  The phase of disengagement with terrorism is the least understood of all the areas of study. It has not until recently attracted much interest, and research in this area remains limited. Bjørgo and Horgan (2009) suggest that disengaging from terrorism may be potentially as complex a process as that which helps us understand initial involvement in the first place, but the evidence we have to judge this is limited in the extreme.

  Over recent times there have been a number of initiatives designed to diminish the presumed risk of incarcerated terrorists further engaging with terrorism on their release. Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Yemen are countries that have initiated well publicised formal programmes to “deradicalise” convicted offenders, and many Western countries with convicted terrorists in some sense have less formal prison-based initiatives to address the risk of reoffending (Ashour, 2009). However, there is little clarity in the precise techniques or strategies used, and no consistency in the criteria to identify success or failure. Formal and systematic evaluations of outcomes are largely absent.

  The issue of how to identify success or failure is particularly important. We know that not every radical will become involved in terrorism, and we also know (from arrested terrorists) that not every terrorist is necessarily radical, in the sense of holding extreme political views. Yet much of the literature on deradicalisation assumes a causal relationship between possession of radical views, and dangerousness. This raises a central question – is success to be measured in terms of changing radical attitudes and beliefs, or is it to be measured in terms of probability of subsequent offending (what we might term terrorist recidivism). This dilemma reflects directly on the concept of risk, and how it might be measured and assessed in a terrorist context; and as we have noted earlier, we lack validated and effective risk assessment tools.

  What we do know about success in this area is limited, but not necessarily particularly positive. As Horgan and Taylor (2011) note, on 7 December 2010, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) released a summary report on the re-engagement of detainees formerly held at Guantanamo Bay (GTMO), Cuba. By October 2010, almost 600 detainees had been released from GTMO. The DNI reported that approximately 13.5% of those released were confirmed as having re-engaged in terrorist or insurgent activities compared to the 6% reported by a detailed investigation published by Bergen, Tiedemann, & Lebovich (2011). A further 11.5% were deemed “suspected” of re-engaging in terrorism after release (also see Bumiller, 2009). The adequacy of these assessments is unclear, and appears to be based on intelligence and threat information. The DNI report suggested that the first reporting of confirmed or suspected re-engagement with terrorism emerged �
�about 2.5 years between leaving GTMO and the first identified reengagement reports”.

  12.8 SUICIDE TERRORISM AND POLITICAL SUICIDE

  It may seem rather ghoulish to introduce a discussion of suicide terrorism following the discussion of ending terrorism, but in a sense suicide terrorism is a very final and clear way, for the individual concerned, of ending terrorism. Of course, whilst the individual is deliberately killed by the act of suicide, the social consequences of the act itself often reverberate across time (as is very evident for the 9/11 bombers, or the UK 7/7 bombers), which makes it a highly effective technique from the perspective of the terrorist. Studying the individuals who commit suicide terrorist acts is of course extremely difficult, for they are no longer alive, and the researcher is dependent on whatever secondary material might be available.

  Merari (2010) has published what remains the most comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of suicide terrorism. He had access to failed suicide bombers, and also their recruiters and dispatchers, incarcerated in Israeli prisons, and was able to conduct extensive interviews and administer a range of psychological tests. Unusually for this area, he adopted a quasi-control procedure (using people convicted for non-suicide terrorist offences), and therefore has some systematic basis for comparative statements. Overall he found that failed suicide bombers tended to be more likely to have completed high school than the controls, were less likely to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, tended to have higher levels of religiosity, and were less likely to have engaged in previous violent activities. Their recruiters tended to be older than the suicide bombers or the control group. Merari suggests that the time between initial recruitment to dispatch was around 40 days, with limited and brief direct mission preparation; video statements (sometimes referred to as wills) tended to be made less than 24 hours before the attack.

  Formal psychological assessments of suicide bombers revealed what initially are rather controversial findings, suggesting diagnoses of avoidant-dependent personality disorder, as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Version Four, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2000), and also higher symptoms of depression than controls. However, these findings have been criticised as being unreliable by McCauley and Moskalenko (2011b), who question the appropriateness of the diagnostic categories used. There is also a more fundamental problem of any work involving incarcerated offenders, in that the process of apprehension and incarceration itself presumably affects how individuals reflect on their activities. For people who are failed suicide bombers, incarcerated in an Israeli prison, this might be assumed to be a significance issue.

  PHOTO 12.3 Whilst the individual is deliberately killed by the act of suicide, the social consequences of the act itself often reverberate across time, which from the perspective of the terrorist makes it a highly effective technique.

