Children Turned Killers: How Do Lives Go So Wrong So Soon?

On a March afternoon in Miami Beach, a 5-year-old boy and a 3-year-old neighbor were playing in a high-rise apartment building. While their parents talked in another room, the children wandered out onto the fifth-floor balcony.

There, the older child gave his playmate a couple of shoves, the second of which sent the younger boy to his death. When the police arrived, officers said, the smiling 5-year-old readily confessed.

He then polished off two slices of pizza, a garlic roll and a banana.

Several weeks later, in an affluent St. Louis suburb, an 11-year-old girl ordered a 10-year-old neighbor boy out of her yard. When he failed to leave, she went into the house, took a pistol from a dresser drawer in her parents’ bedroom and came back outside.

Standing six to eight feet away from her playmate, the girl grabbed the gun with a two-hand hold, took aim and squeezed the trigger. The boy died after surgery that night.

On an April morning in New York City, a 4-year-old girl awoke before dawn. She left her parents’ bedroom where she’d been sleeping and entered the room where her 3-week-old twin brothers slept in their cribs.

She lifted them out, one by one, put them in their car seats, and began playing with them. When the first baby waved his arms and scratched her, she dropped him on the floor and picked up the second. When he squirmed in her arms and started to cry, she threw him back into his crib.

When her parents heard noises and rushed into the room, they found both infants dead, their fragile skulls fractured.

In 1984, according to FBI statistics, 138 children under 15 were arrested on murder charges in the United States.

The numbers are statistically negligible but humanly unnerving, for nothing so violates the natural order of things as a child turned killer.

Are such children misunderstood victims who should be forgiven and helped, or “born” criminals, bad seeds to be punished and sequestered? Can the juvenile court system really handle either? At what age should children be held responsible for their actions? Where’s the dividing line between normal childhood aggression and deadly rage?

What becomes of a child who is delivered from the arms of his parents to the arms of the law? If he is jailed or otherwise institutionalized as a juvenile, his freedom must be restored on reaching adulthood. Might he kill again?

And always the long, lingering question: How does a life go so wrong so soon?

Rooted in Family

There are precious few clear-cut answers. Experts suspect that the violent behavior of children that erupts into murder is rooted in family relationships gone awry, in frequent rounds of domestic violence, in parental mismanagement of discipline.

The lawyers, detectives, psychologists and social workers who must deal with these cases agree that they are rare. There is far less agreement about how best to handle them, although most social scientists believe that jail is not the answer.

Early in March, a group of prosecutors and detectives held a meeting in Miami. At issue: whether to bring murder charges against the 5-year-old Miami Beach boy who had pushed his 3-year-old playmate off the balcony.

As Assistant State’s Atty. Abe Laeser recalls, it was a very short meeting.

“It’s bizarre to even consider the possibility of bringing criminal charges against a child that young,” Laeser said. “Once I had sat down with the persons involved and determined the type of treatment, the length and whether there would be continuous monitoring of the child over the course of years, I felt there was no valid reason to bring charges.”

Instead, the husky, 70-pound boy was placed in a long-term residential treatment program for individual therapy.

Offers Recommendations

“The center will recommend back to the courts whether he should be allowed out on an outpatient basis sometime in the future. He could conceivably remain there until adulthood,” Laeser said.

The boy contended that the younger child had told him he wanted to die because his parents beat him. Police found nothing to support his story. Psychiatrists immediately suspected that the 5-year-old was really talking about himself.

Indeed, Laeser said: “The primary focus of the court was that there had been some abuse in his home life.”

Laeser said he is satisfied that, from a legal standpoint, the child didn’t understand what he had done. At the same time, he said, “it’s fairly clear-cut that he did understand the physical pushing.”

“My children were at that age not so many years ago,” Laeser said. “I can remember simple pushing and shoving done in anger that in theory could have caused the same result if, instead of hitting a soft carpet, they had hit their heads on the corner of a coffee table.”

But in this case something apparently went beyond simple pushing and shoving, as the boy’s reference to death suggests. In addition, he pushed the victim a second time, dislodging him from the retaining bars of the balcony.

“Any kid will naturally grab, pull or fight. It’s their nature to be regulated by adults,” said Dr. Robert Selman, a psychology professor at Harvard and director of the Manville School at Judge Baker Guidance Center.

