The Anatomy of Violence

by Adrian Raine

  It’s ludicrous that we should expect people to train for hours to drive a car or use a computer but, when it comes to looking after a baby, we tell people to just get on with it.… We’ve all been there in the middle of the night, your child won’t stop crying, and you don’t know what to do.62

  How long will it be before the state tells us what to do by initiating compulsory parenting classes in school, arguing that some parents don’t know that shaking their crying baby at night causes brain damage now and violence later, and that it is “ludicrous” to allow an unlicensed adult to be a responsible parent? We may not be there yet, but today’s daydream can easily become tomorrow’s nightmare.

  Other forces that can lead to these future programs include our sense of retribution and the power of politics. As I argued when discussing the evolutionary basis to violence, the retributivist stance is ingrained in every one of us, part of our evolutionary heritage to deter the cheats. It’s not going to fade away too easily, and it is particularly alive and well in the United States and other countries with the death penalty, as well as inside me.

  We saw with Kip Kinkel how retribution trumped rehabilitation. Consider the four legal philosophies that justify punishment: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. We can also add a fifth—reelection. In the future, when do-gooder efforts to stop the rot have failed, society certainly may wonder whether it’s time to get to the heart of the matter, protect ourselves and our children, and halt the moral decay with a tough political party willing to get going when the going gets tough. It’s a new landscape not far from the Queen of Hearts’ “off with their heads” call for law and order in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  Politicians will continue to overreact to isolated tragic events in order to quell the public outcry and try to solve society’s problems. With more water under the bridge, scientific advances in knowledge, and a much broader, multidisciplinary perspective to crime causation that incorporates neurocriminology, the ability to predict—and preemptively act—will, I believe, become more probable, not just possible. These things can happen. You can debate that particular conclusion later, but right now let’s move to a more poignant point—do you want programs like LOMBROSO?

  THE NEUROETHICS OF NEUROCRIMINOLOGY: SHOULD THIS HAPPEN?

  That’s a question for all of us to consider. It sends shivers down my spine to think I could be convicted without committing a crime. It would send shivers down your spine too if you had a brain scan like mine that looks like a serial killer’s, together with low resting heart rate, birth complications, minor physical anomalies, early vitamin B deficiency, and a past that included bootlegging and gambling by the age of eleven. But let’s hear all sides on the neuroethical issues surrounding neurocriminological research, and where we may or may not be taken to in the future. Neuroethics is a new subdiscipline of bioethics championed by my colleague Martha Farah at the University of Pennsylvania. It concerns ethical issues surrounding the brain and mind and the ways neuroscience affects society for better or for worse.63 Let’s take a look at the three futuristic programs highlighted above in the worldview of neuroethics and our broader attempt to understand humanity.

  Of course there are civil-liberties issues in detaining people before they have committed a crime. But as I alluded to earlier, are there not civil-liberty issues involved in not doing anything when you know someone has a 79 percent chance of committing a serious violent act—and you can do something to stop that happening? Yes, some people will be detained who may not pose a risk—yet the harsh reality of daily life is that we have to balance risks with benefits.

  Think back to the case of the young graduate Peyton Tuthill, whose life was snuffed out by the cancer of violence, in the person of Donta Page, just as a different kind of cancer snuffed out my sister Roma’s life. Recall that Donta Page had been out of prison for just four months, and while he had been sentenced to twenty years for robbery, he was released after serving just four years. What if I had been asked to assess him before he was prematurely released? I would have said exactly what I said in court when defending him. All the biosocial boxes were checked. He was a walking time bomb waiting to explode. He was at heightened risk for committing violence for reasons beyond his control. It wasn’t exactly destiny, but he was much more likely to be impulsively violent than not. Even if he had not previously been convicted of robbery, my conclusion would have been broadly the same.

  That was back in the 1990s. In 2034 we will be even better placed not just to identify such individuals before they act, but to help them. In the same way that I wish Roma could have benefited from a cure for her deadly cancer that didn’t exist at the time, I wish Donta Page could have been in a future LOMBROSO program and been treated at all levels, including with innovative drugs that would have blocked the bad chemistry that in part creates violence. If we could just have vaulted Donta ahead in time into the far more sophisticated risk-assessment mechanism of the LOMBROSO program of 2034, we would identify him as an LP-H or an LP-S, or both, by age eighteen.

  Frankly, his fate under the LOMBROSO regime would be better than it is now. Should we not have some feeling for offenders as well as their victims? He would have had some chance of release and of living out his life in humane conditions. Right now he is resigned to living in a hellhole for the rest of his life. More important, young Peyton Tuthill would be alive and well today, enriching the lives of others. We can stand in the way of future progress because of our ethical fear of the frightful risks, yet let us not forget that in doing so there are benefits that will surely be lost, including lives that could have been saved. At what cost civil liberties?