  Source: © Danor Aharon/Shutterstock

  Media representations of suicide terrorism often frame it as having a religious base, and particularly within an Islamic context emphasise the role of martyrdom. However, it is important to note that until recently, the most numerous examples of suicide terrorist attacks were undertaken by the Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), an avowedly secular organisation.

  It may be helpful to distinguish between political suicide and suicide terrorism (Taylor, 1991). Whatever the personal context may be, suicide terrorism like all forms of terrorism victimises non-combatant targets. Political suicide, in contrast, is suicide undertaken for a political purpose that does not victimise others. Suicide as protest is well known, and occurs with surprising regularity; it can be estimated from news reports that there are between one or two protest suicides per week, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes for personal reasons. Self-immolation suicide, a particularly graphic form of protest suicide, tends to occur in Eastern rather than Western cultural contexts, but there are notable Western examples of self-immolation. Of particular note is the self-immolation of Mohamed Barazizi on 17 December 2010 in Tunisia. This suicide took place within a political context, but seems to be best understood as a personal statement, rather than a collective initiative. That it became the emblem and perhaps precipitating event for a mass movement in Tunisia, and subsequently events in Egypt and the broader Arab Spring, does not appear to have been Barazizi’s intention, although it is of course impossible to know.

  12.9 ASSESSMENT OF DANGEROUSNESS

  It is appropriate at the end of this chapter to raise briefly the issue of assessment of dangerousness for terrorists. Assessments of this kind frequently constitute a substantial element of the forensic psychologist’s workload when dealing with other forms of problematic behaviour (such as sexual offending, for example) and it might be thought this would also be the case with respect to terrorism. However, little progress has been made on the development of systematic assessment tools to assess risk in cases involving terrorism (Roberts & Horgan, 2008), either in terms of risk of engagement with violent terrorism, or risk after conviction of further engagement. Monahan (2012) provides a comprehensive review of the conceptual and methodological problems of risk analyses of terrorism.

  At first sight, assessment tools such as the HCR-20 (Webster, Douglas, Eaves, & Hart, 1997) may have potential for use in terrorist cases (see Chapter 18 for a fuller description of this instrument). The HCR-20 is a widely used general violence risk assessment instrument, with well-established validity, but its development was primarily focussed on violent criminals who had a history of violence, and its use should be “restricted mainly to settings where there is a high proportion of persons with a history of violence and a strong suggestion of mental illness or personality disorder” (Webster et al, 1997, p. 5). Drawing on work using the HCR-20, Pressman (2009) has explored the development of the Structured Professional Judgment Protocol for Risk Assessment of Violent Extremists (VERA) and offers some evidence to support the logical use of such a tool. This approach depends upon an evaluator’s judgment, informed by guidelines that reflect best practice. Because of this, assessors require training in the use of the tool to ensure standardisation of the judgements made, in terms of the meaning of the various items included, and their coding. The items included in VERA are Attitude, Contextual (such as website activity, support or contact with violent extremists), Historical, and Protective (such as change in vision of enemy, shifts in ideology and rejection of violence to achieve goals), along with Demographic items. These items are rated, rather than scored, and the tool provides a guide, therefore, rather than a prescriptive list of qualities. However, for the moment, it remains an interesting development, but lacks empirical development and validation (see Monahan, 2012 for a further analysis of these problems).

  12.10 SUMMARY

  The study of terrorism and the terrorist is not something belonging to any particular discipline. In this chapter, there has been an emphasis on process as it might affect the individual, in terms of what was described as the “ARC” of terrorist involvement: becoming engaged; engagement; and disengagement.

  Forensic psychology has a particular research role to play in understanding and exploring all of these processes, but multidisciplinary areas of study present particular challenges, and our understanding will require the difficult task of integrating the forensic perspective with others.

  It can be argued that the study of terrorism has suffered precisely because it has not been sufficiently multidisciplinary in its approach, and has tended to privilege discipline as opposed to area study.

  The central dilemma for anyone concerned with this area is that while lots of contributing factors can be identified as necessary elements in the terrorism story, none offers a sufficient account (Taylor, 2010). From the perspective of forensic psychology, addressing this central dilemma is a major priority. Yet study in this area is fraught with practical and methodological problems, for the following reasons: The subject matter is generally illegal and engagement with it may be dange
rous

  It is also an area where clandestine operations are as much the preserve of the State countering terrorism as of the terrorist engaged in violent acts

  The clandestine qualities on both sides of this equation make access to reliable information difficult, which when added to the political context to terrorism and counter-terrorism, makes reliable assessment of the process involved very difficult.

  Perhaps these issues are no different in other areas of criminal study, but the extreme practical and political sensitivities around terrorism and its potential to damage should it occur places added constraints on the investigator’s freedom to engage.