Control Mechanism

Selman said a child’s capacity to control aggressive impulses is largely a function of cognitive development and, to some extent, biology. “But some kids never develop that normal control mechanism,” he said.

Steve Levine, chief of the juvenile division in the Dade County Public Defender’s Office in Miami and a member of the American Bar Assn.’s Juvenile Justice Committee, predicts that the Miami Beach boy’s future will be bleak.

The treatment he will receive “is probably not anywhere near the kind of treatment required,” Levine said. “As little as the parents could have done or were doing, the state is a very poor substitute.

“I don’t think the state will do a whole lot. He will probably go from one foster home to another. He won’t grow up in a warm, nurturing environment, and there will be little or no regular counseling or treatment.”

If his case is at all typical, Levine said, he’ll one day meet this child again. “The kids I represented as delinquent kids started off as 8- to 11-year-olds identified as having mental health problems.

“Now they’re back in the system. As adult criminals.”

“One needs to take into account how children understand their social world,” said Dr. Eli Newberger, director of family development study at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

“One needs to consider the child’s moral development in the allocation of punishment versus therapeutic approaches. Younger children will understand the difference between right and wrong. But it is not until they become able to process the information that they become capable of abstract thought. It is usually not until the interval between 11 and 13 that children are able to understand that various contingencies carry with them various outcomes.”

‘Utterly Ridiculous’

In Newberger’s professional opinion, attempts to invoke criminal justice in homicides by young children are “utterly ridiculous.”

He explains: “In younger children, one does no service in condemning a child to a term in a detention facility because there will be no way he is going to be able to integrate an understanding of the response on society’s part with whatever actions he may have committed.”

Selman said the vast majority of 5-year-olds have not yet grasped the irreversibility of death, “one small step in the developmental progression. Another capacity would be the ability to be self-reflective, to step outside one’s own behavior. When that occurs, it doesn’t occur naturally.”

Although the proper family environment can speed up the process, Selman said: “It’s pretty hard for kids under the age of 8 to be very self-reflective, even in the most benign situations. What’s important in each case is understanding whether the child has that capacity. In cases of adults who are insane, we say they have lost that capacity.

“With children, the question has to be, ‘Have they achieved it?’ ”

In the case of the 5-year-old Miami Beach boy, most experts agree that the answer is no.

Regardless, “a 4- or 5-year-old kid who causes another child’s death is a kid in serious trouble in relationships who must have a corrective set of experiences,” Newberger said.

Most experts concur that nearly all young children view death as a temporary condition, a lesson they suggest is often learned from television. Cartoon characters are flattened by steamrollers or hurled over cliffs only to emerge unharmed. A human actor “killed” on one show reappears on another.

Links to TV Violence

Ronald Slaby, an associate professor of education at Harvard University, has done extensive research on causes of aggressive behavior in children. He said the notion that television violence plays a supporting role is backed up by studies demonstrating that children who watch a great deal of TV violence are more apt to behave aggressively than those who don’t.

“Most people think the fact that 99% of the kids who watch violent programs are not going to react aggressively right after proves that it cannot be a causal factor. In fact, it can be,” Slaby said.

One classic study of television programming showed that “the use of violent or illegal means was portrayed as being effective in attaining goals more frequently than the use of legal or socially approved means, and this finding was especially strong in children’s television,” Slaby said.

In addition, he said, portrayals of violence on children’s programs are frequently accompanied by laughter, “cuing the viewing children to recognize that violence is considered to be humorous.”

Some children come to regard even serious violence, minus the laugh track, as funny. The significance of this finding, Slaby said, was revealed in a 1972 study in which the happy facial expressions of 5- and 6-year-olds watching a violent episode of the adult detective show “The Untouchables” were found to be strong predictors of their later aggressive behavior toward other youngsters.

Not all researchers agree with these findings. One popularly held and often publicized theory holds that watching violence on TV serves to drain the viewer’s aggressive energy, thereby reducing aggressive behavior. Slaby said the majority of research contradicts this notion.

Other Factors Studied

If TV indeed helps foster violence in youngsters, it would hardly be the only factor. Researchers are investigating many other possible links.

High on the list of suspects are the effects of marital discord; physical, sexual and psychological abuse and its flip side, neglect; overly harsh, inconsistent discipline; genetic influences and poor child-rearing ability.

Other influences may include poverty and social disadvantage, the position of the child in the family and the child’s individual temperament.