  On the early identification of potentially dangerous children there is no question that there are important neuroethical issues that have to be recognized. At the same time, both the public and scientists alike have an honest and growing interest in what to make of the anatomy of violence. The issues are perhaps best summed up by Philipp Sterzer, a neuroscientist and researcher of psychopathic behavior from the Department of Psychiatry in Berlin, who wrote an editorial on Yu Gao’s identification of poor fear conditioning at age three as a putative biomarker for crime at age twenty-three. His critical evaluation, entitled “Born to Be Criminal? What to Make of Early Biological Risk Factors for Criminal Behavior” ended with the following summary paragraph:

  If not handled with great caution, neurobiological markers can easily be misused to stigmatize individuals who are perceived as a potential threat to society. With the increasing availability of data that help us prevent, diagnose, and treat antisocial behavior early in life, we also need a public debate on how to use this information and, even more important, how to avoid its misuse. Neurobiological research offers a great chance to further our understanding of antisocial and criminal behavior. This understanding should be used to benefit those children who are at greatest risk for a criminal career and to design interventions that are tailored to their needs.64

  We certainly have more data available to us than in past generations, and that will only increase. What to do with it does require due caution, protection against misuse, and minimization of risks. Yet the potential benefits exist, and there should be discussion about them. Jonathan Kellerman had the courage in 1999 in the wake of the Jonesboro middle school shooting to voice his views on the issue. He argued that we already know the warning signs of troubled children, we should take them very seriously, and preventive custody with appropriate treatment is a solution worth implementing for a small minority.65 Just as Philipp Sterzer argued, we should use new knowledge to benefit children who need help, and create new individualized interventions for them. Leading scientists have been arguing for some years that the U.S. government should save children from a life of crime by establishing a national program of risk-focused prevention—identifying those at risk and intervening early.66 But should we? If we go out too far, do we run the risk of falling through thin ice? How do we know that the bad old days of eu
genics are really over?

  On parental licensing, is it really a moral right to have a child or not? Should it instead be considered a privilege that needs to be earned? Even today we take away parental rights. Parents who lack the capacity for care and nurturing, and instead hurt their child, lose their paternal rights—just as we saw in chapter 5 in the case of the Russian-roulette boy. Their child is taken away from them into care. It’s not too far a leap to go one step further by conducting preventive intervention to preclude harm to the child occurring in the first place.

  In a future where every individual is assessed not just on his or her parental capacity but on his or her risk quotient for child abuse, would such preventive intervention not be in the best interests of both parent and child? We adults have our human rights, but what about the rights of the child—whether they are born or not? Do today’s children at least have a right to minimal standards of care and upbringing? Do you really wish to deny to Donta Page, Henry Lucas, Carlton Gary, and many other killers who suffered horribly at the hands of their abhorrent parents the right to an upbringing that is not a total affront to human dignity? Even if you could have just ensured that these killers had been treated slightly worse than your average pet dog when they were growing up, you would very likely have prevented many homicides. Is that too much to ask for the care of an innocent young baby—as these killers once were?

  Is being a parent any less responsible an activity than being a doctor? Would you go to a doctor if she was not licensed to practice? Parenting a child is not so very different from a therapist caring for a client. If anything, parenting requires much more responsibility. Parents need to care for their children far more than do licensed therapists. We are very ready to protect our own turf—so why don’t we protect the next generation of people like us? No one has the capacity to harm a child more than its parent, and, indeed, 80 percent of all child abuse is perpetrated by parents.67 We protect ourselves from inept therapists by requiring a license for them to practice—why not protect future children from inept parents?

  You may reasonably remonstrate against licensing. I did when I first encountered the idea. It just did not feel right to me for reasons I could not entirely put my finger on. My reaction was typically the System 1 thinking elucidated by the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman—emotional, fast, and intuitive.68 It was a gut reaction. Licensing just smacked of the sneering superiority of the privileged classes. I thought, Surely we all have a right to reproduce?

  Perhaps you think and feel the same way I did. If you had that same negative feeling that a parental license is just not right, let’s try to get a better handle on our reaction. Is it because we feel that everyone knows how to be a parent? Animals get on with it pretty well, don’t they? Surely we are better than animals? Yet consider adoption. Not everyone is automatically assumed to be a good enough parent to look after a child. Potential parents are scrutinized very carefully by the state on background and financial circumstances to ensure that the child will enter a loving and stable home. Because of that competency screening, the rate of child abuse in adoptive homes has been argued to be less than half of that for children reared by their natural biological parents.69 We ensure standards for unwanted children—so why not apply such screening to us all to help every child in society and cut child abuse?

  Legal and spiritual perspectives may help to partly explain our negative reaction to parental licensing. English common law has historically treated children as their father’s property. That proprietary right of parents to possess their child as chattel stills holds a subconscious sway today in the most educated sectors of society. The God-given right to procreate certainly lies at the heart of many peoples’ objections to parental licensing—but is it a good ethical reason to reject the idea?70

  What is ultimately the most potent force fueling that undefined feeling against curtailing parental rights? I think the answer lies in evolutionary forces, a powerful drive built into us to reproduce at all costs. We’ve discussed how we are essentially gene machines whose primary mission is to reproduce and be represented in the next gene pool. Without that powerful drive, we would not be here right now to debate this ethical issue. So I sense evolution instills in us the feeling that licensing is wrong, motivating us to invoke counterarguments, whether they hold water or not. Arguments like the one saying that parental licensing is a subtle form of eugenics to create a master race, or that it may discriminate against some sectors of society, or that being a parent is a natural, God-given right that should not be taken away. Are these arguments merely a specious by-product of the genetic, instinctive need to reproduce? Are we capable of rising above our genetic heritage and our instinctive “feeling” that parenting is a right—while licensing is wrong? Or are we destined to remain the instinctive animals that we are?