Elissa Benedek, director of research and training at the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ann Arbor, Mich., which evaluates patients for the courts, recently completed a study of adolescent murderers seen at the center.

While adolescence differs from early childhood, both in terms of physical development and in the types of pressures on the individual, authorities say unusually aggressive behavior in children often carries over into this next stage of growth.

“We saw very few youngsters who were psychotic or who had serious mental illness when committing their crimes. We were surprised how few,” she said.

The study also showed that neurological disorders were rare.

The adolescents’ relationships to their victims as well as the circumstances surrounding the killings may have a bearing on the likelihood of future violence.

Studies have indicated that youths who killed strangers or acquaintances in conjunction with another crime, such as robbery or rape, tended to have a history of school and community adjustment problems, while those who killed a parent or another relative during an argument or conflict were generally better adjusted.

Crime, Conflict Groups

“Adolescents in the crime group could be regarded as the most characterologically maladjusted or antisocial. . . . “ Benedek’s study concluded. “Adolescents in the conflict group might be less maladjusted and more amenable to treatment. . . . “

Another study, done in 1979, focused on seven adolescent homicides committed in the course of a robbery or for no apparent reason. The researchers found these youths at greater risk for future violence, and also concluded that they should be treated differently by the courts from six adolescents who killed acquaintances in the course of an argument.

No long-term follow-up studies on homicidal children or adolescents have been done in the United States, Benedek said. One such study, in Finland during the 1960s, followed up on several adults who had killed as juveniles. In these cases, juveniles who killed family members after long conflict had “surprisingly good adult outcomes, with good social adjustment” and no further crimes.

“In contrast, an adolescent who murdered in the course of a robbery continued to engage in other criminal activity in later years,” the study concluded.

While no such studies have focused on young children, a similar pattern may hold. The outlook is better for those who attack relatives out of anger or frustration than those who vent their aggression outside the family.

Experts agree that more long-term research, using a larger number of cases, is needed. They also agree that, in light of another finding, it must be done soon. Aggressive, antisocial behavior is proving to be one of society’s most intractable problems.

‘Tremendous Continuity’

“The reason the problem is so serious is that there is tremendous continuity into adulthood,” said Dr. Alan Kazdin, professor of child psychiatry and psychology and research director of the Child Psychiatric Treatment Service of the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh.

“In 50% of these cases, the individual will wind up in prisons or hospitals. The other half will develop other serious psychiatric problems.

“It doesn’t just continue in an individual’s repertoire, it is passed on from generation to generation.”

Evidence of a genetic component, not yet entirely understood, is mounting. Children separated from antisocial parents at birth still are at risk. Studies also have focused on twins separated from antisocial parents--and from each other--at birth. “If one shows the behavior, the other will show it too,” Kazdin said.

That isn’t to say there won’t be exceptions, he adds. “There are cases of violent children who don’t come from violent backgrounds, just as there are some people who get lung cancer who aren’t cigarette smokers. There are some children who don’t have terrible things in their past,” Kazdin said.

“But if you eliminated cigarette smoking, you’d eliminate almost all lung cancer. It’s virtually the same with this.”

The notion that violence breeds violence is awash in a sea of supporting evidence. Punitive treatment by parents has been linked to their children’s aggressive behavior in more than 25 studies.

“Punitive, harsh discipline does not prevent crime, it breeds crime,” Elliott Currie, a former Yale University criminologist, has written. Currie calls abuse and neglect in childhood “among the most powerful sources of serious criminal violence in America today.”

High rates of violence in the family, spouses who hit one another and parents who administer harsh punishment to their children all significantly foreshadow aggressive behavior in children, Kazdin said.

In about one-third of the families being treated at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, he said, “there is documented child abuse. There is a lot more that we can’t find legally.”

‘Fighting Is the Issue’

“Most of them tend to punish heavily, fail to reward good behavior, scream and give commands,” Kazdin said. “Corporal punishment is found in the majority of these families, and marital discord is common. Separation and divorce is not the crucial issue. Fighting is the issue.”

Children from violent homes differ from other children in various ways.

Despite normal IQs, they often lag behind in school and frequently develop reading problems. They tend to be more easily discouraged than their peers, and are less apt to be artistic or athletic. They also are hard-pressed to make friends.

Their violent home life instills in them what sociologists call a “mean world” philosophy. They are quicker than other children to perceive hostility on the part of others and to respond in kind.

A fertile breeding ground for more violence.