  Perhaps we have become numb to child abuse. Wretched parenting is rampantly common. I was visiting my family in Darlington and discussing parental licensing with my sister and brother-in-law over a cup of tea—a split vote there—and they showed me an article in their daily newspaper. An eleven-year-old boy from Blackpool was forced by his parents to live in a filthy, windowless outhouse, a coal bunker with a concrete floor. With no heat and very little light, he was locked up in this barren room every night with a potty-chair for a toilet. His parents bullied him and half-starved him.

  Why did they force him to live for a year in the bunker? They told the police that it was punishment for taking some food from the refrigerator. The gross ill-treatment only came to light after his school became concerned that he was constantly hungry, leading social workers to visit the home and discover the conditions. Doctors found him to be stunted due to malnutrition. It was reported at court that he was traumatized and psychologically damaged by the experience, with the judge calling the bunker “akin to a prison cell from a third-world country.”71 His parents were jailed for two years. And yes, you’ve guessed it from our evolutionary perspective in chapter 1, the “father” was the stepfather.

  Of course this story is barely considered newsworthy—it was buried on this page of the paper. After all, child abuse happens so often, it’s just not news. So what’s more important? The front page was devoted to David Cameron stuffing a meat pie into his mouth and society’s sigh of relief that a new tax on the Cornish pastie was withdrawn. Like the parents of the Blackpool boy, we appear to care more about how much food we can shove into our own mouths than what a child can minimally eat to stay alive. We adults count, our children are chattel, and we do with them what we will behind closed doors and in underground bunkers. We care more about the cost of a pie, which is why if LOMBROSO saves society substantial money it really will take root.

  One of the most difficult neuroethical challenges that neurocriminology will give rise to in the future is undoubtedly the sensitive balance between protecting society and protecting our civil rights. The futuristic National Child Screening Program that I described is based on a docudrama I took part in for the BBC in December 2004 in the United Kingdom, a documentary about what we know and don’t know about the biology of violence, interlaced with a fictional drama about how an NCSP could go horribly wrong in the future. Immediately after the screening I took part in a studio debate with Jeremy Paxman, a forceful, assertive, witty, and very astute TV interviewer known for his incisive and unyielding questioning of politicians. It also featured Shami Chakrabarti, a very intelligent and likeable civil-liberties leader in England. We chatted together before we went on the air, and I was very impressed with her sincerity and thoughtfulness.72 During our debate Paxman put a provocative question to Chakrabarti that highlights the tension between violence prediction to protect society and the violation of human rights:

  PAXMAN: If science could predict with 100 percent certainty who was going to commit a violent crime, would it be legitimate to act before they commit that crime?

  CHAKRABARTI: I would have to say that in a liberal society of human beings, and not animals, my an
swer to your question would be “No.”

  PAXMAN: So someone would have been potentially killed by this person despite the fact that that life could have been saved. Even if science can do it 100 percent, you still say it would be wrong?

  CHAKRABARTI: We also have to look at the kind of society that we live in, and even while the risk-free society, drama and illusion that it may be, is touted by popular politicians … there is a huge cost to our way of life and to the kind of liberal democracy that I say we want to live in.73

  Shami had understandable difficulty with that particular question, which challenged the civil-libertarian perspective. It seems that in the name of a liberal democracy and human rights, we would wave good-bye to a life we could have saved, even in the face of perfect prediction, as in the movie Minority Report. It is always a question of balance in weighing protection and civil liberty, never a question of absolutes. In striking out for liberal democracy we must also look down at the blood we have on our hands—the blood of innocent lives that could have been saved had we only chosen to act. Would you really agree with Shami Chakrabarti?

  Let me attempt to defend Chakrabarti’s point of view. Once we begin to slip on our democratic principles, we can end up on a scrap heap of human-rights violations. Before we vote, politicians tempt us with the illusion of the risk-free society that we say we want. But isn’t that just a charlatan’s call echoing in an immoral wilderness? Is it not a mirage, a future that we dearly want to see, but will never have unless a huge price is paid, the price of gross injustice to the innocent who are wrongly accused?

  I think some of you may disagree with Chakrabarti’s perspective. You may conclude that in the face of perfect prediction, perilous though the ethics may be, we must act. Yet if even one human right is violated, can we in good conscience live with that policy? That is Chakrabarti’s provocative point. Is that moral sense the reason in a previous chapter you would not push the corpulent man off the footbridge to stop a runaway trolley from killing five railway workers? You object to the principle of utilitarian moral decision-making—the greater good of the greater number. Well, let’s push the envelope on that issue one nudge further.